LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

2026-05-18T06:18:56.353-07:00

Double Trouble: Assam’s Maize Farmers Hit by Pests, Erratic Weather

Maitreyee Boruah | 15 May 2026

As maize cultivation expands across Assam, climate shifts and rising pest attacks are eroding yields and farmer confidence.

A maize threshing machine separates corn kernels from cobs on the bank of the Hajo Suti River in Bangalpara village (Photo - Maitreyee Boruah, 101Reporters)

Kamrup, Assam: On a pleasant sunny day in the first week of April, Bangalpara, a village in Assam's Kamrup district, was busy harvesting maize. The village is located about 35 kilometres from Assam's capital, Dispur.

The west bank of the Hajo Suti River, flowing gently through Bangalpara, had turned yellow — freshly harvested corn kernels spread across large plastic sheets, drying in the sun. Overlooking the riverbank were vast swathes of ripened maize plants, waiting their turn.

Maize, or maakoi, is the main crop grown in Bangalpara. The village has around 550 residents, and all 100-odd households are engaged in farming.

"Around 2,000 bighas (268 hectares) of land in Bangalpara are under cultivation. Of that, we grow maize on 90 per cent of the land, and paddy on the remaining 10 per cent," said Kutubuddin Ahmed, 48, the gaon bura or village head of Bangalpara.

Abdul Rashid, 81, the village's oldest farmer, interjected: "We are traditionally dhan (paddy) growing people. Maize was introduced as a commercial crop in Bangalpara in 2017. Slowly, it replaced dhan. Now the farmers are mostly growing maize," the octogenarian told 101Reporters.

The pride in Rashid's face quickly gives way to despondency. "We are poor people. We have to keep working till we die. No matter how hard we work, botor (the weather) and puk (pests) destroy half the crops we grow," he added.

All the farmers of Bangalpara share Rashid's dejection.

Yet the farm work never stopped. On that April day, the whole village, including children, worked in sync with two maize threshing machines, separating corn kernels from cobs on the bank of the Hajo Suti River. The machines produced a constant buzzing that made everyone speak louder.

Men fed the machines ear by ear. Women and children collected the kernels, cobs and husks, sorting them into separate zones.

"We sell corn kernels and use cobs and husk for animal feed and fuel," said Arjina Khatun, 27, a woman farmer.

The pest problem

Shahidul Islam, 28, another maize grower from Bangalpara, laid the blame squarely on pests. "The pests are our biggest enemies. They destroyed half our maize crop, which we had sown in the last kharif season, around May 2025," he said.

Denim Bora, Agricultural Development Officer (ADO) of Hajo revenue circle, under which Bangalpara falls, confirmed the farmers' fears.

"Pest attacks on maize crops have increased over the years across Assam. The state is highly vulnerable to climate change events. Unseasonal rainfall, temperature fluctuations, and extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, and cyclones significantly affect maize production. Warmer, more humid conditions favour pests such as the fall armyworm, accelerating their reproduction and intensifying crop damage," said Bora.

"Some of the pests attacking maize across Assam are the maize stem borer (Chilo partellus), fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda), maize shoot fly (Atherigona spp.), and corn aphid (Rhopalosiphum maidis)," he added.

From paddy to ‘golden grain’

Earlier, maize was grown in small patches across Assam for household consumption. In 2016-17, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and Indian Institute of Maize Research (IIMR), Ludhiana, in collaboration with Assam Agricultural University (AAU), Gossaigaon, launched a series of demonstrations and training programmes to promote maize as a commercial crop in the northeastern state.

The traditional paddy growers of Assam — rice is the state's staple food — began experimenting with maize on a commercial scale. The results were striking. Maize cultivation surged from 31,000 hectares in 2016–17 to 1.04 lakh hectares in 2023-24, with productivity rising 39 per cent to 5.14 tonnes per hectare.

Along with Kamrup, Barpeta, Bongaigaon, Nagaon, Darrang, and Udalguri emerged as the 11 major maize-producing districts of Assam.

"Maize truly proved to be 'the golden grain' for Assam. The crop sparked a rural revolution, reshaping the agricultural map of the state and providing livelihoods to thousands," said Ramesh Kumar, principal scientist (plant breeding) at IIMR Ludhiana, over the phone.

"To expand maize cultivation across 12 districts of the state, ICAR-IIMR joined hands with the World Bank, the Government of Assam, and the Assam Agribusiness and Rural Transformation (APART). More than 3,200 farmers received field-level technical training covering seed selection, modern cultivation practices, pest management, storage, and market linkages," Kumar added.

Maize is grown twice in Assam, in the Kharif (monsoon) and Rabi (winter) seasons, explained Bora.

"The Kharif maize crop is used as animal fodder and fuel. The Rabi crop is for human consumption," he added.

Farmers across villages in Kamrup district, Ramdia, Simina, Tapabari, Bangalpara, and Borgaon, told 101 Reporters they had shifted from paddy to maize because the yield and profits were both higher.

"In Assam, the average yield of maize is seven to 10 quintals per bigha, going up to 16 quintals per bigha. Rice yields three to six quintals per bigha, up to 10 at best. Farmers are getting Rs 1,500-1,700 per quintal for maize, against Rs 1,200-1,400 for rice," said Muzaffar Ali, 31, who runs a farmer-producer company under APART and the Assam State Agricultural Marketing Board in Kamrup district.

A farmer producer company pools farmers together to sell produce collectively and negotiate better prices.

Behind the numbers, however, lies a grimmer reality.

"Pest and fungal attacks and diseases have always been there. In the last four to five years, they have intensified. Crop loss is now visible. But the full extent is yet to be quantified," said Ali, who is also a farmer himself.

The farmers of Bangalpara said they did not know the names of the pests. "We call them puk — insects or insect-like creatures. They crawl through our fields. Some even look harmless, like a butterfly. They mostly attack at night and destroy our crops," said Rashid.

Eliza Khatun, 41, a woman farmer from the village, noted that the attacks had worsened since the Covid-19 pandemic.

"We are already fighting floods and erratic rainfall. Now, in the last five to six years, pest attacks have increased, which was not the case when the village first adopted maize as its main crop."

Climate stress

Floods hit Bangalpara every year between May and August, and again between September and October. Kamrup is among the most flood-prone districts in Assam. During the rains, the Brahmaputra and its tributaries, Pagaladiya, Puthimari, and Noona, swell above danger levels, inundating villages.

In 2025, 22 districts of Assam, including Kamrup, were affected by floods, destroying around 12,610 hectares of cropland. In 2024, one of the worst years in recent memory, floods swept in three waves, with the Assam Flood Memorandum 2024 recording damage across all 35 districts.

Heavy, unseasonal rains in March this year compounded the misery. "The rains in March destroyed a lot of our maize, tomato and cabbage crops. Continuous rains made it nearly impossible to harvest in time," said Khatun. She and her husband, Tomaz Ali, 51, could barely salvage half their cabbage crop before it began rotting in the fields.

"After the rains, the pest population will only increase," she warned.

Nazirul Islam, 55, a farm labourer from neighbouring Gandheli Tari village (Photo - Maitreyee Boruah, 101Reporters).

Rising risks

So when maize was sown again in Bangalpara in mid-September 2025, Islam sharply cut back on acreage. "Instead of 16 bighas, I planted maize on just seven. This is to limit losses from pests and erratic weather," he said.

"Prices have also dropped. This season we are getting Rs 1,700 per quintal, down from Rs 2,100 last year," he added.

Most other farmers in the village followed suit.

Kumar, principal scientist at IIMR Ludhiana, acknowledged pests as a serious concern. "It is mainly the fall armyworm, an invasive species, that has been attacking crops. But we have trained farmers to combat it, through deep ploughing before planting, which exposes the soil to sunlight and birds, reducing existing pests; through the use of neem cake; keeping field bunds clean; planting flowers; sowing on time and uniformly. We also recommend rotating chemicals between sprays, since pests develop resistance to repeated use of the same one," he said.

Ali, who runs the farmer-producer company in Kamrup, said not all of the training translates to the ground. "Most farmers here are not formally trained, but they are experienced — they have hands-on knowledge. Even so, it is not easy to fight pests when they attack in swarms. And unseasonal rains and floods keep pushing back both sowing and harvesting, leaving crops more vulnerable to stunted growth, pest attack, or rotting," he said.

Research confirms that pest populations thrive in conditions of erratic rainfall and elevated humidity.

Dr Rahul Mahanta, director of the Centre for Clouds and Climate Change Research at Cotton University, Guwahati, told 101Reporters that rainfall patterns have shifted significantly over the past three to four decades. "The core monsoon zone has moved from the east to the west. The western region is getting wetter while the eastern region grows drier each year — likely a consequence of climate change. A stationary wave has formed over eastern India, suppressing rainfall. This decreasing trend is likely to continue until the end of the century," he said.

Mahanta explained that rising temperatures increase the atmosphere's moisture-holding capacity, as described by the Clausius-Clapeyron relation — but the mechanism to lift that moisture to higher altitudes for rainfall has weakened.

"At times, conditions become briefly suitable for rainfall, and we get an extreme burst for a day or so, followed by a dry spell of 20 to 25 days. Previously, rainfall was persistent — two to five centimetres a day over extended periods, with dry intervals of just three to five days. These shifts have fundamentally altered the flood cycle," he added.

Guwahati-based agricultural scientist Juri Talukdar pointed out that pests were not targeting maize alone. "In 2023, nearly 28,000 hectares of paddy fields across Assam were destroyed due to pest infestation. Prolonged periods of warm temperatures are the primary driver of these massive attacks," she said.

According to climate projections released by Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, in 2025, mean annual temperatures in some districts of Assam may rise by up to 0.83 degrees Celsius by 2040, while monsoon rainfall may decline by as much as 15 per cent over the same period.

Nazirul Islam, 55, a farm labourer from the neighbouring Gandheli Tari village, said the first signs of pest infestation were wilting and stunted growth.

"Puk buror baibey paat bur xori jai" (plants shed their leaves because of pest attacks). "Puk buror baibey maakoi bur bhal koi nalagey" (the pests eat the cobs and kernels)," he explained, while harvesting maize in Bangalpara.

Islam lost his own agricultural land to floods a decade ago. "Now I work as a farm labourer across different villages. I earn Rs 400-700 a day, depending on the season and the work," he said.

Maitreyee Boruah is a freelance journalist and a member of 101Reporters, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters.

2026-05-18T06:13:55.277-07:00

Scientists Say Human Lungs Could Become Next Diagnostic Network

Rajeev Choudhury | 15 May 2026

Research suggests that lungs may function like a biological broadcasting system, releasing invisible chemical signals that reflect what’s happening deep inside the body.

Representational image Image Courtesy: Pexels

What if a simple breath into the air could quietly reveal the earliest signs of diabetes, asthma, lung disease or even cancer long before the symptoms appear?

Scientists across Europe, the United States and Asia are now exploring exactly that possibility, turning human breath into one of the most promising frontiers in modern medicine. Their research suggests that the lungs may function like a biological broadcasting system, continuously releasing invisible chemical signals that reflect what is happening deep inside the body.

The idea sounds futuristic. Yet, inside advanced laboratories from Berlin to Boston, researchers are already building sensors capable of “listening” to these chemical messages in real time.

At the centre of this emerging field is the study of volatile organic compounds (VOCs)—tiny chemical traces released naturally through human breath during metabolism, inflammation, and disease. These microscopic compounds are often measured in parts per billion, meaning they exist in extremely tiny amounts. Still, scientists say these may hold extraordinary medical value.

“Every breath you take carries more than oxygen. It carries information,” researchers noted while explaining the concept behind breath-based diagnostics.

Doctors have known for decades that breath can reveal clues about health. Alcohol breathalysers are the most familiar example. Patients with uncontrolled diabetes sometimes produce a fruity-smelling breath because of rising acetone levels. People with asthma often exhale higher levels of nitric oxide, a gas linked to airway inflammation.

What has changed now is the sophistication of the technology.

Using ultra-sensitive graphene sensors, optical detectors and artificial intelligence systems originally inspired by communication engineering, researchers are attempting to decode these chemical patterns with unprecedented accuracy. Some experts compare the process to detecting WiFi signals hidden within noisy environments.

The human body, they say, acts like a transmitter. Breath becomes the signal. The surrounding air acts as the communication channel. Sensors operate like receivers.

Dr Sunasheer Bhattacharjee of the Technical University of Berlin, says in a paper, the biggest scientific challenge is separating genuine disease signals from everyday “noise” created by pollution, food, smoking or even morning coffee.

“We don’t rely on absolute biomarker values", Bhattacharjee saysadding that “disease shows up as ongoing, related changes in breathing patterns across different sensors, while diet or pollution acts like random or slowly changing background noise.”

In simple language, scientists are not searching for one magical chemical. Instead, they are searching for stable patterns that repeat consistently when illness develops.

This approach is rapidly gaining scientific attention. Recent peer-reviewed studies published in journals, such as Nature Sensors, Biosensors and Bioelectronics, and ACS Nano, have reported major improvements in breath-analysis accuracy using machine learning models trained on thousands of breath samples.

Researchers believe the implications could be enormous for countries like India, where millions still receive diagnoses only after a disease has significantly progressed.

In overcrowded healthcare systems, non-invasive screening tools could potentially reduce dependency on repeated blood tests, lower diagnostic costs and help doctors identify high-risk patients earlier.

The attraction is obvious. Breath testing is painless. No needles. No biopsies. No laboratory reagents.

A frequently discussed example among scientists is the “smart mirror” concept. A person brushing their teeth in front of a bathroom mirror could unknowingly breathe in hidden sensors capable of detecting suspicious changes linked to diabetes, lung inflammation or chronic disease. An alert could then recommend a medical check-up before visible symptoms even begin.

For now, however, the technology remains largely experimental.

Dr Saswati Pal, a researcher at the Technical University of Berlin, working in the same field cautions that real-world environments remain far more difficult than controlled laboratory settings.

“Our work highlights that most current systems are validated under controlled laboratory conditions,” Pal explains. “Future sensors need to include features that allow them to automatically adjust, estimate normal conditions, and process signals based on the environment to deal with changing conditions,” she adds.

The challenge is not trivial.

Airflow constantly changes. Chemical traces linger in rooms. Crowded public spaces create overlapping breath sounds from multiple individuals. Even humidity can interfere with readings.

Inside Berlin laboratories, researchers reportedly spent months testing airflow turbulence, environmental interference and sensor instability before achieving reliable signal detection under simulated public conditions.

Some scientists are also investigating whether future nanosensors placed temporarily inside the respiratory tract could detect incoming toxins or allergens directly from the lungs. But researchers admit the idea faces serious biological and engineering hurdles.

“The respiratory tract is designed to rapidly clear foreign material,” Pal says, adding “any internal sensor must avoid inflammation, toxicity or tissue damage.”

Despite these obstacles, momentum in the field is accelerating because the medical need is enormous.

According to the World Health Organisation, chronic respiratory diseases, diabetes, and cancer collectively account for millions of deaths worldwide each year. Early detection remains one of the strongest predictors of survival.

Yet, alongside scientific excitement, a more unsettling question is beginning to emerge: Who owns the information contained in human breath?

If homes, offices, airports, or shopping centers somehow deploy air-monitoring systems capable of identifying disease-linked chemical signals, privacy concerns could become unavoidable.

“If my breath is broadcasting data, who is allowed to listen?” Bhattacharjee asks while discussing the ethical risks surrounding the technology.

He stresses that future systems must enforce “purpose limitation, irreversible feature extraction, and opt-in consent” so that individual health data cannot be secretly inferred in public spaces.

Experts warn that without strong regulations, breath-monitoring technology could eventually create new forms of discrimination involving employers, insurers, or surveillance systems.

Bhattacharjee argues that patient control must remain central.

“Breath-monitoring systems should suppress non-actionable variability, give users full control over activation and data sharing, and enforce hard firewalls against insurance or employer access", he adds.

For ordinary people, the science may still sound distant. But researchers insist the shift has already begun.

Medicine, they say, is slowly moving away from reacting to disease after symptoms appear and toward identifying invisible warning signs much earlier.

And somewhere in that transition, something as ordinary as breathing may become one of healthcare’s most powerful diagnostic tools.

The writer is a Delhi-based freelancer who writes on health issues and medical discoveries.

2026-05-18T06:10:32.418-07:00

Trump Falls Short on His Objectives During China Visit

Abdul Rahman | 16 May 2026

China reiterated its red lines about US involvements in Taiwan, clearly warning that any “mishandling” would destabilize US-China relations and may even lead to conflicts.

US President Donald Trump left Beijing at the end of a two-day state visit to China on Friday, May 15, without achieving any of the goals set before the commencement of the first such trip in nearly a decade.

For the US, a successful trip to China would have meant progress on trade bottlenecks including tariffs, visible promises of more Chinese purchases of US goods, including aircraft and advanced technologies, cooperation on Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, and easing of the restrictions on rare earth exports imposed by last year.

None of these happened, and President Xi Jinping even warned the US against crossing stated red lines in the two countries’ relations.

The visit was nevertheless termed by the Chinese as a “historic and landmark one,” with an overall positive tone of promising commitments on future cooperation for mutual development.

During a private meeting at Zhongnanhai complex in Beijing between the two leaders on Friday, Xi proclaimed that the “two sides have set the new vision of building a constructive China-US relationship of strategic stability.”

Xi also insisted that both the countries have agreed to work for “peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation on the basis of mutual respect” in the coming days, as good relations between US and China are essential for global peace and development.

Trump agreed with Xi during the press conference. He even claimed his visit to China had captured the world’s attention, was very successful, and unforgettable. He asserted that both sides made a lot of progress on various issues of mutual interests without going into the specifics.

On Taiwan

Reiterating comments made by China on several occasions in the past, Xi reportedly told Trump again on Thursday that Taiwan was the most important issue in China-US relations – and a red line.

He told Trump that if the US approach this topic properly, the bilateral relationship will enjoy stability. Otherwise, both sides can expect clashes or even conflict.

The US has been using Taiwan as a flashpoint to target China both politically and economically. It has supported the separatist forces there and pumped weapons worth billions of dollars under the guise of its supposed “legal obligations” despite Chinese objections.

While Trump refused to comment on the Taiwan issue while in China – despite being explicitly asked by the press – Secretary of State Marco Rubio later claimed that his country’s position on the topic remains the same.

On Iran

On Thursday, Trump underlined a “shared desire” of the US and China to open the Strait of Hormuz. However, China refused to make any public statement on the US request to push Iran to open the Strait, which has been partially blockaded in response to the US-Israeli war.

Both the countries agree that the opening of the Strait is crucial for global energy supplies and free navigation, however, there is a difference between them on the ways to do so.

Trump wants an international coalition to force Iran to open the Strait, if necessary by using force. On the other hand, China has maintained that the closure of the Strait was a result of the war and that only the end of the war can lead to its opening.

Although Trump claimed during a TV interview on Thursday that Xi agreed that Iran should never have nuclear weapons and must open the Strait of Hormuz, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement on Friday condemning the US-Israeli war on Iran saying it “should never have happened and has no reason to continue.” It supported the ceasefire and negotiated settlement of all the disputes including the Strait of Hormuz.

Nevertheless, Rubio reiterated his country’s insistence that China vote in favor of a UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force to open the Strait.

The vote on the resolution proposed by the US and Bahrain and supported by over a hundred other countries, is pending. China and Russia had vetoed a similar resolution in March.

On trade

Trump was looking for lucrative trade deals during the visit, as made clear by the number of the world’s top CEOs participating in the US delegation to China. However, unlike his previous visit in 2017, when he got trade deals worth billions of dollars, no clear promises were made by the Chinese this time.

The only major commitment made by China was to buy 200 Boeing jets, the first such deal in almost a decade. However, the number of jets China agreed to buy from the American company was far less than the expected number of 500. This caused a fall in the company’s share prices after the news became public.

There were no explicit deals on the rare earth minerals supply as well. China restricted the sale of rare earth minerals to the US following Trump’s tariff war launched in April last year.

Reuters reported on Friday that Chinese restrictions on the sale of rare earth minerals have affected the production in American chip-maker and aerospace companies.

China controls around 90% of world’s rare earth minerals production crucial for the production of advanced technology goods, including defense equipment.

Though the White House claimed that China has agreed to buy more oil from the US in order to reduce its dependence on the Persian Gulf region, the amount and nature of the deal was not confirmed by the Chinese.

On tariffs, it seems both the countries agreed to maintain the status quo agreed in October last year when Xi met with Trump during his visit to South Korea, and refrained from tackling the issue during the most recent visit.

Courtesy: Peoples Dispatch

2026-05-18T06:09:01.748-07:00

India Among 4 Countries in HKH Region That Saw Over 10 Major Disasters in 2025

Mohd. Imran Khan | 16 May 2026

ICIMOD’s analysis of EM-data shows that across the region, about 1.2 million people were displaced or directly affected by disasters last year.

Representational Image. Image Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

Climate change has increased the risk of disasters. India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region experienced more than 10 major disasters in 2025, as per a latest scientific study by experts.

Asia accounted for a large share of disasters globally in 2025, a trend reflected in the HKH, which spans parts of South and East Asia. Four of the eight countries in the HKH region are more vulnerable to disasters, according to data analysis by the Kathmandu-based ICIMOD, highlighting the region’s growing exposure to hazard-related risks.

ICIMOD’s analysis of EM-Data shows that countries in the HKH region experienced economic losses of more than $$6 billion in 2024 alone from these events, with most of the damage linked to water-related hazards, such as floods, landslides and storms.

The situation continued into 2025. Intense monsoon rainfall triggered repeated flooding and landslides across several HKH countries, including Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. Other hazards, such as glacial lake outburst floods, were also reported in select locations. Across the region, about 1.2 million people were displaced or directly affected by disasters during the year.

Globally, disaster-related economic losses in 2025 were estimated at more than $169 billion. In comparison, losses recorded across the HKH highlight how extreme events translate into disproportionate impacts in a region characterised by complex terrain and high exposure.

Data also shows that Myanmar, Pakistan, and China experienced a series of monsoon-induced floods in 2025, causing widespread damage to infrastructure and livelihoods.

Researchers link the increasing impact of disasters in the HKH to the growing prevalence of multi-hazard events. Multi-hazards occur when more than one type of hazard, such as floods, landslides, or droughts, happen at the same time or when one hazard triggers another. Past examples in the region include the Kedarnath floods in Uttarakhand in 2013, and the South Lhonak glacial lake outburst flood in Sikkim in 2023, India, as well as the Melamchi flood in Nepal in 2021.

“Recent years show how floods, landslides, and other hazards are increasingly overlapping in mountain regions, amplifying damages to homes, infrastructure, and essential services,” said Pema Gyamtsho, Director General at ICIMOD, commenting on the regional trend.

Long-term data covering the period from 1975 to 2024 shows a decline in death rates and the number of people affected by disasters in the HKH after 2013. Analysts caution that data gaps may influence this trend, but improvements in preparedness and early warning systems may also be contributing factors.

“The numbers are still worrying, but the post-2013 trend suggests fewer lives are being affected year on year, which may reflect better climate services and preparedness in parts of the region,” said Manish Shrestha, a hydrologist at ICIMOD, adding that “sustained investment in preparedness and planning remains critical as risks continue to rise.”

Early warning systems have been credited with reducing losses in some flood-prone areas. In eastern Nepal, alerts issued from a flood early warning system along the Khando River in 2024 helped inform and evacuate around 60,000 people living downstream.

Analysts note that reducing future disaster losses in the HKH will also depend on risk-informed investments, where development and infrastructure planning take multi hazard risks into account. Without integrating hazard and vulnerability data into investment decisions, exposed communities risk locking in higher losses as climate driven extremes intensify.

Experts warn that multi hazard risks are likely to intensify in the coming years as climate change alters weather patterns and increases the frequency and severity of extreme events, leaving exposed communities across the HKH vulnerable to escalating losses.

2026-05-18T06:05:24.048-07:00

Joseph Vijay and His New Tamil Nationalism

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd | 16 May 2026

TVK’s Ambedkar, Periyar, Kamaraj social justice combination, along with two women icons, constructs a new nationalist vision that is totally opposite to RSS-BJP’s nationalist vision sans women.

In the thick of the RSS-BJP (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Bharatiya Janata Party) North Indian normalisation of Hindu Rashtra from Gujarat to West Bengal, a challenge emerged from the South—Tamil Nadu. Joseph Vijay's victory definitely has a new message to the whole nation and the RSS-BJP forces in particular.

Joseph, the very name is unacceptable to the RSS ideology from its birth. But Joseph Vijay quite proudly took oath as Ninth Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, without any hesitation by using his first name that has an established Biblical history. Joseph was Mary's husband and foster father of Jesus Christ, who saved his life in his childhood and taught him how to read Torah and trained him to be a carpenter.

Joseph Vijay came to power in Tamil Nadu at a time when Christianity as a religion is on trial with several anti-conversion laws in different states ruled by the RSS-BJP, the amendment Bill on the Foreign Currency Regulation Act or FCRA is on the table of the BJP government to declare Christians almost as anti-nationals. They are presumed to survive with foreign money, buy souls into the fold of Jesus and build properties that deserve to be taken over through “Hindutva legal” means. I am using the phrase “Hindutva Legal” means consciously, because many laws that the BJP government passes bypass the constitutional moral framework. They are meant to suit their Hindutva ideological agendas. The anti-conversion laws and FCRA amendment Bill are part of that “Hindutva legal” means.

For Joseph's ideological campaign, he used five figures which cannot be accepted by the RSS-BJP forces. In the Tamil context, Periyar Ramasamy Naikar, B.R Ambedkar, Kamaraj Nadar, Queen Velu Nachiyar and Anjali Ammal, have a different nationalist ideological message. While three great male icons—Ambedkar, Periyar and Kamaraj -- are well known, the women icons add a new metaphor to his ideology of gender justice.

Queen Velu Nachiyar, an 18th-century queen of Sivaganga, was one of the first Indian monarchs to wage war against the British. And Anjalai Ammal, a freedom fighter from Cuddalore, is known for her active role in the Indian Independence movement, often called the "Jhansi Rani of South India".

Joseph Vijay’s party, the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), used these two women icons as its female representatives during the election campaign. This female nationalist symbolism played its role among women voters of Tamil Nadu.

WHAT THIS COMBINATION MEANS?

The Ambedkar, Periyar and Kamaraj Combination constructs a new nationalist vision that is totally opposite to the RSS’s nationalist vision of Savarkar, Hedgewar and Golwalkar. They do not recognise any woman nationalist icon because in their vision women are not even part of the sky, in a world where women are considered to be the half of the sky.

The new combination of Ambedkar, Periyar and Kamaraj, who have three different backgrounds with a common thread of inbuilt ideology and practice of social justice is certainly creative. While Ambedkar and Periyar are extensively discussed thinkers, with a lot of literature thought discourse about their life, writings and organisational activities Kamaraj is not so much in the national memory. Even the Congress did not promote him much.

Kamaraj was a Congress leader, known as king maker, with competitive energy that could challenge Chakravarthy Rajagopalachari, who led the Brahmin lobby of India. Popularly known as Rajaji, he wrote commentaries on Ramayana and Mahabharata, became a close follower of Mahatma Gandhi and finally his daughter was married to Gandhi’s son.

Though Rajaji and Kamaraj were rivals, they remained within the Congress party all their lives. Both of them ruled as state Chief Ministers. However, Kamaraj was the first OBC (other Backward Classes) leader who laid the foundation for a welfare state, particularly by beginning pro-poor education policies. He was the one who introduced the mid-day meal system for poor school children in India. He was kept outside the Dravidian pages of history, though he himself was one of the most respected lowest of the low caste political icons.

Joseph Vijay gave him the place that Kamaraj deserves. Interestingly most Nadars, who were once untouchables, are Christians in Tamil Nadu and Joseph must have found a loving place among them.

THE NEW MESSAGE

This combination of these five outstanding social justice icons of India sends a new message to the RSS-BJP nationalist ideology that works around the single point agenda of opposing Muslims and Christians of India.

Ambedkar as anti-caste philosopher and the father of Indian Constitution, with a comprehensive philosophical vision of India, is a challenge to the RSS-BJP ideology, though they pretend to own him.

Periyar is not just a thorn in their ideological bed but a thinker, social reformer and nationalist, who is gaining more acceptability even in North India after the RSS-BJP political forces captured Delhi in 2014.

They could attack Jawaharlal Nehru in Parliament and outside but they cannot attack Periyar even in their electoral campaign, though he was a strong atheist, because his moral and ethical stature is high enough for the Hindutva forces to be cautious.

Periyar’s image among the entire Dravidian society, and more particularly among women, is un-matched. Tamil nationalism is deeply embedded in his long ideological Dravida Kazhagam movement and all political parties, including BJP, could not openly attack him in Tamil Nadu.

Joseph Vijay owning him, having come from a Dalit-Christian family, background sends a different message while including him in his team of icons with a caveat (unlike Periyar, he believes in God.) That is a clever message.

JOSEPH AND DALITS

The Dalits of Tamil Nadu were very unhappy with the long rule of the DMK and AIADMK because the Dalit population is about 20% and were neglected. This is the estimate of the 2011 Census. It could be a bit more now. Such a vast population, with a well-educated middle class, was neglected by DMK and AIADMK all these years.

Thol Tirumavalavan’s Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi or VCK has been working among Dalits quite for some time, but it could not galvanise non-Dalit voters into its fold across the state, therefore it remained a small success in very few regions. Joseph Vijay has crossed that barrier and galvanised masses who voted him voluntarily.

Vijay could convince the Dalits by adopting Ambedkar as his icon and setting up a welfare agenda that gives hope to them. His semi-Dalit blood lineage must have also helped him.

Periyar’s symbolism must have convinced the Dravidian ideological constituency that Joseph Vijay will carve out a new political niche. In any case, the victory of Joseph, with that Christian name at a time when Christians across India are facing persecution, financial difficulties with new strategies like the FCRA Bill by the RSS-BJP government in Delhi to starve them of any foreign assistance to run their medical, educational and orphanage institutions are getting squeezed, is a relief for them too.

Christian service outside their religious fold, cutting across caste, creed, seems to have worked in favour of young Joseph, apart from his film stardom. Let us wait and see how his administration works.

The writer is a political theorist, social activist and author. His latest book is ‘The Shudra Rebellion’. The views are personal.

2026-05-18T05:58:24.574-07:00

Delhi: Crisis of Women & Child Safety in an Unequal Society

Shirin Akhter | 16 May 2026

Over a decade after the Nirbhaya case forced the Indian State to promise sweeping reforms, there looms a deeper crisis of governance, institutional decay and social indifference.

The recent rape cases in Delhi have shocked us to the core. A woman allegedly gang-raped inside a moving bus in the national capital, a three-year-old child allegedly assaulted within a school environment, repeated reports of sexual violence against minors appearing with such frequency that the country has almost learnt to consume them as routine news. One headline replaces another; one outrage dissolves into the next.

What is terrifying is not merely the brutality of these crimes, but their frequency. After every candle march, every televised debate, every promise of “women’s empowerment” and “zero tolerance”, there is another such crime. Meanwhile, women continue to navigate this society with fear woven into the ordinary rhythm of life; fear while travelling, fear while studying, fear while working, fear while simply existing.

More than a decade after the Nirbhaya case forced the Indian State to promise sweeping reforms, another woman is allegedly assaulted, in the same way, inside a moving bus in Delhi. Children continue to face violence even within institutions meant to protect them. This repetition is not accidental. It reflects a deeper crisis of governance, institutional decay and social indifference that no amount of political rhetoric can conceal.

Yet, at the very same time, we are constantly shown figures supposedly demonstrating rising women’s workforce participation, expanding inclusion and women-led development. We celebrate statistical improvements produced through changing definitions and measurement practices that increasingly classify precarious, unpaid and subsidiary labour as employment. Whereas the plain truth is that no society can meaningfully claim women’s empowerment while simultaneously failing to punish violence against women.

The crisis becomes even more disturbing when one examines the gap between reported crimes and actual punishment. India reports tens of thousands of rape cases every year, yet conviction rates have historically remained shockingly low. In many years, more than 70% of accused persons effectively escape conviction. Behind these numbers lies an entire machinery of institutional failure; delayed investigations, hostile policing, endless judicial pendency, intimidation of survivors, social pressure to withdraw complaints and the crushing psychological violence of navigating courts for years.

Figure 1: Reported Rape Cases and Approximate Convictions in India, 2004–2023

These figures shame the nation. For two decades, India has witnessed persistently high levels of sexual violence while conviction rates remain abysmally low. The issue, therefore, is not merely that a crime occurs, but that the criminal justice system repeatedly fails to punish it swiftly and credibly. A State that cannot guarantee women safety, dignity and justice cannot meaningfully claim to empower them, regardless of how many times it redefines inclusion statistically.

The deeper problem lies in the nature of governance itself. Women’s safety has increasingly been reduced to spectacle; CCTV announcements, symbolic legislation, carefully staged outrage and periodic policing drives after horrific incidents. But safety cannot be manufactured through spectacle after violence has already taken place. It requires functioning public institutions before violence occurs; safe public transport, accountable policing, strong forensic systems, accessible legal aid, dignified employment, social security and judicial systems capable of delivering swift punishment.

Instead, what we increasingly witness is the coexistence of statistical celebration and lived insecurity. Governments speak the language of women-led development while women continue to disappear from public spaces after dark out of fear. We are told that participation is rising while insecurity itself functions as an invisible tax on every woman’s mobility, education and labour force participation.

The burden of this insecurity is not experienced equally. Women rendered more vulnerable because of socio-economic location face disproportionately greater challenges. The privileged can partially privatise safety through gated housing, private vehicles and expensive institutions. The poor cannot. Their insecurity becomes normalised within everyday urban life.

Equally horrifying is the growing violence against children. The repeated reports of sexual assault against minors reveal not merely individual criminality but the collapse of institutional responsibility itself. A society that cannot protect children even within schools and supervised environments cannot claim to possess functioning governance structures.

The category “crimes against children” includes both male and female minors, and the larger reality is that violence in unequal societies invariably falls most heavily upon the vulnerable. Boys under 18 are often no less vulnerable to abuse, exploitation and institutional abandonment than girls. Yet a substantial proportion of sexual offences under POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offence) Act and related laws continue to target girl children, exposing the deeply gendered nature of violence within a broader landscape of social vulnerability and institutional failure.

The explosion in crimes against children reveals a society undergoing a deeper moral and institutional breakdown. The rise from roughly 18,700 reported crimes against children in 2005 to nearly 1.87 lakh cases by 2024 cannot be dismissed merely as improved reporting. Even where reporting has improved, the inability of institutions to deliver swift justice, prevent abuse and protect children within homes, schools and neighbourhoods points toward a profound collapse of governance.

More disturbingly, even the apparent rise in convictions does not necessarily indicate timely justice. Much of India’s child-protection system remains paralysed by enormous pendency under POCSO courts, delayed investigations and years-long trials. The consequence is that legal processes themselves increasingly become another form of violence inflicted upon survivors and their families.

Source: Author’s compilation using NCRB Crime in India reports, CRY/NCRB analysis and NCRB-linked reporting. Approximate convictions are indicative and derived from reported conviction-rate trends.

Ultimately, the crisis of women’s safety in India is not merely a question of crime. It is a question of what kind of society and state we are becoming. No economy can meaningfully bring women into public and productive life while simultaneously allowing fear, impunity and institutional indifference to govern everyday existence. Regardless of how many statistical categories are revised or definitions expanded, a society that cannot guarantee women safety, dignity and justice cannot meaningfully claim progress.

The writer is Associate Professor at Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi. The views are personal.

2026-05-18T05:53:42.786-07:00

Birth Anniversary: Why Marx Still Matters in India

Shabir Ahmad Ganaie | 05 May 2026

Marx asked a simple question: who owns, who works, and who profits. In India, today, the answers are increasingly unequal.

India is growing fast. Its workers are not.

This is the contradiction that defines the present. Highways expand, startups scale, and wealth accumulates at unprecedented speed. Yet those who sustain this growth continue to work without security, without protection, and often without dignity. This is not a temporary imbalance. It is structural. That is why Karl Marx still matters.

Marx, who was born on May 5, 1818, asked a simple question: who owns, who works, and who profits. In India today, the answers are increasingly unequal. Ownership concentrates. Labour fragments. The widening distance between the two is not a side effect of growth. It is how growth is organised.

The scale of this imbalance is stark. According to Oxfam, the top 1% in India owns more wealth than the bottom half combined. The top 10% controls the overwhelming majority of resources. Growth is visible. Its distribution is not. As India’s most respected historian, Irfan Habib, has argued, economic inequality in India has long been rooted in unequal control over resources and labour.

This concentration coexists with a labour structure defined by insecurity. Over 85% of India’s workforce operates in the informal sector, without contracts or social protection. Even within formal employment, informalisation is expanding. Stability is no longer guaranteed by having a job.

India is not facing a shortage of work. It is facing a shortage of work that can sustain a life.

More than half of the workforce is self-employed, and a significant share is engaged in unpaid labour. What is often presented as entrepreneurial energy is, in reality, economic compulsion. The line between employment and survival has blurred.

Consider a delivery worker in a major Indian city. He logs into an app he does not control. His earnings fluctuate according to algorithms he cannot see. Fuel prices rise. Incentives change without warning. A single accident can erase months of income. The platform grows. The worker absorbs the risk.

This is not flexibility. It is structured insecurity.

As Marx observed, “the worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces.” The insight is not rhetorical. It describes a system where value is created at one end and captured at another—where labour is essential, but security is optional.

Supporters of the current model argue that growth will eventually correct these imbalances. That prosperity will spread. That time will do the work of policy. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey shows that while headline unemployment appears moderate, urban unemployment remains persistently higher, and underemployment is widespread. Even minimal or irregular work is counted as employment.

The economy is generating jobs. It is not generating security.

This is not a failure of growth. It is a feature of how growth is structured.

Marx’s relevance lies here—not as ideology, but as diagnosis. When ownership concentrates and labour disperses, inequality does not resolve itself. It reproduces — quietly, efficiently, and often invisibly — through markets, institutions, and everyday practices.

Language helps sustain this process. Insecurity is reframed as flexibility. Lack of protection becomes efficiency. Risk is individualised, while profit is centralised. These are not neutral descriptions. They are ways of making structural inequality appear natural, even inevitable.

The consequences extend beyond income. Economic instability shapes decisions about education, health, and mobility. It shortens time horizons and weakens demand. A workforce that cannot plan cannot accumulate. An economy built on such labour cannot sustain broad-based prosperity.

Policy responses have largely focused on expansion—more infrastructure, more platforms, more schemes. These have produced visible gains. But they have not altered the underlying distribution of risk and reward. Growth, in its current form, depends on labour it does not secure.

In India today, inequality is not simply persisting alongside growth. It is being produced by it.

Marx does not offer a blueprint for resolving this contradiction. But he does clarify its logic. He shows how ownership, labour, and power align—and why, once aligned, they tend to reproduce the same outcomes.

The question, then, is no longer whether India is growing. It is whether that growth can sustain the people who make it possible.

If those who produce value remain excluded from its benefits, the imbalance will not correct itself. It will deepen. An economy that grows without securing its workers does not just risk inequality. It risks exhausting the very foundation on which its growth depends.

The writer is a researcher in South Asian history, specialising in socio-political dynamics, minority experiences, and marginalised voices. The views are personal.

2026-05-18T05:38:17.991-07:00

The 1926 General Strike in Ealing and Hillingdon

MAY 8, 2026

This week marks the centenary of the 1926 General Strike. Barbara Humphries looks at how it was organised in West London.

By the 1920s, parts of the London Boroughs of Ealing and Hillingdon had become industrial areas. This was due to the Great Western Railway which had been built in the 19th century. Southall and Acton had railway works whose workforce became the backbone of the labour movement. The GWR attracted factories along its side, both in Southall and neighbouring Hayes. These included a margarine factory and AEC which made buses for London transport. In Hayes, EMI made electrical equipment. These factories had relocated from inner London due to cheap land prices in the area.

World War 1 had boosted industrialisation with munitions factories in Park Royal on the borders of Acton and Brent, and alongside the railway in Hayes. After the war these sites became devoted to civilian production such as brewing and cocoa processing. Factories such as Napiers opened on Acton Vale. The 1920s saw hundreds of factories in Acton, including Walls.

What had been a rural area at the turn of the century with orchards and brickworks catering for the London market became one of the heaviest industrialised part of Europe. Workers moved to this area to work. Some came from other parts of London, but others came from the distressed areas of high unemployment, such as South Wales, the North of England and Scotland. Many had a coal mining background and they brought their politics with them.

There had been a labour movement presence in the area for some time. This included branches of trades unions, such as the National Union of Railwaymen, the Railway Women’s Guild, but also the Labour Party, the Independent Labour Party and the Co-operative Movement. By 1945 the area had changed politically forever. Road transport had also developed with tram depots in Acton and Hanwell. Their workers were recruited into the Transport and Workers Union, which was to become the second largest union in the area.

However, side by side with these pockets of industrialisation sat commuter towns such as Ealing, the queen of suburbs, home to city gents and retired civil servants. They were determined keep the working class out of the borough.

Solid support

When the General Strike broke out in May 1926, workers in Hayes, Acton, Hanwell and Southall were amongst the first to be called out. According to all accounts, they were a hundred percent solid. Both the railwaymen and the bus workers had been in earlier disputes at the end of the War.

Trades councils were to become the backbone of the strike at a local level. They became councils of action, organising picket lines, demonstrations, soup kitchens and entertainment. There were very few violent incidents, although Syd Bidwell, a GWR worker who went on to become the local Labour MP from 1966 to 1992, remembers a bus in Southall driven by volunteers, probably with police on board, being pushed right over.

Syd remembered the strike, as his father, a building worker, was on the Southall strike committee. Joan Parr in Acton remembers her father being on strike. She and her mother joined marches, booed at scab bus drivers and helped set up a soup kitchen. The councils of action tried to take over the distribution of food and other essential supplies, but the government was resistant.

On one occasion, armoured vehicles were sent into the London docks to secure food supplies. These would have received permits from the local trades council as they were essential supplies, but the government refused.

Propaganda was the responsibility of the trades councils, as with the newspapers on strike and the BBC on the government’s side, there was little information about how the strike was progressing. The TUC tried to rectify this by publishing the Workers’ Gazette to counter the British Gazette published by the government.

The TUC had hoped for an improved offer from the government, but none was forthcoming. The government had prepared for months for the strike, recruiting volunteers who signed up with the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies. It was more prepared than the TUC. TUC leaders were afraid that more revolutionary elements in the trades unions would take control. A.J. Cook, the leader of the Mineworkers Federation of Great Britain stuck with his line of no cuts in pay or longer hours. He addressed workers all over the country, including in Acton Town Hall. He was a member of the National Minority Movement, which contained members of the Communist Party, many of whose members were imprisoned before the General Strike and not released until it was over.

Leaders of the Labour Party like Ramsay MacDonald were not in support of the strike and hoped that the government would win. He thought that it was more important to get a Labour government elected. However, at a local level, Labour and trades union councils were one and the same body. So while Labour MPs were denouncing the strike, Labour Party members at a local level were running it In Hanwell, Party members addressed meetings of bus drivers.

Meanwhile in Ealing

In the old borough of Ealing, volunteers were recruited to break the strike. They drove cars and vans to get people to work and to distribute supplies. However, it was debateable whether they were able to drive trains and buses effectively. They had little time for any training – and who was willing to train them?

Accounts of the strike in Ealing, from the standpoint of the strike-breakers, say that many of them had the time of their lives. Joe Sherman who was the secretary of the Ealing Trades Council, however, was very upbeat about the strike. He said: “Believe it or not everything stopped. We had a taxi put at our disposal. I used to ride around in a taxi cab by permission of the Ealing Strike Committee. I had a letter from the borough surveyor, Hicks, asking whether the strike committee would give permission to deliver two tons of coal to the Ealing Memorial Hospital. It showed how strong we were. Fortunately we had the Labour Hall open. We had about 1,000 people there every day. We had a demonstration on Ealing Common. There must have been 50,000 people. You could not have seen the grass for the number of people. We had the most effectively organised strike committee.”

Aftermath

When the strike was called off after nine days. The Ealing Strike Committee was as shocked as the rest of the trades union movement. There were more workers on strike than at the beginning. The miners were left with no concessions, and many who came out in support of them were victimised and did not get their jobs back.

The GWR was noted for being most vindictive. Members of the NUR were made to sign a document saying that they would not take action again. The union lost members and did not recover until the end of the decade.

The miners were locked out until the end of the year. Local trades unionists collected food and clothing. Some, according to Joe Sherman, took in miners’ children or offered holidays for them. The government, sensing victory, passed the Trades Dispute in 1927. This made sympathy strikes illegal, as they are today, made it illegal for civil servants to join a union, and made ‘contracting in’ compulsory for trades unions supporting the Labour Party (rather than the easier to operate ‘contracting out’). The Labour Party lost thousands of pounds in affiliations, but this Act was not repealed until 1945.

In the General Election of 1929 Labour won its highest number of seats in Parliament so far, but with no overall majority it was forced into coalition with the Liberals. Labour won the Acton seat for the first time electing Joseph Shillaker. Mass meetings were held in Acton. It came close also to winning the Uxbridge parliamentary division, which contained Hayes and Southall.

The General Strike had divided Britain, as it had Ealing and Hillingdon. For the trades unions it had been a defeat, but a victory in solidarity.

Dr Barbara Humphries is a socialist activist in West London. She wrote her PhD on “The Origins and Development of the Labour Movement in West London 1918-1970.”

Image c/o Unite.

The 1926 General Strike in a London suburb

Ahead of a talk with author Edd Mustill next week, Richard Price explores how the 1926 General Strike affected his local area.

The broad outlines of the General Strike have remained largely unchanged in the last one hundred years. Nothing has rehabilitated the abject surrender of the TUC General Council or the treachery of Ramsay MacDonald, who confided to his diary on May 2nd 1926 – the day before the strike began – “The Government has woefully mismanaged the whole business … But the TUs have been equally blameworthy.” He described the election of charismatic miners’ leader A.J. Cook as “the most calamitous thing that ever happened to the T.U. movement.”

How the General Strike played out in the towns and cities of Britain has been the subject of dozens of local studies. Many of them, necessarily, have focussed on the major flashpoints – in London’s docklands, in the coalfields and in port cities. But how did it pan out in one of London’s late Victorian suburbs?

Researching the Nine Days in my own area of Leyton has been far from straightforward. Very few Labour Party, trade union or trades council records have survived. There are a tiny number of memoirs or diaries. Local papers were hostile to both unions and the Labour Party, and the main one was strikebound.

Leyton was, as its long time MP Reg Sorensen said approvingly, “an ordinary place”. Fenner Brockway described it in the late 1920s as “two thirds working class, one third middle class”. But its growth as a suburb had been extraordinary. In 1851, Leyton and Leytonstone were two Essex villages with a combined population of 3,901. Two generations later in 1911, their population had grown to 124,735. Leyton, Willesden, Tottenham and West Ham were the four fastest growing areas in Britain. Two main groups of people moved into the nascent suburb – those moving in from Essex and East Anglia, escaping rural poverty in search of better opportunities; and those moving out from the cramped and frequently squalid old East End.

Along with lots of builders building at astonishing speed, the first main occupational group living in Leyton were clerks. Lower middle class in contemporary status, many earned less than skilled workers. George Bernard Shaw recovered from smallpox at his doctor uncle’s in Leyton in 1881. His uncle, used to having the country gentry as his patients, complained about the area being taken over by “rows of little brick boxes inhabited by clerks in tall hats supporting families on fifteen shillings a week.”

So Leyton was quite different to the industrial centres and docklands that lay to its south. Industrial development was much slower, although manufacturing did develop over time. By the 1920s Leyton had one large enterprise – the London Electric Wire Company in Church Road, which employed 1,300 workers – and lots of small scale manufacturing from marmalade and sweets to shoes and church organs. The Co-op had begun to expand, both as a retailer and a manufacturer.

Leyton didn’t have the big battalions of dockers, seamen and railway and gas workers who had formed the backbone of New Unionism in the 1890s, although a significant number of Leytonians worked at the giant railway works in Stratford. The largest group of organised workers were probably transport workers on buses, trams and railways.

Leytonstone, which had been a small village before the railway arrived in 1856, was specifically developed as a middle class enclave for City gents higher up the feeding chain than the clerks of Leyton. Lower Leytonstone, however, had some of the poorest parts of the district.

There were social and cultural differences with neighbouring areas. Unlike Stratford, Leyton’s Irish community was quite small. It had one Catholic church and an array of different non-conformist churches that influenced both Liberalism and the emerging Labour politics. Before the First World War, Leyton’s largest migrant community was German.

It also developed distinct politics. The Social Democratic Federation and syndicalism had had some impact in Walthamstow, and the SDF had a base in West Ham. But neither the SDF nor syndicalism gained a foothold in Leyton, where the main socialist grouping was the Independent Labour Party. Compared to West Ham, where the council had a socialist and Labour majority by 1888-89, and which elected Keir Hardie as its MP in 1892, Leyton didn’t elect its first trade union or Labour councillor until mid-way through during the first world war.

But the war had a radicalising effect, and between 1918 and the General Strike a period of closely balanced three-party politics opened up. Taking account of its rapid population growth, two parliamentary seats – Leyton West and Leyton East – were created in 1918. Leyton West elected a Tory in 1918, who died almost immediately; a Liberal in 1919; a Tory in 1922, and its first Labour MP in 1929. Leyton East elected the erratic Lt Colonel Cecil L’Estrange Malone as a right wing Coalition Liberal in 1918, only for him to become converted to the cause of Soviet Russia, join the British Socialist Party, and become Britain’s first Communist MP, drifting out in the same Parliament to sit as a Labour MP. He was replaced by a Tory in 1922, who then lost to Labour in 1923. The seat was retaken by the Tories in 1924 and recaptured by Labour in 1929.

By the mid-1920s, these types of suburban area were on the front line of rapid and closely contested political change, with Labour on a generally upward path. Part of Labour’s growing strength lay in its pyramid of affiliated or Labour-adjacent civil society organisations – unions, rapidly growing women’s sections and the Women’s Co-operative Guild among them.

One striking measure of how this local labour movement responded to the strike call is that, whatever MacDonald’s cowardly equivocations, all Labour councillors appear to have seen their duty as assisting the dispute. They spoke alongside trade unionists at a pre-strike rally. They served on central strike committees which organised effective picketing in both Leyton and Walthamstow, and supported cutting off the locally managed electricity supply. An occupational breakdown of the background of Labour local government candidates in 1926 shows them to be almost entirely manual or office workers.

This cooperation between the industrial and the political wings helps explain why the strike in Leyton was very solid, with all buses, trams and trains out, and most significant workplaces on strike. And because of this strength, there were no significant clashes, and no arrests directly connected with the strike. The Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS) had significantly fewer volunteer scabs in Leyton than the London average. A big crowd watched the Australian tourists smash the Essex bowling all over the place at Leyton cricket ground – cricket having gone ahead with the agreement of the MCC and the trade unions. A delegation of women successfully pressured the council to give milk to women with children.

There is a photograph of what are almost certainly typists and secretaries waiting at the Bakers Arms for a lift in a charabanc driven by a strike-breaking volunteer to the City of London. But was it all peaceful? The fact that there were no arrests may reflect that police numbers were depleted by extra numbers being sent to docklands, where troops were introduced. The main local paper, then as now, the Guardian, got one single duplicated sheet out during the strike that said that “good order has been maintained”. But in its first post-strike issue on May 12th it claimed that a “state of terrorism” had existed in Leyton during the strike, with general intimidation from its first day, private buses surrounded at the Bakers Arms, charabancs overturned, and lorries carrying people to work “subject to brutal insults by the crowds of hooligans.”

This latter is almost certainly lurid, vengeful exaggeration, at a time when victimisation was happening on the railways. But I have come across several examples of what you might call civil disobedience – two teenagers bound over after having been caught trying to disable a signal box on the line between Loughton and Woodford; two lads arrested for trying to block the traffic near Gants Hill; and a group of women council tenants who blocked the line to Liverpool Street at Highams Park.

The TUC’s capitulation was followed by a fall in trade union membership and a retreat in the face of an employers’ offensive. It also swung the pendulum back towards political action, and in Leyton the Labour Party shifted leftwards. Fenner Brockway, who had edited the TUC’s British Worker during the General Strike, went to work with his brother-in-law Reg Sorensen in Leyton. Both were left-wing members of the ILP and both were adopted as prospective Labour candidates – Sorensen for Leyton West and Brockway for Leyton East. They launched a local left wing paper, the Leyton and Leytonstone Pioneer, which was delivered to thousands of addresses. It spearheaded their joint victories at the 1929 general election. Theirs was a strongly moral socialism of right versus wrong (with an obvious non-conformist component) but it was also pioneering in its anti-colonialism. Both Sorensen and Brockway were involved in the League Against Imperialism in its early stages, and many years later they were the first MPs to move a Race Relations bill in the House of Commons.

In any discussion of the General Strike, the question of whether it was a revolutionary situation inevitably arises. In the revolutionary corner, supporters point to the building strength of the strike during and even after the nine days; that it was – as MacDonald feared – a direct constitutional challenge to the state; that embryonic forms of dual power emerged in the Councils of Action; that workers in many parts of Britain had effective control of the supply of food, power and transport; that it “posed the question of power”, and that “all that was lacking was a revolutionary leadership”, with the Trotskyist tradition laying particular stress on the conciliatory Anglo-Russian Committee and the fatal weakness of the left-wing members of the General Council.

Sceptics point to the lack of any political plan on the part of the trade union leadership, and to the lack of a widespread revolutionary consciousness among workers; that there was a miss-match between its militant trade unionism and its still-emerging political consciousness. Clearly the General Council could have escalated and continued the dispute, and its decision to abandon the miners was taken voluntarily.

Whether a situation was revolutionary or not is not simply a yes or no answer. Trotsky himself on occasion criticised revolutionaries who mistook the first month of pregnancy for the ninth. No Council of Action existed in Leyton, although the Central Strike Committee presumably performed similar functions. But this was dual power only at a very embryonic level. There were no red guards. Many workers were army veterans, but few had guns and they were unlikely to obtain many without a highly improbable mutiny in the army.

Workers were undoubtedly aware that a general strike meant a confrontation with the state. With the strike almost universally supported, the next stage would inevitably involve political confrontation. But there are very few accounts indicating that workers discussed what that would look like.

Ramsay MacDonald was right about one thing – that the unions had no plan. Of course, the last thing Ramsay MacDonald wanted would been for the unions to have had a plan to confront state power. But he was right that they had no plan. Tories, Liberals and MacDonald’s allies had no problem identifying the constitutional implications of the mass strike. Only the union leaders saw it as only a trade union dispute.

The Communist Party’s line both leading up to, and during, the General Strike has been widely criticised as tail-ending that of the General Council. In Ken Loach’s Days Of Hope, a young Communist sees through the party line and leaves in disgust. But that fictional character had hardly any real life equivalents. There was scarcely a ripple of opposition within the CPGB at a time when it was still possible to debate the party’s strategy and tactics internally. In fact, the CPGB gained credit for its activism during the General Strike, and its membership more than doubled to 11,000 during 1926. But it was still a tiny force compared to Labour’s more than 5 million voters.

Decades ago, many of us were swept away with the idea that revolutions had failed to come to fruition because “all that was lacking was revolutionary leadership”. These days I’m warier of this kind of all-purpose, circular and tautological argument. Why was it lacking? Usually, the explanation is in the form of the subjective failures of assorted Labour leaders and trade union bureaucrats. But why did the membership of the revolutionary wing of the movement number only 7,000 in mid-1926? Among the reasons for the small size of the British ‘vanguard’ when compared to most other European countries must be the unitary nature of the British labour movement, and in particular, the Labour-trade union link.

Without pre-empting any more of my talk, these are some of the themes I will be exploring in an on-line meeting on Leyton and the General Strike on Sunday May 10th at 2.30 pm. Also speaking will be Edd Mustill, author of the recently published book Britain’s Revolutionary Summer: The General Strike of 1926, reviewed on Labour Hub here.

The General Strike in Croydon

HubMP2012

This is an amended version of a talk by Daniel Frost, which was given to a Unite the Union GPM&IT Sector event celebrating the centenary of the General Strike, held at Ruskin House in Croydon on Saturday 2nd May.

On 4th May 1926, workers in many key industries – transport, printing, metal and chemical manufacture, construction, power generation – went on strike in support of the 1.2 million miners who had just been locked out as part of a dispute which stretched back many months.

Other workers soon joined this ‘first line’, often to avoid working with strike-breakers, but sometimes out of sheer enthusiasm. The General Strike had begun.

The possible necessity of a “national strike” – the TUC’s preferred term – had been recognised for some time. It was a decade tense with hopes of revolutionary change. In September 1925, at the TUC annual Congress, the outgoing leader of the engineers’ union, Alonzo Swales, even proclaimed that the world had “entered upon the next and probably the last stage of revolt.”

The central controversy was the future of the mines. On 10th March, a Royal Commission report was published which called for partial nationalisation but also a 13.5% cut in miners’ wages. The mine-owners responded by offering new terms, including wage cuts and longer hours, in defiance of the miners’ slogan: “Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day.” The key month would be May, when a nine-month coal subsidy was to come to an end.

Yet despite this long buildup, much of the initiative to prepare for the strike came from below. On 21st March, a “special conference of action” was organised in Battersea, with hundreds of delegates representing nearly a million members. Central to its programme was the creation of local Councils of Action. This “great positive programme” – as local activist Harry Wicks argued in a recently republished pamphlet – “served the class in the nine days of May.”

In Bermondsey, for example, the local Council of Action produced a 6,000-copy daily bulletin, and the Labour council permitted the use of both town halls for strike meetings – including ‘afternoon meetings’ aimed at women. The Councils of Action also played a role in keeping order, with stewards in red armbands stopping traffic to check for TUC permits. Bermondsey reported that they had no arrests, but there were “one or two disturbances” in Borough and Southwark.

However, historian Edd Mustill has described South London as a “hotbed of sabotage and vandalism”, and striking workers sometimes went beyond the bounds of official advice. TGWU pickets at New Cross jammed objects into the rails to keep trams from running; the Guardian claimed that women in Camberwell were laying their children in the road to stop vehicles from passing.

Meanwhile, at the Woolwich Arsenal munitions factory, 7,000 workers went on strike on 4th May only to be ordered back to work by the TUC. Across the country, local councils and union branches struggled to interpret the instructions coming down from above.

The TUC’s approach was especially chaotic when compared to the carefully-laid plans of the government. The Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, had been quietly preparing for a general strike since the middle of 1925, with schemes in place to keep power stations operating and the organisation of volunteer strike-breakers.

Most famous were the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies, or OMS, which recruited heavily from the middle and upper classes. As Mustill notes, the ‘Order of Mugs and Saps’ often provided an opportunity to realise “long-forgotten boyhood dreams to work on the footplate of a steam engine or behind the wheel of a bus.” But as he also points out, the expectation of the Chief Civil Commissioner – Croydon South MP William Mitchell-Thomson – was that OMS volunteers would be subordinated to the government’s plans.

Croydon in the 1920s was still primarily a middle-class suburb, with a significant blackcoated ‘dormitory population’ that the Croydon Advertiser saw as the “hardest hit” by the strike. I am not sure whether the miners would agree!

On the night of Monday 3rd, an OMS meeting was held at Croydon Town Hall; a local Lloyd’s Bank employee served as their treasurer. Immediately outside on Katharine Street, the British Fascisti – Britian’s first fascist organisation – met in the open air. While the government had officially declined the fascists’ organised support, they were permitted to join the OMS in an individual capacity.

In Croydon and in other boroughs, volunteer strike-breakers tried to operate the trams and buses, or transported people in private cars. They struggled to keep up with demand; the local press described crowds of people milling about or slowly traipsing toward central London. And the strikebreaking could sometimes have disastrous results: on May 7th, a South London bus driven by a volunteer was waylaid by a picket and drove onto the payment, killing a bystander.

Yet while middle-class volunteers did flock to support the government, Croydon was also home to the workers who had stopped the buses and trams in the first place. The local Council of Action was notably successful, even publishing its own paper: the Croydon Worker, which had a circulation of about 3,000. Like Bermondsey, Croydon had a sizeable printing industry, and the Council of Action must have benefited from the expertise of those that had otherwise downed tools.

The old Ruskin House, close to West Croydon, was a major organising centre, with a ‘workers defence corps’ keeping order, and a canteen to raise money for the Miners’ Hardship Fund. It had been founded in 1912 with money from a temperance activist, and moved to its then-site in 1919. There were sports games and acrobatic displays in the garden, and even a performance led by the prestigious Surrey-based composer Rutland Boughton, all described in the second issue of the TUC’s British Worker.

Most often remembered as the founder of the original Glastonbury Festivals, Boughton had courted controversy earlier in the year by wearing ‘plus fours’ and a red tie at a performance at the Albert Hall, and caused an even bigger stir during the General Strike when a staging of Bethlehem (1915) depicted Jesus Christ being born in a miners’ cottage. He had also recently joined the Communist Party.

On 9th May, a “monster demonstration” – as the Council of Action later described it – marched from Ruskin House to Duppas Hill, led by a brass band. With thousands of strikers and their families and supporters, it was the largest protest in Croydon’s history. The Croydon Times reported that there were “young children… in their hundreds”, including “perambulators by the score” and a little boy in a toy motor car.

The strikers were optimistic. “After this little job is all over,” a local activist declared, “Croydon must show the same solidarity politically as it is now showing industrially. The fight will go on! And our victory in the industrial field must be repeated in the political field.”

Across the country, the numbers on strike continued to grow as more industries were called out. On 12th May 12, Bermondsey Council of Action later reported, the “workers were more solid… than at the first.”

Yet behind the scenes, the leadership of the TUC was preparing to surrender. With only vague promises that a compromise would be found for the miners, and without adequate measures to protect those returning to work, the strike was called off. The miners, who had not agreed, remained out, many until as late as November. For other workers, victimisation was widespread: according to Mustill, the sole trade unionist at the Mazawattee Tea Company in South London was sacked after refusing to tear up his union card.

For those who had fought so hard, the end of the strike was a betrayal, and could scarcely be believed. In an interview in Robert Vas’ Nine Days in ’26 (1974), the Labour activist who announced the news from the steps of Ruskin House says that people even wept. The disappointment was enormous. The “absolute solidarity” reported by the Croydon Council of Action hadn’t been enough.

This had serious consequences for the labour movement as a whole. By 1931, as unemployment and disillusionment both grew, trade union density in Croydon fell to just 5%. Moreover, in the November 1926 local elections, Labour was badly punished, as – to quote from Sam Davies and Bob Morley – “links to the trade union movement raised apprehension in the hearts of Croydon’s middle classes.”

There were other recriminations, too. In 1927, the government introduced legislation to outlaw secondary action and mass picketing, closing the legal route to future general strikes. And the leadership of the labour movement also went looking for people to blame: in late 1926, the Labour Party disaffiliated the Teachers Labour League – headed by a Croydon teacher – over supposed Communist links.

However, to focus only on these gloomier outcomes is to lose something of the strike’s significance. Though the local press had been uniformly and unsurprisingly critical of the strike as a whole, they had continually been forced to admit the fact that the strikers were “orderly” and “respectable” – which I suspect was more a reflection of the strength of the labour movement than an absence of “sabotage and vandalism”! By the 1930s and especially after the 1940s, the Labour Party was an established part of Croydon’s political scene. It was starting to achieve victory in the ‘political field’ even where industrial solidarity had fallen short.

Moreover, for all of the disappointment, the strike had helped to cement some important local institutions. Ruskin House, barely a decade old in 1926, is today one of the few surviving labour halls in London, and the headquarters of the Communist Party of Britain and the Morning Star. The workers defence corps apparently survived the strike, and may have come in handy during the confrontations with fascists which peppered the next few years.

And though the course of the general strike can be debated over and over, it cannot be forgotten that it made the ruling classes tremble and that, for nine days, the possibility of a different social order crept into view. I will end with the thoughts of Harold Croft, looking back at the end of the strike’s first day, quoted by Mustill:

“I quickly relapse into an inert but reflective mood – fortuitous impressions of Croydon, Streatham, London, Reading, Swindon and Bristol crowd into my mind and rapidly culminate to a tangible idea of the massive reality of the power and magnitude of the great Strike. Every town and city isolated – seemingly autonomous – yet all indivisibly and indissolubly one in unity and purpose – A vast phalanx of workers still – serious – silent – waiting for the victory of their immense passivity. This massing of toilers to demand a living wage for miners is an epic of Labour.”

And so it was.

Daniel Frost is a historian and UCU member, and the co-editor (with Evan Smith) of In Solidarity, Under Suspicion: The British Far Left from 1956, which was recently reviewed on Labour Hub.

Image: Ruskin House, Croydon. Source: From geograph.org.uk Author: Stephen Richards, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Richard Price is a political activist in Leyton.

2026-05-18T05:34:53.300-07:00

UK

£26.2 billion in energy ‘war profits’ posted since start of 2026

HubMP2012

Energy companies have generated profits of over £26.2 billion in the first three months of 2026, with around £3 billion generated on the firms’ UK operations.
The UK-generated returns equate to £102 in profit for every household in the UK in just three months.
The figures have been compiled following trading updates by a host of household name energy firms in recent weeks as the conflict with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz delivered a significant war windfall for oil and gas firms – at the same time as households face rising bills.
Among the results included in the figures are Equinor, the UK’s biggest gas supplier, which said it had generated £7.19 billion in profit in Q1 2026. Shell’s announcement of £5.07 billion in profits is also included with the firm looking to reduce its UK tax liability by around £1.3 billion through its Adura joint venture with Equinor, which pools the two firms’ North Sea exploration assets.
TotalEnergies has followed a similar path to Adura, spinning off its UK North Sea assets into NEO NEXT+, now billing itself as the largest producer on the UK Continental Shelf. The parent company posted adjusted net income of £4 billion for the quarter, up from £3.1 billion a year earlier and has announced a share buyback and increased dividends.
BP reported underlying profits of £2.4 billion for the first three months of the year, more than double the figure from a year earlier, driven largely by its oil trading division.
Other firms included in the analysis include Chevron and Scottish Power owner Iberdrola. The Spanish-based firm reported an 11% rise in adjusted net profit in Q1 2026, with growth driven substantially by its regulated network operations in the United Kingdom.
Meanwhile, new analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit found that the average household’s energy bills will have been £4,800 (87%) higher over the five years since the start of the gas crisis in late 2021, with the coming winter likely to add even more to these extra costs.
Cornwall Insight forecasts average household energy bills will rise by £201 a year from 1st July while homes on heating oil and LPG energy have already seen energy costs soar, prompting the Government to provide limited emergency relief and extend support for these households to move off oil and gas.
In a new poll from Survation, 74% of the public felt that it is morally wrong for oil and gas companies to profit from the energy crisis caused by the Iran war. The figures back up previous End Fuel Poverty Coalition polling which showed that the public support the Windfall Tax by a margin of two to one.
Energy company bosses saw their own personal wealth grow off the back of the current crisis, with Harbour Energy’s Linda Z Cook seeing the value of her shareholding rise by more than £4 million to £26 million in just the first four weeks of the latest conflict. Her firm has claimed in a trading update that the Middle East conflict has created “unprecedented disruption” to energy markets, while quietly more than doubling the amount of surplus cash for 2026 to £1.02 billion on the back of rising oil and gas prices.
Simon Francis, Coordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition said: “Around a quarter of every energy bill is taken in profit by a range of firms involved in the industry and that figure could well grow thanks to the war profits still being generated by the energy industry. Not only do these firms profit off the back of a war which has killed thousands of civilians, but the profits are also built on the backs of financial suffering in UK households.
“It can’t be right that while the public see their energy bills increase, energy firms make billions and employ rafts of accountants to maximise their profits and lobbyists to campaign against the Windfall Tax.
“The only winners from the conflict with Iran appear to be the oil and gas giants who control the prices we pay. The sooner we get off the fossil fuel price rollercoaster through increased energy efficiency of buildings and more renewables, the better.”
Jan Shortt, General Secretary of the National Pensioners Convention, commented: “It is an appalling situation when energy companies profit from a humanitarian crisis and the public pay the price of ever increasing household bills. It is time for a real and urgent push to engage with renewable energy and sustainable energy rather than fossil fuels.
“We are concerned that increasing energy bills will mean that those who need heat even in the warmer weather due to their health conditions will be forced to cut down their consumption.
“The billions going into the coffers of energy companies like Shell and BP should be used to offset the increase in household energy bills so that hot food and heating homes when necessary doesn’t mean going into debt.”
Former North Sea oil worker, Danielle Dale, 51 from Aberdeenshire, said: “I worked in operations for fossil fuel production, but I moved on. I saw that the world was changing and we needed to create a thriving, sustainable future. The question we should be asking the oil and gas industry is this: can we really call it profit when the true cost is counted in vanishing species, destabilised climates, and families choosing between heating and eating?”
Labour peer Prem Sikka summarised the picture: “Bumper payouts for execs and shareholders; higher inflation, poverty, misery for us. 120,000 Britons a year die in fuel poverty, Must levy windfall taxes.”
Momentum commented: “This is the result of a system that prioritises profit over the living standards of ordinary people. The Labour Government could go further by bringing energy companies into public ownership. Instead the burden falls on all of us.”
Image: https://picpedia.org/handwriting/p/profit.html License: Creative Commons 3 – CC BY-SA 3.0 Attribution: Alpha Stock Images – http://alphastockimages.com/ Original Author: Nick Youngson – link to – http://www.nyphotographic.com/

2026-05-18T05:18:32.079-07:00

UK

Right to Food Commission Calls For Urgent Action From PM to Tackle Food Insecurity

HubMP201

MAY 12, 2026
The Right to Food Commission has written to the Prime Minister asking him to urgently introduce radical measures they believe are needed to help the millions of people across the country affected by food insecurity.
The Commission has asked the Prime Minister to raise incomes, cap essential food prices as well as supermarket profits and provide support to lifeline community organisations that are feeding people across the UK.
Their calls come after a series of evidence sessions across the country that have heard harrowing and distressing evidence about the extent of food insecurity and the real human impacts being felt by millions.
The work of the commission is ongoing, but the Commission has felt compelled to write now to the PM in the knowledge things could get much worse for people because of global impacts driving up the cost of food. They are fearful that a new wave of food inflation will drive more people into food poverty and hunger.
The Commission also felt the need to write to the PM after reports that supermarkets intend to introduce dynamic pricing in relation to the purchase of food.
Ian Byrne MP, Vice-Chair of the Right to Food Commission said: “We have heard the most harrowing and distressing evidence from people across the country about the extent of food insecurity in their communities and the real and tangible impacts it’s having on then.
“As things currently stand, there are millions of people feeling insecure about food and often where their next meal is coming from. That is bad enough but if this new wave of food inflation happens we are genuinely fearful that it could drive more people into food insecurity and intensify the plight of those already experiencing it.
“We believe that the government must act now to support people. It’s a structural economic issue that sees so many without the means to cover their basic needs and it’s structural changes at government level that will offer solutions.
“If this government is to rebuild trust with the British public then it must address some of the most pressing issues facing people and they do not get more important than ensuring that every citizen in this country has the means to access food.”
Barrie Margets Chair of the Commission said: “Our commission has confirmed that food insecurity is having a hugely detrimental impact on people across the country. Health, educational, and social outcomes are being impacted and urgent change is needed to help those people and communities who are faced with the daily challenge of trying to feed themselves, their children and, if a lifeline local organisation, people across their community.
“With a new wave of food inflation likely, it is imperative that the government urgently acts to support the millions of people already caught in a cycle of poverty and food insecurity as well as the many more who could be drawn into a life of feeling insecure about food.”
Sarah Woolley, General Secretary of the BFAWU and vice Chair of the Commission said: “From the evidence we have gathered plus in my work representing food workers, I know first-hand how people are struggling to make ends meet and do not have enough income to purchase the food they need. Our union has year on year heard how food workers often cannot afford the very food they produce. That is a disgrace and a stain on our society and economy,
“The government needs to intervene and drive up incomes. It must also make sure that supermarket prices and profits are capped, and it must urgently ensure that the dynamic pricing of food is never allowed to ever happen.”
Commissioner and Consultant Respiratory Paediatrician in Liverpool, Ian Sinha, said: “During this commission, we have heard first-hand about the hunger children are experiencing in school, and the food insecurity they and their families are experiencing. I also see this and the negative health impacts in my work as a doctor in Liverpool.
“The PM in his speech to the country this week rightly spoke about changes that could help young families save for a house – but how are they expected to save in this way when mothers are already choosing not to feed themselves in order to feed their children, which is exactly what we have heard during the work of the commission? Radical structural change to address people’s basic requirement to food is needed urgently.”
Commissioner and Economic Social and Cultural Rights Lead at Amnesty International, Jen Clark said: “This government, like those that came before them, have failed in their obligation to fulfil the basic human right to food. The Right to Food Commission has heard evidence from communities across the UK showing that far from being protected, people are driven into debt, hunger and skipping meals to feed their children. From overwhelmed community kitchens to overloaded food banks, charities are stepping in because the state has failed to act.
“The scale and urgency of this food insecurity crisis means if we continue to heavily depend on goodwill in the charity sector to respond, we will eventually hit catastrophe. With food prices set to rise again and troubling pricing practices of big corporations threatening to undermine access to food, the government must take immediate action either to drive down costs or ensure people have enough income to live with dignity.”
The full text of the letter is here.
And another letter…
In a separate initiative, charities campaigning for lower fuel bills have written to the Prime Minister urging the government to go further and faster to solve the energy costs crisis.
It comes as energy bills are forecast to rise by 18% in July and a further 4% in September, with Ofgem due to confirm the changes on 27th May. Any increase will take effect from 1st July.
Polling for the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit found that the cost of living was the top driver of voting intention overall and energy bills were the single biggest cost-of-living concern among voters in the recent elections.
Simon Francis, Coordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition who helped organise the letter, said:“In just 15 days, households will learn how much their energy bills will increase. The government should be focused on working out a package of support for vulnerable households and those in energy debt now, while urgently reforming electricity prices to bring down costs for everyone.”
Tessa Khan from Uplift, one of the signatories to the letter, commented:“Labour must not repeat the mistakes of past governments that failed to prepare this country for soaring energy costs driven by overseas wars. Spending tens of billions propping up a broken fossil fuel system is not an answer, nor is more drilling when we know it won’t lower bills and the UK has already burned through most of its gas reserves. Instead, ministers must urgently scale up support for households to switch to clean energy and reforms to ensure they feel the savings.”
The open letter, coordinated by the End Fuel Poverty Coalition and signed by over 40 organisations including Asthma + Lung UK, Centre for Sustainable Energy, Disability Rights UK, Fair By Design, Friends of the Earth, Independent Age and the Social Workers Union warns that without further intervention “millions of households will continue to suffer.”
Lord John Bird, a crossbench peer, signed the letter on behalf of the Big Issue and said: “The British public punished the government at the ballot box last week for not going fast or far enough on cost-of-living pressures. Voters are fed up with being pummelled by rising household bills they simply can’t afford. People need to feel the change being promised in their everyday lives by the time winter rolls back in. Lower bills in warmer homes would be a good place to start.”
Jan Shortt, General Secretary, National Pensioners Convention, added: “It is totally wrong that customers are always expected to pay the ever increasing price of energy. Older people, particularly those with complex health conditions, need warmth and comfort even in warmer weather. Whilst the government has taken some steps the message at the ballot box was not enough to help households stay out of debt.”
The full text of the letter is here.

2026-05-18T05:07:05.449-07:00

Another future is possible. We are working to build it

HubMP2012

MAY 15, 2026

By Peter Lux, Lakenheath Alliance for Peace

Our current mainstream political discussion often centres on the immediate and the domestic— immigration, fixing more potholes or the cost of living. These ‘safe’ worries distract from a much darker undercurrent of anxiety. While the political pundits discuss the personal traits of party leaders, the public is quietly bracing for a catastrophe that the political class seems unwilling to discuss.

Looking beyond the potholes of our daily lives, we must ask ourselves: where does our safety truly lie? We must decide if we want a future based on escalation, war and possibly nuclear extermination, or one based on the understanding, cooperation and belief that another world is possible.

The scale of public fear regarding global conflict is not just rising; it has become a mainstream expectation. Over 50% of UK adults believe a world war is likely within the next five to ten years and 68% of the UK population are actively worried about the threat of conflict in the immediate future. In the US, most Democrats and one-third of Republicans believe a nuclear war is likely within the next decade.

In the National Security Review 2025, Keir Starmer wrote: “National Security is the first responsibility of any government.”

If security is truly the first responsibility, the failure to engage the public on military escalation is a staggering dereliction of duty. When the only options presented are ‘increase defence spending’ or ‘face invasion’, when jobs are to be created by increased military production and when dole queues are to be cut by military recruitment, voters are effectively sidelined. We are left to worry about potholes while the shadow of war lengthens.

Although RAF Lakenheath and nearby RAF Mildenhall are technically UK bases, they operate as a de facto US enclave where our concerns are secondary to American strategic goals. This was most evident when the US Air Force ignored UK government reservations regarding the legality of using the base for offensive attacks on Iran and supply of offensive weapons to Israel.

During a recent protest, we watched as A-10 ‘tank buster’ attack aircraft departed for the Middle East. These were only a few of over 140 fighter-bombers that have left for the Middle East via Lakenheath this year.

The UK government’s stance on arms exports to Israel is a study in hypocrisy. Officially, the government has suspended certain exports because there is a “clear risk” that they might facilitate serious violations of international humanitarian law.

In January, three Israeli F-35I jets were documented departing from RAF Mildenhall on a delivery flight bound for Israel. This logistical support completely undermines the official declarations.

While the general public is trapped in pessimism, the International Peace Camp at RAF Lakenheath on 1st – 6th 2026 April offered a different way forward. This gathering was grounded in the belief that active resistance is a hopeful act with open discussion, cooperation and disruptions to the base’s operations. The activities included workshops, nature walks, leafleting and engaging with people in local towns and direct action.

The Big Blockade on Saturday 4th April brought people from across the country with the main entrance blocked for three hours with talks, music and the demand for a better future. This led to two arrests.

The Camp also came at a time when the freedom of expression and protest are under attack. On the Sunday seven people were arrested for wearing tabards that read “We oppose genocide, We Support Palestine Action”.

On the same day Colonel Chris Romberg, a descendant of Holocaust survivors who served for 30 years as a Defence Attaché in Jordan and Egypt and has become a vocal critic of current policy stated: “As a former military officer I’m shocked at the war of aggression being waged and the complicity of the British government.”

The day after the end of the Peace Camp the two main gates of the base were blockaded.

At one gate, a vociferous crowd used flares and a banner reading “called in sick to block RAF Lakenheath” to shut down the gate for several hours. The other main gates was paralysed for six hours by a car, a large CND symbol, and activists with ‘lock-ons’. This led to another 14 arrests.

The disconnect between the clandestine nuclear deployments, military escalation and the mundane rhetoric of domestic politics is no longer sustainable.

Lakenheath Alliance for Peace consists of 65 organisation dedicated to opposing the return of US nuclear weapons to USAF Lakenheath. It is committed to nonviolent direct action for a peaceful and non-threatening world.

It is more than a one-off protest – it’s a sustained campaign. Since 2024 we have held monthly vigils (third Saturday of every month) and we have had three yearly peace camps. Alongside this, we continue actively campaigning across the country.

We welcome other groups to join our vigils on specific issues or hold their own actions/protests at RAF Lakenheath. For example we held a Welfare Not Warfare vigil last November and people are coming from Wales for a vigil at the end of June.

Another future is possible. We are working to build it.

Peter Lux is an activist with Lakenheath Alliance for Peace.

More resources: A 40 minute documentary about the camp here. Information about the 2026 Internation Peace Camp here. Access more images and videos of the camp here.

On social media: https://lakenheathallianceforpeace.org.uk/
https://www.facebook.com/lakenheathallianceforpeace/
https://twitter.com/LakenheathAfP/
https://www.instagram.com/lakenheathallianceforpeace/
https://bsky.app/profile/lakenheathalliance.bsky.social  https://www.youtube.com/@LakenheathAllianceforPeace
https://rumble.com/user/LAPeace

Images: Lakenheath Alliance for Peace.

2026-05-18T05:04:40.491-07:00

HubMP2012

UK

Education for sale

MAY 16, 2026

Mike Phipps reviews Human Capital: The Tragedy of the Education Commons, by Guy Standing, published by Pelican.

Fascism doesn’t necessarily begin with violence. It begins with lies. Hanhan Arendt said: “A people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. And with such a people, you can then do what you please.”

On that basis, discrediting truth-making institutions is the key to taking society and governance in an authoritarian direction. That includes the education system. It’s not accidental that Trump famously said: “I love the poorly educated.”

Nor is it accidental that one of the largest universities in the US has just banned the teaching of Plato’s Symposium to undergraduates. The entire philosophical basis of public education from the Athenian era onwards – the search for truth through dialogue, the equal right to speak and hear, including the right to speak truth to power without retribution – is being challenged by those who have a very different conception of, and purpose for, education.

Inculcating the values of rentier capitalism

The traditional liberal conception of education as a commons-based good, embodied in Britain in the 1963 Robbins Report, is being replaced by a system for inculcating the values of rentier capitalism: competitiveness, productivity and the sanctity of private property. People are being taught what, not how, to think. Schooling may be expanding, but creativity is not. In the UK and US, new schools are being built without playgrounds.

In 2023, nearly half of 14-year olds in England said they disliked school, up from a quarter in 2015. Mental ill-health is mushrooming among young people. Teaching to the test, associated with competitive societies with high rates of inequality, is especially prevalent in Britain and the US.

Universities, particularly in the US, are adapting to the competitive education market by making courses easier. Nearly half of all students don’t read books unless forced to. But this decline merely reflects a broader pattern in society where reading for pleasure – and with it literacy skills – is plummeting. This is music to the ears of politicians pushing simplistic solutions and hostility to experts.

In Britain, the move away from the education commons has accelerated since Thatcher: an increasing standardization of the curriculum, a focus on schools and universities being run like businesses, and a cult of exams – about half of all time in schools is now spent taking tests. This has fuelled a boom in private tutoring, which attests to both the failings of the academy system and the hyper-competitive ethos it fosters.

Sell off, make profits, cut pay

Privatisation has expanded at all levels. Despite its Sure Start children’s centres, New Labour favoured the privatisation of nursery facilities, and that has continued under subsequent governments. By 2023, the private childcare market in the UK was worth £6.7 billion.

State schools have been privatised by stealth, as school funding reached crisis point, often as a result of expensive, government-encouraged PFI contracts. Forced academization took schools away from local authority accountability, with no real improvement in standards or efficiency. By 2019, over 50,000 children in England were in limbo, waiting to be transferred from one failed academy chain school to another. In one year alone, failing trusts were bailed out with £21 million of public money. Yet heads of academy trusts are extracting huge sums from the scheme, which has been racked by questionable financial practices.

The impact on pay within the profession is shocking. By 2022-3, 775 heads of school academies or trusts were earning over £150,000. Universities are increasingly run by people with a background in business and expect salaries to match. Teaching staff at all levels, in contrast, are being proletarianized, subject to greater standardization, supervision and surveillance. Between 2011 and 2020, one-third of all newly qualified teachers left the profession, due to falling wages, increasing workloads and declining facilities. By 2022, there were 90,000 supply teachers in British schools, all paid substantially less than regular teachers, but making huge profits for the agencies providing them.

Precariousness is spreading in higher education. Oxford, Britain’s richest university, has 77% of its academic staff on casual contracts. Many middle class tutors can afford to work this way, driving out those who can’t.

The New Labour-introduced fees regime has accelerated the growth of private universities, while giant corporations have moved into the lucrative market of student accommodation. Globally, private universities tend to support conservative, often evangelical, ideologies and staff have been sacked for supposedly breaching the limits of political acceptability.

Alongside privatisation, education has been commodified and standardized. New Labour required universities to pay for management consultants and auditors to define and enforce performance indicators. Education was reduced to the preparation of human capital for the needs od business. More testing and grading flowed from this outlook.

Uk universities now operate in a fiercely competitive market to attract grants and students, spending over £500 million a year on recruitment agents, particularly seeking overseas students paying higher fees. In 2013 just 1% of applicants were offered places that were not conditional on exam results. By 2018, that had risen to 23%.

Knowledge too is being commodified. Public universities are contracted to do research for the corporate sector, sometimes giving an academic veneer via their publications to the propaganda of self-interested industries.

By the end of this decade, the global education market will soar to a spending zone of £8 trillion a year. Asset-stripping by private equity companies is already rife. Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) is an especially lucrative area, given the growing demand and shortage of places. In February, the leader of the Liberal Democrats accused private equity firms of using vulnerable children as “cash cows” and raking in record profits.

He’s not wrong. In 2024, the National Audit Office found that a private SEN place cost £62,000 a year on average, compared to £24,000 in the state sector, with private operators netting £2 billon in fees from cash-strapped local authorities in 2022-3. This cost to councils of meeting their legal obligations represents an existential threat to the financial stability of local government.

Curriculum control

Corporate control also influences the curriculum, for example in the US challenging climate science. It also determines what dissent may be tolerated on campus, as underlined by the recent forcing out of the presidents of Harvard and Pennsylvania Universities for their supposed failure to tackle antisemitism.

These are not isolated examples. Even before Trump, an evangelical religification was spreading through US schools. Trump’s 2025 announcement that he would cut federal funding to any university allowing “illegal protests” was life-threatening to US higher education. When he cancelled $400 million in federal grants and contracts with Columbia, the university capitulated to all his demands, including hiring security teams with arrest powers. More widely, scientific research is being defunded, particularly on climate change and vaccines.

This book is hugely impressive in its detail. But it’s also a call to action. Standing observes that “All the great rebellions in British history have been about defending the commons,” about which he has written extensively. With two-thirds of the population going to university by age 30, the vast majority saddled with lifelong debt and no guaranteed prospect of a job to match their hard-earned qualifications, it looks like education may be the next battleground for a fight to reclaim the commons from the privateers.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

2026-05-18T05:04:31.344-07:00

HubMP2012What is the ‘soft left’?

WHAT IS THE SOFT LEFT

MAY 17, 2026

A new pamphlet from Compass, published today, looks at where this current came from and what it stands for now.

Currents in the Labour Party have always been in a state of evolution but the split between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ left that originated in the early 1980s has proved unusually enduring, argues Eric Shaw, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Stirling, in this new paper.

Its greatest influence in recent years was probably under Ed Miliband’s leadership of the Party. But while it is true that the highly centralised control of candidate selections was relaxed somewhat in these years, in comparison to the hyper-factional approach of the Blair-Brown era, the influence of ‘soft left’ thinking at this time should not be exaggerated. In terms of policy, with Ed Balls the Shadow Chancellor, there was more continuity than rupture with the economic thinking of New Labour. And anyone who remembers Labour’s “Controls on Immigration” mugs in the 2015 general election will be all to aware of the continuity with current Starmerite thinking.

The ‘soft left’ was neither very helpful nor loyal under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Party. That judgment applies to Keir Starmer, whose ‘soft left’ ten-point platform was quickly shredded once he became leader. Starmer’s move right, which has continued apace since ethe 2024 general election, has seen the sidelining of a number of prominent ‘soft left’ figures, including the removal of Angela Rayner and Louise Haigh from the Cabinet. But Lucy Powell’s defeat of Bridget Phillipson in last year’s Deputy Leadership race suggests there is ongoing support for the group from the Party’s declining membership.

Leader-in-waiting Andy Burnham now seems to be firmly linked to this wing of the Party, backed by the newly-launched Mainstream group. The right, by contrast, is in disarray following the disgrace of Mandelson and the departure of Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney. Starmer himself is electorally toxic and unlikely to survive and Wes Streeting, the natural candidate of the right, is not popular, due to his close association with the Labour Together faction and enthusiasm for NHS privatisers.

Shaw tries to pin down the central principles that animate the ‘soft left’: equality, collectivism, pluralism. The problem is that at this level of abstraction, virtually nobody would disagree with such core values. The difficulty arises when hard policy choices need to be made – and funded.

So Shaw seeks to propose what a democratic left current should stand for concretely: proportional representation, the public ownership of essential utilities including water, and a move away from rampant hyper-factionalism towards a more inclusive politics – something, he agues that the ‘hard left’ has not always been clear about.

It’s highly positive that there is a process of political renewal taking place in the Party that it is trying to define itself against the right wing neoliberalism embraced by Starmer. But one of the characteristics of the ‘soft left’ historically has been a tendency to cave in to pressure. Hence Shaw emphasises “the need for extra-parliamentary forces to be mobilised to support and hold to account the more transformative left-green government that would be facing the hostility of conservative and national populist forces.”

Shaw perceives the ‘hard left’ to be largely marginalised today. That’s true in terms of its strength as an organised current in representative politics. But if the ‘soft left’ promise of even a limited dose of “radical pragmatism” fails to deliver, the mounting pressure to fix the threefold cost of living, climate and public services crises may well bring more sweeping solutions to the fore.

To read the pamphlet, see here.

2026-05-18T05:04:18.902-07:00

Lammy at odds with trade unions on Prison Officers’ right to strike

MAY 15, 2026

Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy is at odds with the whole trade union movement on the campaign to restore Prison Officers’ right to strike. Widespread criticism of Lammy’s position comes after he wrote to the Prison Officers’ Association (POA) to flatly reject their request to repeal Section 127 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994) and restore Prison Officers’ basic right to withdraw their labour.

The POA had written to the Justice Secretary after the European Committee on Social Rights reported that the ban on industrial action by Prison Officers infringes their human rights and that the UK is in breach of its obligations under the European Social Charter.

As the POA gathers for its conference this week, it has won backing for its campaign from the entire trade union movement. The TUC, GFTU and Trade Union Coordinating Group, which collectively represent every trade union in the country, have written to the government calling for the restoration of the Right to Strike for prison officers for England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

These new developments have given impetus to the long-running campaign, which will ultimately see the Labour Government forced to defend Tory anti-trade union legislation in court and in direct opposition to the country’s trade unions.

Steve Gillan, POA General Secretary said: “The stance taken by the Labour Government marks a new low in its relationship with the trade union movement. It is a betrayal of Prison Officers and ruptures any trust working people have in this government. If need be, we will see them in court where we will have the grotesque spectacle of a Labour government defending Tory anti-trade union legislation.

“However, there is still time for this government to see sense, change tack and restore our members’ basic human rights. In so doing they will send a strong message to the wider movement that Labour still represents the interests of working people. If they don’t, it will send the opposite message and they will continue to lose the support of Prison Officers and trade union members across the whole movement.”

Mark Fairhurst, National Chair of the POA said: “The ban on Prison Officers having the right to strike is a disgraceful attack on the fundamental right of our members to take industrial action to defend their jobs, pay and conditions.

“The POA will not flinch in pursuing every legal avenue to overturn this outrage. If Mr Lammy fails to address that appalling injustice we will see him in court where we are confident we will win our case.”

Who’s in the running to be Unite’s next general secretary?

The election will take place this summer

Chris Jarvis

MAY 15, 2026

Left Foot Forward

Unite will this summer hold an election for its general secretary position.

Sharon Graham has led the union since 2021. She won that year’s general secretary election, picking up 33.7 per cent of members’ votes. Her platform at the time was focussed on focussing on winning industrial disputes for members, and she was widely regarded as the grassroots candidates. She said that she believed United had “moved too far from our core business—protecting jobs and improving the pay and conditions of our members”.

During her time as general secretary, Graham has garnered a reputation as a fierce advocate for Unite members and has a string of successes under he belt, having won substantial pay rises for workers at dozens of workplaces across the country. She’s also made a name for herself as a campaign against corporate profiteering at the expense of workers and consumers.

Alongside this, Graham has taken a position of ‘no blank cheques’ in the union’s relationship to the Labour Party. In March 2026, Unite reduced their annual donation to Labour by 40 per cent on the one year anniversary of the Birmingham bin strike.

Graham is understood be seeking a second term in this year’s general secretary election.

She’ll be fending off a challenge from Simon Dubbins, – Unite’s current international director.

Dubbins’ newly launched campaign website is critical of Unite under Graham’s leadership.

On it, Dubbins says: “We need to look outwards, no longer distracted by tired, internal battles. We need to look forwards and focus on delivering for members.

“This Unite General Secretary election is a battle for the heart and soul of Unite the Union. Its outcome will determine whether our union reunites as a powerful fighting machine that works for our members, or if we slide into further chaos and divisions.”

Dubbins has not yet specified what the internal battles and divisions he is referring to are.

He also says that stopping a far-right government and ‘building international solidarity’ would be among his priorities.

Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward

2026-05-18T05:04:02.948-07:00

The Local Election Disaster of 2026: Can We Save Labour?

MAY 10, 2026

In 1929 the first British General Election took place under universal suffrage. In the light of the catastrophic local election results, Bryn Griffiths asks will the next General Election, on the centenary of this important milestone, also bring us the worst election outcome since all the British people secured the right to vote?

Labour members are reflecting upon whether Starmer’s performance is so bad that he will enable Nigel Farage to enter 10 Downing Street. In this utterly miserable moment on Saturday 9th May 2026, I first attended the Momentum National Coordinating Group and then travelled on to a Lewes Labour gathering to consider Votes Turns and Wipeouts.

The flyer for the Lewes Labour Party Event on 9 May 2026

The Farage threat

If Farage was to enter 10 Downing Street in 2029 he would become the worst Prime Minister in living memory. It would be as if Enoch Powell, instead of being frozen out by Ted Heath in the 1970s, had led the Tory Party and gone on to become our Prime Minister. We all remember the massive series of defeats for the labour movement that followed Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, but we can assume that Farage has the potential to be a whole lot worse.

So, how bad was the 2026 local election result? Is the party facing an ‘existential threat’ as John McDonnell suggested on the Labour Left Podcast back last autumn? What is to be done to save the party before it is too late?

The bad news

In Lewes, the keynote address was by politics Professor Tim Bale, Queen Mary University London, a co-author of The British General Election of 2024. He introduced, what at points was a doom-laden event, by telling us: “The bad news is there is no good news.” To make sure we got the point he added that the word “catastrophic understates the situation” and the result was “devastatingly bad”. Tim added that he had been sceptical about a Farage victory in 2029 but he now thinks Farage is on course to win if things don’t change. So, Farage may well be our next Prime Minister.

Earlier in the day at the Momentum National Coordinating Group Mike Phipps, the Labour Hub editor, had suggested that the 2026 elections signalled a fracturing of Labour’s progressive coalition. Labour now not only faces the loss of some working-class votes to Reform but also the peeling away of progressive voters to the nationalists, in Scotland and Wales, and to the Greens as well. Due to the crisis of Labour, progressive voters now have other places to go.

What actually happened on Thursday 9th May 2026, according to Tim Bale, was that Nigel Farage managed to reassemble much of the Boris Brexit coalition, but this time it was to support Reform. As a result, according to Sky TV, it was Reform who were the clear winners with 27% of the vote. The Tories followed behind with 20% of the vote and Labour came third with 15%. The Greens and Liberal Democrats were very close on our tails with 14% with the balance being made up by other parties. The translation of local election votes into national percentages is a difficult task and the percentage figures vary a little across outlets but the story is always the same: Reform won and the electorate’s message is universally bad for Labour.

Professor Tim Bale, Queen Mary University London, a co-author of The British General Election of 2024 addresses the Lewes Labour Party event

According to Tim Bale, another disturbing aspect of the local election result is the resurgence of the Scottish National Party and the rise of Plaid Cymru which means Labour can no longer be seen as a national party. It is as if Tom Nairn’s Break up of Britain is happening before our very eyes.

Fragmentation

In the aftermath of the Caerphilly by-election and a local council by-election in Colchester, I told A Story of Fragmentationin Britain’s two-party system. The fragmentation of United Kingdom electoral politics has previously been mapped by Hannah Bunting, the Co-Director of the Elections Centre at the University of Exeter, when she wrote in The Conversation last year that “UK local elections delivered record-breaking fragmentation of the vote”. In Hannah’s words, “the 2025 council election broke records for the extent of fragmentation – a significant movement away from the dominance of the two parties that have dominated British politics for the past century.”

The process of fragmentation consolidated in the 2026 local elections, with the pollster John Curtice reporting a record low of 34% for the combined total of Labour and the Tories who historically have been the two main parties under the first past the post electoral system.

Given this political fragmentation taking place across Britain, we need to look at the party-specific electoral stories which are emerging to help us map the new political landscape.

The Greens

John Curtice reported that in his calculations the Greens got around 18% of the vote with Labour and the Conservatives trailing with 17% each. The figures confirm Tim Bale’s suggestion that “catastrophic” understates the seriousness of the result for Labour. Bale went on to explain how the Labour seats tally tells a misleading story. Reform may have been winning the seats in big numbers but in many cases the explanation for their victories was that it was the Greens who were reducing Labour’s vote and handing seats to Reform as our supporters abandoned Labour to the left.

To make matters much worse, Tim Bale reported that polling by Focal Data suggests that the Green wave is a more permanent phenomenon than a temporary protest vote.

Labour

The Labour story is utterly depressing. The Starmer narrative that this is mid-term blues and we must keep our nerve and keep on track is utterly delusional. It overstates Labour’s ability to bounce back. Labour councillors form the bulk of Labour’s door step campaigners so when you lose 1,496 Labour councillors you also lose a large proportion of our door knockers. It is also the case that in many areas councillor expenses pay for our Labour leaflets. Without councillors how do we fund our leaflets next time?

Bale also pointed out how damaging the impact of Starmer’s stance on Gaza had been to Labour’s previously strong support in the Muslim community. Bale said that Starmer’s Nick Ferrari interview on Gaza had been one of the most damagingly impactful statements by a party leader that he could remember when it came to losing votes.

Reform

The Reform re-creation of the Boris Brexit coalition to win a vote of 26% and 1,451 new seats is utterly depressing. Tim Bale pointed out that the Conservatives on these kinds of results would ensure that we get a Reform Government. The only point of doubt is whether they would seek to heal the division on the right after the 2029 General Election, or would they even more frighteningly come to some arrangement with Farage before the election even takes place? If they were to heal their divisions with some form of electoral understanding before 2029, the General Election result would be much worse.

The Liberal Democrats

The Liberal Democrats did not make much progress but along with the Greens they form another part of a picture of a fragmenting left of centre electoral bloc.

Mainstream

Back in Lewes, another former Labour Left Podcast guest Neal Lawson of Compass, a key mover of Mainstream, the new ‘soft left’ organisation, was in barnstorming form. Compass had previously pointed out in their aptly named report Thin Ice – Why the UK’s progressive majority could stop Labour’s landslide melting away that an electoral strategy that leans heavily towards trying to out-Farage Farage on his own anti-migrant territory was fatally flawed as it would undermine our own electoral base. Neal who has been vindicated and was visibly unhappy about it captured the mood of the meeting.

Meanwhile, Mark Perryman, who organised the event and recently published The Starmer Symptom, reviewed on Labour Hub here, pointed out that 36 of the top 50 Green target seats at the next General Election are Labour seats and, echoing other speakers and John McDonnell MP, suggested Labour is facing an existential crisis.

I left Lewes more convinced than ever that we must back the candidates in Labour’s National Executive elections who say they wish to Reset the Labour Party. We need to back candidates across Labour’s progressive majority which include both supporters of the Centre Left Grass Roots Alliance and the newly formed Mainstream. I hope you will join me in backing all the candidates who stand for rebuilding basic democracy, pluralism and fair process within our party.

What is to be done?

If we are to stop Nigel Farage entering Downing Street we need to rebuild Labour’s ‘progressive coalition’. We are up against a Reform Party which has rebuilt the Boris Brexit coalition so the task is absolutely urgent.

To re-start the important task of progressive coalition-building, we need a change of leadership but we also need to change the toxic culture brought about by Labour Together which is a systemic problem at the very heart of the Labour machine. It’s a culture eloquently described by Paul Holden in the recent Labour Left Podcast. Labour’s Cabinet, with the possible exception of Ed Milliband is no place to look for a new Leader as they were hand-picked by Labour Together and Keir Starmer to take the Party in the direction which has caused us so much damage.

At the time of writing it seems clear that Starmer is going and he will not be the Leader of the Labour Party when we fight the next General Election. Starmer’s departure is so clear that in Lewes even Christabel Cooper, the Director of Research at Labour Together conceded Starmer would not lead us into the next General Election. What is not clear is the manner of his departure. Will he leave suddenly in an attempt to allow the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) to circumvent a proper discussion within the party and attempt a PLP coronation? Will he be forced to depart to a clear timetable to allow for a smooth and orderly transition this year? Starmer is currently threatening Labour members with a continuation of his leadership so perhaps he will stagger on to be felled by yet another crisis in the not-so-distant future.

Christabel Cooper, the Director of Research at Labour Together addresses Lewes Labour Party flanked by (l-r) Peter Lamb MP, Mark Perryman and Compass’s Neal Lawson.

Given Labour’s problems are so much more than a Labour Leader who is hated by a large part of the electorate we need a plan that reaches far wider than a change in the face at the top. I would suggest the following questions would be good ones to pose to any of the leadership candidates that emerge.

Will you shoot rightwards rather than leftwards to do all you can to stop Nigel Farage entering Downing Street? In the local elections Labour’s relentless attacks on the Greens led by Labour Together’s toxic factionalist and Cabinet member Steve Reed MP were utterly shameful. If we are to attract Green voters back to the Labour fold we need to address their policy concerns and make Nigel Farage our main enemy.

What will you do to save the link to unions like UNITE and show that Labour will again act for working people? An important feature of Labour’s existential crisis is the possibility of losing big trade union affiliations, most notably UNITE’s. Not only would this devastate Labour’s finances but further loosen Labour’s identity as a Party that represents working class people, further accelerating the fragmentation of Labour’s base.

How will you restore Labour’s democracy? Labour’s internal culture is toxic with excellent hard working Labour representatives being dumped by the party. To give one clear example, Hackney MP Diane Abbott, the Mother of the House and Britain’s first Black woman MP, has had the whip withdrawn. The result has been a moribund local party and the election of a Green Mayor in Hackney.

Would you signal an end to Labour’s creeping authoritarianism by supporting John McDonnell MP’s call for an independent inquiry into Labour Together? If we are to show that Labour is bringing an end to the toxic culture that led to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the United States Ambassador, the Party needs to signal a clear break with Labour Together. Labour needs to be apologising to the British public and an independent inquiry would be a great way to signal we have started to change.

Will you support Labour’s Conference policy of proportional representation to ensure that Nigel Farage’s Reform could not enter Downing Street with as little as say 28% of the vote? We should not risk Nigel Farage following Keir Starmer by securing his own wide but shallow parliamentary majority. A new leader needs to be crystal clear on this policy so in the event of a hung parliament we know we can forge a coalition to lock out Nigel Farage.

Will you question Labour’s long held policy of Atlanticism and forge an ethical foreign policy independent of Donald Trump and his ally Benjamin Netanyahu? Labour needs a new debate on its approach to foreign policy now that events in Gaza and Iran have well and truly broken the so called ‘special relationship’. In a multi-polar world we need to reconsider, in the words of the late Robin Cook MP, what an ‘ethical foreign policy’ should look like.

When Starmer goes, we should support an attempt by the Socialist Campaign Group to stand a candidate but it is very likely that the Morgan McSweeney-instigated rule change that requires around 80 MP nominations to get on the ballot will prevent this from happening. To facilitate a proper leadership election taking place we need to push back against any rushed attempt to secure a coronation by the Parliamentary Labour Party. Now more than ever we need a serious debate with time, if we are going to save the Labour Party and stop Nigel Farage.

If we cannot have a Campaign Group candidate on the ballot paper I think Andy Burnham is best placed to answer all the questions above. The obvious concern after Labour Together’s factional blocking of Andy’s attempts to re-enter Parliament will be that the members’ favoured choice will fail to even make the ballot paper.

Can we stop Farage?

The big question is can Farage be stopped in 2029? The answer is that there is clearly the potential to beat him as we know from the local elections that there is a left of centre electoral bloc made up of the Greens, Labour and the Liberal Democrats which commands the votes of around half the electorate. The problem is that under first past the post there is every possibility that Farage supported by the Conservatives could enter 10 Downing Street with as little as say 28% of the vote.

The difficult task is to reconstruct Labour as a progressive bloc which can win or at least get as far as achieving a hung parliament from which an anti-Farage coalition can emerge. But we all know that the precondition for embarking on the long march to the re-creation of Labour as a progressive coalition is the removal of Sir Keir Starmer as our Labour leader and the end of Labour Together’s toxic political culture at the heart of our party. If we don’t carry out these essential political tasks we will all be doomed and Nigel Farage will be our next Prime Minister.

What happens next in the Labour Party matters to the whole of the left. It is clear that the Greens cannot win a parliamentary majority alone so who becomes the next Labour leader will be crucial to us all. If there is a hung parliament will the Labour Leader in 2029 pick up the phone to call Zach Polanski? Will they be prepared to back proportional representation? Will they have a respectful conversation with the nationalists of Scotland and Wales? We know the answers we need to hear if we are going to rebuild Labour as a progressive coalition to stop Farage and win.

Bryn Griffiths is an activist in Colchester Labour Party and North Essex World Transformed. He is the Vice-Chair of Momentum and sits on the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’s Executive.

Bryn hosts Labour Hub’s spin off – the Labour Left Podcast. You can find all the episodes of the podcast here or if you prefer audio platforms (for example Amazon, Audible Spotify, Apple, etc,) go to your favourite podcast provider and just search for the Labour Left Podcast.

To explore the key themes in this article you may wish to watch the Labour Left Podcast with Paul Holden to understand the role of Labour Together. The latest podcast with David Renton looks at the threat of the extreme right.

Main image: the author out leafleting in Colchester’s New Town and Christ Church. Photos c/o the author.

Red Wall Tory voters defect to Reform, but Muslim vote leaves Labour

MAY 16, 2026

Michael Hindley looks at May’s local election results in the former East Lancashire Cotton Belt.

The four East Lancashire District Council elections (Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley, Hyndburn and Pendle) all saw a collapse in Labour representation, and though the boundaries do not correspond exactly to Westminster constituencies, the results spell disaster for Labour in the sub-region. The Westminster Labour victories in 2024 were a temporary respite, and not a revival.

It is clear that the long-term prospects for Labour in East Lancashire were set in the ‘Red Wall’ election of 2019, and didn’t fundamentally change in 2024.

To recap, the metropolitan chatterati got very excited with Boris Johnson’s victory in December 2019, which in essence was down to a clever, opportunist slogan of “Get Brexit Done”. That election was in effect the ‘Second EU Referendum’, which Keir Starmer, then Labour’s Europe Spokesperson, had naively demanded. Labour promised to renegotiate the terms of membership and put the subsequent new deal to another referendum; a faint echo of a far more skilful Harold Wilson’s clever winning strategy in 1974.

East Lancashire had been staunchly anti-Europe in the 1975 Referendum held to confirm our membership. East Lancs retains a deep reservoir of Euro-scepticism, as I well know as a former Hyndburn Council leader and MEP for the sub-region from 1984 to 1999.

The clever campaign slogan of “Get Brexit Done” fed on that anti-EU sentiment, despite East Lancashire’s great success in attracting EU funds, which to some degree alleviated the ravages of Thatcher’s stripping of East Lancashire’s manufacturing base and starving of local government aid.

Only in Blackburn did Labour escape the General Election of December 2019 election cull.

But Johnson and subsequent Tory governments had not the slightest intention of alleviating the misery of social and economic distress and the failures of successive PMs, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak drained the Tory Party’s reservoir of support.

The Labour ‘landslide’ of 2024 had everything to do with the peculiarities of the First Post the Post (FPTP) electoral system and the exhaustion of the Tory Party had very little to do with Starmer’s cautious policies. In fact in the East Lancs seats, which Labour regained (Burnley, Hyndburn, Rossendale and Darwen and Pendle) the Labour vote actually fell,but was compensated for by a collapse in the Tory vote.

Starmer did not enter Number 10 with any popular enthusiasm, more a relief that the Tories were gone.

The immediate fiasco of the winter fuel allowance and the ‘second child cap’ severely dented any idea that ‘change’ was coming. Also, the immediate revelation that the Labour elite were freeloading on Lord Alii’s generosity and also accepting freebies for pop concerts and sporting events increased the grumbling that ‘they’re all the same’.

The collapse in confidence in Starmer’s Labour had set in long before the damage of the Mandelson scandal. Most significant, and often overlooked in election analysis, is the continued impact of the Israeli government’s horrendous destruction and slaughter in Gaza, which still continues despite a bogus ceasefire.

The outrage felt among the usually loyal Muslim Labour voters and representatives has been profound and lasting. Throughout East Lancs, Muslim Labour councillors resigned in protest against the Starmer government’s failure not only to explicitly condemn Israel’s attacks on Gaza, but in effect to become complicit in those attacks. Many of those ‘Independent’ defectors kept their seats in the recent local elections and there are now some thirty-five such local councillors identifiable as Muslim ‘Gaza’ Labour defectors.

This disillusion climaxed in the Rochdale by-election in February 2024. The local Labour Party selected the much respected and competent Labour Leader on Lancashire County Council and Pendle-based, Azhar Ali. Some intemperate remarks of his were magnified by a press in full hue and cry to accuse another Labour figure of anti-Semitism. The former MP and former Leader of Lancashire County Council, Louise Ellman, at first spoke in his favour but then on the leaking of further intemperate remarks, joined the chorus to drop Azhar Ali.

Buckling under the pressure, the Labour leadership dropped Azhar Ali but too late to stop his name appearing on the ballot paper. The inevitable drop in the Labour vote in Rochdale led to the itinerant radical George Galloway winning the seat, only to lose the seat in the May General Election.

Azhar Ali is now the Leader of a small groups of Greens and Independents in County Hall under the name ‘Progressive Lancashire’, perhaps a sign of things to come.

Worst was to follow for Labour in Lancashire in the County elections in May 2025, when Reform advanced spectacularly from a few councillors to a staggering overall majority.

The percentage of people identifying themselves as Muslims in East Lancashire boroughs is higher than the national average of 6.5%. (Blackburn 35%, Pendle 26%, Burnley and Hyndburn 14% each), figures eagerly seized on by the anti-immigration Reform party, which deliberately conflates immigration with refugees and asylum seekers.

The nadir of Labour’s loss of support amongst Muslim voters came in the General Election of 2024, when an ‘Independent’ won Blackburn, which had been a safe Labour seat for decades and had had Philip Snowden, Barbara Castle and Jack Straw as its MPs.

The winner, Adnad Hussain, another Labour defector, won. Like other Muslim representatives, Hussain, a local businessman, is pro-Palestine but socially conservative. Although an initial supporter of the ‘Independent Group’ of MPs, he soon left after its transformation into ‘Your Party’.

The Greens have little impact on the electoral map of East Lancashire, but a growing membership and have an appeal to younger votes.

Boundary changes in East Lancashire were gerrymandered by the Tories to ensure their survival but the plan failed disastrously as the Reform surge ate into the Tory vote. Ironically it was this loss of Tory votes, which saw Labour win seats despite a fall in the Labour vote.

Labour needs East Lancashire seats to form a government and it is significant that two of Labour’s 2024 new winners, have called for Starmer’s resignation. My own conversations throughout East Lancs with many friends with longstanding experience in Labour politics were adamant that Starmer’s unpopularity was a decisive issue on the doorstep.

Will Andy Burnham’s possible entry into an eventual leadership contest change the picture? Currently reading Chris Moss’ Lancashire, I came across a very apt description of Lancashire urban society. Though Lancashire is now a post-industrial society, the atmosphere hasn’t really changed. The original quote comes from 1930s Bolton but is as accurate today as then.

“…the complete discrepancy between what all the people I am working with think and what is being reported in the newspapers and on the BBC. The gap between leader and led, between… Westminster chatter and Lancashire talk has built an invisible barrier that is dangerous in democracy.”

The feeling in ‘Red Wall’ East Lancs, is that Starmer simply doesn’t get it; but Andy Burnham does. Burnham’s record in Manchester, East Lancs’ most accessible metropolis, is admired across all sections of the North West.

The challenge though is, can Andy Burnham translate that empathy into national policy?

Michael Hindley is a former Leader of Hyndburn Council, a Lancashire County Councillor and MEP for Lancashire East. He is now a freelance writer and speaker on international politics. This article first appeared on his substack here.

Image: https://socialistalternative.info/2022/07/01/wakefield-by-election-yet-another-tory-catastrophe/ Creator: Kim Hansen (Wikimedia Commons User:Slaunger) Copyright: Kim Hansen Licence: Attribution 3.0 Unported CC BY 3.0 Deed

Labour’s catastrophic results necessitate new leadership

HubMP20

MAY 9, 2026

‘Sweeping gains for Reform’ was the dominant headline following the first wave of results in Thursday’s local government elections. It’s undeniable that Reform were highly effective at converting votes into seats, particularly in parts of the North and especially in areas represented by prominent Labour MPs.

BBC Political Editor Chris Mason pointed out that in Tameside, Greater Manchester, the seat of former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, Labour lost 16 of the 17 seats it was defending to Reform. In nearby Wigan, where the local MP is Cabinet Minister Lisa Nandy, Labour lost all 22 seats it was defending to Reform.

In many such areas, this is a reaction to politics-as-usual, a vote by desperate voters for the ‘Change’ that Keir Starmr promised in 2024 but signally has failed to deliver. Elsewhere, Reform made gains at the expense of the Tories, a straightforward switch between the two right wing parties.

Where did Labour’s votes go?

But polling expert Professor John Curtice counselled caution in drawing any conclusion that it is Reform who are doing most damage to Labour in these elections. “That is not the pattern,” he argued. “A sharp fall in Labour’s performance is accompanied more often by an above average Green performance than it is by a strong Reform performance.”

Politics Professor Rob Ford agreed: while Labour may have lost most seats to Reform, it lost more votes to the Greens and this split allowed Reform to come through the middle. He warned: “If Labour react to this pattern by saying ‘we need to win back votes from Reform’ they risk making a major misdiagnosis, one which could make their current troubles even worse.”

London Mayor Sadiq Khan went further. He said: “Labour has lost votes in London to a variety of different parties, but the biggest change has been Labour voters switching to the Greens.” He said that many people who had voted Labour in 2024 “clearly feel angry, disappointed and let down.”

“They want a Labour government to address the cost-of-living crisis while demonstrating the core values the party was established to promote,” he continued.

Green leader Zack Polanski certainly had a lot to celebrate, including the end of two-party politics, as his party made substantial gains, especially in London. But without proportional representation, this fracturing of the progressive vote has unhealthy consequences, with good socialists in both Labour and Greens – and sometimes independents too – running against each other. In some cases, this allowed candidates – sometimes from the far right – to win with a small percentage of the vote. With a future Reform-led government a distinct possibility, this is a luxury the left simply cannot afford.

For Labour, the break-up of its coalition of radical progressives and working class voters is producing a stark polarisation. Nowhere is this clearer than in Wales with the Labour voters moving to Plaid Cymru and Reform to demand different kinds of radical change. Even Labour’s First Minister Eluned Morgan could not retain her seat. Contrast this with the picture a few years ago under Mark Drakeford’s leadership, when a clear Welsh Labour identity helped the Party in Wales to buck national trends that were unfavourable to Labour.

Some caution clearly needs to be exercised when extrapolating from these results projections for the Westminster Parliament. Turnout may have been higher than usual, but it was still significantly lower than in a general election. For a variety of reasons, older voters tend to vote more in second-order elections, and this cohort tends to favour parties of the right, compared to younger voters. In a general election, where younger voters are likely to be more engaged, the Greens might do even better, Reform UK less so.

Who’s responsible?

Much of the blame for Labour’s dire performance must be attributed to the Starmer government’s failure to deliver the promised change, instead attacking Labour’s base with the winter fuel allowance policy and the continuation of the two-child benefit cap. All the worthy things the government may be doing are marginalised by its refusal to address the cost of living crisis.

But a good part of Labour’s dismal showing is down to what the Starmer faction, led by the now disgraced Mandelson and McSweeney, have done, not just in government, but to the Party itself, with their factional expulsions, deselections and blocking of decent candidates.

Take Hackney, where the Greens made sweeping gains to win a majority on the Council and the mayoralty. “Hackney North MP Diane Abbott has been suspended for nearly two years and the Constituency Labour Party is moribund, without even branch meetings, let alone any pretence at internal democracy. The result is yesterday’s collapse in the vote,” pointed out David Osland.

In Brent, northwest London, where Labour won all but eight seats in 2022, the Council passed to no overall control. The Borough Party was the centre of a Campaign Improvement Board, answerable only to the National Executive Committee. It tore up the local selection process by branches and imposed candidates centrally, barring several sitting councillors, many from the left, with impeccable records, in the process. Some joined the Greens and retained their seats. The widespread demoralisation of Labour members undermined effective campaigning and all opposition parties made sweeping gains, leaving Labour councillors in a minority.

Change the leader

The news agenda has moved on from analysing the results to weighing up how long Keir Starmer has left in office. A change of leadership is undoubtedly necessary, as increasing numbers of MPs – and not just from the left – are now saying publicly.

“There was one issue on the door and it was Keir. If he leads us into a future election we are dead,” one Labour MP told the BBC. Another usually loyal Labour MP, in an area that went heavily Reform in Thursday’s poll, said the reassuring thing was that voters didn’t really hate Labour, but “they did hate Keir.”

Former Cabinet member Louise Haigh said: “Unless the government delivers urgent and significant change it’s clear the PM cannot lead us in to the next election.”

Clive Lewis MP spelled it out: “The Prime Minister needs to go. That is not negotiable. The only thing now in his gift is the nature of the contest that follows. It must be open, fair and legitimate. Everyone who should be part of that process must be allowed to take part. That means no blocking Andy Burnham. And it means a clear departure date, no later than the autumn. These results are existential for the Labour Party. Existential. Anyone still saying we should simply carry on ‘delivering the plan’ has lost touch with political reality, and with the public. The voters have spoken. It is not for the leadership to pretend they have not.”

This is eminently sensible. And it should be added: replacing the current leader with a ‘better communicator’ will not address Labour’s woes if the political direction remains the same. Labour needs new leadership, but also new policies that address the combined crises of health, climate and cost of living – and much more.

Urgent! A letter from defeated Labour councillors and candidates is now circulating calling on Keir Starmer to set a timetable for his departure. Please get defeated candidates and councillors to sign.

On the Monday evening after the elections – 11th May, 6.30 – 7.30 – Arise and the Trade Union Coordinating Group will be hosting an online discussion asking these questions. Left MPs including John McDonnell and Richard Burgon will be joined by trade union leaders Fran Heathcote (PCS) and Daniel Kebede (NEU) to think through the significance of what has happened and the political lessons for activists on the left.

Register here to join the meeting.

2026-05-18T05:04:00.000-07:00

Can the Labour Party survive its greatest crisis since the National Government of the 1930s?

MAY 14 , 2026

Frank Hansen weighs the possibilities.

Uncertainty and chaos currently rule the Labour Party and the Government. This is a product of the Starmer Project itself – a political con perpetrated by McSweeney/Labour Together and others against the Party and the electorate, claiming to be something else, while moving to the right and imposing disastrous pro-business neoliberal policies. The chaos has been triggered by the Mandelson scandal, exposing the rotten core of the Starmer regime, and by Labour voters now making it clear that they didn’t vote for these policies.

When the media say the chaos is similar to that of the Tories, on one level they are right. The two-party system is breaking up, (along with the post WW2 world order) – propelled by the contradictions of the global neoliberal economic framework and the rivalry between powers and trading blocs, leading to wars and the rise of populism and the far right, as well as alternative left parties.

Before the Mandelson scandal, McSweeney and his acolytes controlled all the key levers of power – the leadership, the National Executive Committee, the bureaucracy, (the rules for managing the Party): they dominated the Cabinet and parachuted many of their supporters into Parliament through manipulating selections, purging the left and facilitating a mass exodus of Party members. Labour’s election victory seemed a great one in 2024. – but it was a hollow, being primarily aimed at winning the support of the establishment through vacuous politics and the promise of stability – then once in government, introducing business-friendly policies, austerity and support for the US and Israel.

Even if Starmer is removed, you can be sure that they will try to cling on to the levers of power and install a successor. However, at the same time, the Project appears to be collapsing into farce and contradiction, leaving a tragedy for the labour movement to sort out. From the Project’s point of view, logic suggests that Starmer should have resigned paving the way for Streeting, yet splits are occurring and key figures seem to be going different ways. Some say they want him to go, others like Steve Reed want him to stay. Will there be a coup or not? Politicians may fall apart – but of course one key feature of the Starmer Project is their ability to convincingly say one thing while doing another.

Can Streeting get 20% of MPs to stage a bid? The Starmer Project upped the percentage needed to stop the left and now one of them is being banjaxed by their own machinations! Rayner has been ‘exonerated and is now back in the frame and Miliband is lurking. The centre left are ‘waiting for Burnham’ – but will he (a) get a seat, (b) win it (c) arrive in time – and if he doesn’t, will there have to be another leadership election further down the road? Meanwhile, he unions want Starmer to go before the next General Election.

This is the appalling chaos and confusion that the Labour Together/Starmer Project has inflicted on the Party. It is so disabled and corrupted politically that there seems no rational or democratic way of moving forward. The machinations taking place read more like a Monty Python sketch than the workings of a normal democratic political party. Meanwhile McSweeney is still a member of the Party and has numerous contacts – so maybe he’s still helping to ‘sort things out’ Mandelson-style behind the scenes.

By the time you read this – one, or some. of the following may have happened: Streeting may have launched a coup with 81-plus backers, Rayner may be his opponent, Starmer may have resigned. Andy Burnham may have found a seat, Starmer may have seen them all off and will continue until a challenger arrives. Worse still, but hopefully unlikely, they may be so divided that the bankers/markets collapse the economy Liz Truss-style and they have to call an election.

So where do we go from here? In the wake of the Labour Together/Starmer Project fiasco, it won’t be an easy or a short term task to return Labour to a functioning democratic party of government. Radical change and the restoration of democracy are needed urgently and Labour’s September Party conference could be our last chance to seriously begin this process – hopefully with a new leader, who is not tainted by the Starmer Project, and with policies that benefit working people and the oppressed. Ironically these could be based on Starmer’s ten points – the ones he promised to follow when he stood for the leadership, but soon ditched once elected – which takes us back to the beginning of this tragedy/farce/mess and provides an opportunity for a new start which brings about real change – as opposed to Starmer ‘change’.

Frank Hansen is a former Councillor in the London Borough of Brent.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/number10gov/54059291938 Creator: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Str | Credit: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Str Copyright: Crown copyright. Licence: Attribution 2.0 Generic CC BY 2.0 Deed

2026-05-18T04:37:33.695-07:00

Poll reveals who is most likely to beat Starmer in a leadership contest

This doesn't look good for Wes Streeting...

Chris Jarvis

MAY 14, 2026

Left Foot Forward

Keir Starmer’s premiership remains in peril, with the health secretary Wes Streeting the most prominent resignation from the government so far.

While Streeting’s resignation letter didn’t immediately trigger a leadership contest, his departure nonetheless suggests that an election could be imminent.

There are two routes for this. First, Starmer could decide that he no longer has the confidence of his parliamentary party, and choose to either stand down or set out a timetable for his departure. The other route would be if a 81 Labour MPs nominate an alternative candidate for leader of the Labour Party.

In the latter scenario, Starmer may well decide to fight the leadership contest. Indeed, he has made clear that he intends to. And we now have some insight as to who might win in a head-to-head battle with Starmer.

New polling, conducted by Survation on behalf of LabourList has assessed the mood of Labour Party members on a potential contest.

The poll suggests that the most likely candidate to beat Starmer is Andy Burnham. However, the route to Burnham getting on the ballot remains unclear, given he is not currently in the House of Commons and the Labour Party rulebook requires the party leader to be an MP.

According to the poll, 61 per cent of Labour members would back Burnham, compared to 28 per cent who would back Starmer.

The other candidates who the poll suggests would beat Starmer are Angela Rayner (4 point lead), Ed Miliband (8 point lead).

In bad news for Streeting, the poll has found that just 23 per cent of members would vote for him in a head-to-head contest with Starmer, with 53 per cent backing the prime minister.

Starmer would also see off challenges from Bridget Philipson (21 point Starmer lead), Lucy Powell (24 point Starmer lead), Shabana Mahmood (51 point Starmer leader), Darren Jones (15 point Starmer lead), Al Carns (28 point Starmer lead), Yvette Cooper (14 point Starmer lead) and Louise Haigh (21 point Starmer lead).

If Starmer doesn’t end up on the ballot, it doesn’t seem that Streeting has a clear route to victory. The Survation poll also asked Labour members who they would back in a head-to-head contest with Streeting up against a variety of other potential candidates.

According to the poll, Streeting would lose against every candidate except Shabana Mahmood.

Burnham would beat Streeting by 53 points, Rayner would beat him by 25 points, Miliband would beat him by 28 points and Powell would beat him by 11 points.

Mahmood would, however, lose to Streeting by 24 points.

Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward

Image credit: Simon Dawson / Number 10 – Creative Commons

What have Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting said about rejoining the EU?

The Labour leadership crisis has pushed the UK’s relationship with the EU back into the spotlight

Olivia Barber

MAY 18, 2026

Left Foot Forward

Labour leadership contender Wes Streeting has put the UK’s relationship with the European Union back into the spotlight, saying Brexit was a “catastrophic mistake” and the UK should “one day” rejoin the bloc.

Andy Burnham, who is the most popular Labour figure among party members and voters and is expected to launch a leadership challenge if he wins the Makerfield by-election, has also said there may be a case for rejoining the EU “in the long-term”.

However, he sought to distance himself from the discussion about rejoining the EU, insisting he was “not advocating that in this by-election”.

Last year, the Greater Manchester mayor said “I hope in my lifetime I see this country rejoin the European Union.”

In a speech on Saturday, Streeting, who declared that he will stand if a leadership challenge against Starmer is launched, said that “leaving the European Union was a catastrophic mistake”.

“It’s left us less wealthy, less powerful and less in control than at any point before the industrial revolution.”

“We ‌need a new special relationship with the EU, because Britain’s future lies with Europe, and one day, one day, back in the European Union,” he added.

In the 2016 Brexit referendum, in Makerfield, 66% of voters backed Brexit in the vote.

In the recent local elections, Reform won 24 out of 25 contested council seats in Wigan, the borough that covers Makerfield.

Nigel Farage has already signalled that he will centre the Makerfield by-election campaign around Brexit, and has already claimed that Labour’s leadership contenders are “preparing to completely betray Brexit voters”.

In a targeted dig at Burnham, Farage told The Express: “It is increasingly obvious that Andy Burnham wants to say one thing to Labour voters in the constituency while telling Labour MPs something entirely different as he positions himself for power.

“Voters are not fools and they deserve honesty from open-borders Burnham.”

On Friday, Burnham was cleared by Labour’s National Executive Committee to stand in the Makerfield by-election, after the constituency’s current MP Josh Simons said he would vacate it to free up a seat for the Manchester mayor.

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward

Andy Burnham confirms he will stand in Makerfield by-election: What are his chances?

The Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham has confirmed that he will seek to stand as the Labour Party candidate […]

Basit Mahmood

MAY 15, 2026

Left Foot Forward

The Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham has confirmed that he will seek to stand as the Labour Party candidate for the Makerfield by-election, giving him a potential route back to Westminster amid intense leadership speculation.

It comes after Josh Simons, the former Cabinet Office minister who is MP for Makerfield, announced that he is resigning to free up a seat for Burnham.

Simons said in a statement: “Today, I am putting the people I represent and the country I love first and will be resigning as MP for Makerfield. I am standing aside so that Andy Burnham can return to his home, fight to re-enter Parliament, and if elected, drive the change our country is crying out for.”

In what will now become the most significant by-election for the country, Burnham’s first hurdle to overcome is winning the seat.

So what are his chances?

In last week’s local elections, here’s how eight Makerfield wards voted:

Reform: 50.4%

Labour: 22.7%

Green: 10.9%

Conservative: 9.9%

Lib Dem: 3.8%

Other: 2.2%

It shows the scale of the challenge facing Burnham.

However, in the 2024 Greater Manchester Mayoral election Burnham won 62% of the vote in Makerfield.

This is no ordinary by-election, it is a vote with significant implications for the future of the country. Can Burnham, if selected, stop the Reform surge?

Caroline Lucas calls for Greens to not campaign against Andy Burnham in Makerfield by-election

'There are times when it’s more important to put country before party.'

Chris Jarvis ·

MAY 15, 2026

Left Foot Forward

The former Green Party MP Caroline Lucas has called for the Greens ‘put country before party’ and suggested that her party doesn’t ‘properly contest’ the Makerfield by-election in the event that Andy Burnham is the Labour candidate.

Lucas’ intervention follows a report in the Guardian which indicates that the Greens are intending to run a campaign for the by-election.

The Guardian reported a statement from a Green Party spokesperson which said: “We are looking forward to the campaign. We’ve learned from our campaigning and wins in Gorton and Denton and the recent local elections, and we’ve shown we can beat Reform. We’re a democratic party and our local members choose their candidates. We have already started the candidate selection process for any potential byelection in Makerfield.”

Responding to that report, Lucas said that Burnham winning could lead to electoral reform and prevent a Reform government.

Lucas posted on X: I hope this isn’t true. There are times when it’s more important to put country before party. This is one of them. Burnham’s longstanding commitment to a fairer voting system could transform our democracy and counter dire threat of a Reform UK government.

In the 2024 general election, Labour won Makerfield with 45 per cent of the vote. Reform came second on 32 per cent. The Greens picked up 4 per cent of the vote, coming fifth.

However, predicting the frontrunners in the seat is fraught with difficulties.

Since the 2024 election, Labour has fallen significantly in the polls, while both Reform and the Greens have surged. In the local elections in May 2026, Reform won in all the wards that make up the Makerfield constituency. Labour came second in all of them. The Greens came third in all but two. It is widely assumed that Burnham specifically is considerably more popular than the Labour Party generally and that his candidacy would boost the party’s chances.

The Makerfield by-election is taking place as a result of Labour MP Josh Simons standing down in an attempt to get Andy Burnham back into the House of Commons in order to allow him to stand in a Labour leadership contest.

Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward

2026-05-18T04:31:08.334-07:00

Eurovision, Double Standards, and Bangaranga!

By Michael John-Hopkins

May 17, 2026

Bulgaria won the 70th Eurovision Song Contest with a song called “Bangaranga”. Israel finished second, and the contest in Vienna unfolded under the familiar banners of music, unity, spectacle, and carefully managed joy. The precise meaning of “bangaranga” became one of the running jokes of the night. Asked about it, the singer Dara reportedly described it as “a special energy that everyone has got in themselves, a feeling that everything is possible”. That wonderfully encapsulates Eurovision in that it could be nonsense, philosophy, marketing, or all three. But it also has a strange seriousness. In dark times, the idea that “everything is possible” cuts both ways. It can mean the return of war, occupation, authoritarianism and impunity. It can also mean solidarity, resistance, and the stubborn refusal to let law and culture become decorative language for a world that no longer believes in them.

This year’s Eurovision was not merely a contest between songs. It was also a contest between legal and moral values. Five countries, Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Iceland, boycotted the competition over Israel’s inclusion, citing concerns linked to Gaza and the wider conduct of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and the region. The controversy did not descend upon Eurovision from outside. It exposed what was already there. Eurovision is not political only when protestors arrive. It is political because it stages a fantasy of belonging. The real question is not whether politics should enter the contest, but which politics are treated as unbearable, and which are absorbed into the lighting design.

The comparison with Russia is unavoidable, even if it must be handled with care. In 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the European Broadcasting Union excluded Russia from that year’s contest, explaining that the inclusion of a Russian entry during the “unprecedented crisis in Ukraine” would bring the competition into disrepute Russia’s aggression was, and remains, a profound breach of the post-1945 prohibition on the use of force. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Russia’s actions also shredded the assurances given to Ukraine in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons inherited after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in return for security assurances from Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom

But once Eurovision has accepted the principle that participation can bring the contest into disrepute, it cannot easily retreat into the language of pure musical neutrality. The question becomes, disrepute according to what standard? Russia’s exclusion was justified by reference to the values of the EBU and the crisis in Ukraine. Israel’s inclusion, by contrast, has been defended through procedural compliance, broadcaster eligibility, voting safeguards and the formal separation between governments and broadcasters. Yet the controversy was not simply that Israel did well in the public vote. It was that Eurovision’s public-voting system appeared to become a terrain of state-backed public diplomacy. Official Israeli foreign ministry social media encouraged viewers to vote for Israel’s 2025 entry and reminded them they could vote up to 20 times. Furthermore, this was the tip of a wider Israeli government campaign that treated Eurovision as a soft-power tool, involving diplomatic contacts, marketing expenditure, and efforts to salvage Israel’s international reputation at a time of growing isolation over Gaza. The EBU then rewrote the rules to discourage “disproportionate promotion campaigns”, especially where supported by governments or governmental agencies, and later confirmed that all eligible members could participate in 2026 if they accepted the new safeguards. Israel and its Public Broadcasting Corporation KAN deny breaching the rules, and there is an important distinction between enthusiastic mobilisation, diaspora support, public diplomacy and improper interference. But that distinction is precisely the point. Eurovision’s voting system became another stage on which state legitimacy, image management, diaspora mobilisation and cultural soft power were being fought out.

That may be administratively coherent but it is not morally satisfying. The law and politics surrounding Israel and Palestine are not marginal concerns. The Geneva Academy’s War Watch report on international humanitarian law describes a global environment in which serious violations of the laws of war are widespread and impunity is intensifying, including in conflicts that have placed civilians, hospitals, homes and essential infrastructure under devastating pressure Amnesty International’s 2026 global report similarly situates Gaza, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Lebanon and the wider Middle East within a broader crisis of human rights, armed conflict and weakening respect for international law

Nor is this merely the language of campaign groups. The International Court of Justice has already found, in its 2024 advisory opinion, that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful and that states are under obligations not to recognise the resulting situation as lawful or render aid or assistance in maintaining it. In South Africa v Israel, the Court indicated provisional measures under the Genocide Convention, requiring Israel to take measures to prevent acts within the scope of the Convention, prevent and punish incitement, enable humanitarian assistance, preserve evidence, and report on compliance. These are not final findings of genocide. But they are not background noise either. They are part of the ‘legal weather’ in which cultural institutions now operate at a time of uncertainty about geo-political ‘climate change’.

Eurovision is not the European Union. The EBU is not the European Commission. The contest has always included countries outside the EU, and its boundaries are as cultural and broadcasting-based as they are geographic. But it would be disingenuous to pretend that Eurovision does not perform Europe to itself. It is one of the continent’s most visible rituals of post-war modernity, namely kitsch, camp, multilingual, commercially packaged, occasionally sublime, and often ridiculous. Its genius is that it converts the high language of peace and unity into choreography, pyrotechnics and public voting. For one night, the treaty imagination of order, freedom, security puts on joy and sequins. That imagination has roots. The Treaty of Rome created the European Economic Community around a common market and the free movement of goods, people, services and capital The Maastricht Treaty deepened the movement toward union. Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union now speaks in a different register, naming respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and human rights as foundational values. Article 3 adds that the Union’s aim is to promote peace, its values and the well-being of its peoples

Of course, Europe has never lived up to these values consistently. The Mediterranean has become a graveyard for those escaping persecution and poverty. Fortress Europe has made the language of human dignity sound, at times, like a border management slogan. Arms, trade, energy and security interests routinely complicate the moral vocabulary. The point is not that Europe is innocent. It is that Europe has made particular promises about law, memory and human dignity, and Eurovision draws its soft power from the emotional residue of those promises.

There is a darker counterpoint here. If Europe’s post-war imagination was, at least in aspiration, constitutional, integrative and rule-bound, Israel’s founding settlement remained territorially and constitutionally unresolved. The 1917 Balfour Declaration promised support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine while also stating that nothing should prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities. The Mandate for Palestine carried those tensions into an imperial legal framework. Israel’s Declaration of Independence invoked the UN partition resolution and promised equality of social and political rights, but it did not define the borders of the new state. Nor was the promised constitution ever completed. Israel instead developed a system of Basic Laws after the first Knesset proved unable to agree on a formal constitutional text. That unresolved space matters. In Israel: What Went Wrong?, Omer Bartov argues that Zionism’s emancipatory promise has been transformed into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism, exclusion and violent domination of Palestinians, leaving Israel facing accusations of war crimes and genocide. One need not reduce Israel’s whole history to that trajectory to see the danger. Where borders, equality and constitutional restraint remain unsettled, politics can become a contest over how much territory the national imagination is entitled to claim, and how much violence can be justified in making that claim real.

This is where imagination, culture, and praxis matter. Law does not move only through courts, treaties and sanctions. It also moves through symbols, refusals and habits of recognition, and behaviour at different social, political and economic levels. The so-called Brussels effect is often discussed in relation to regulations, markets and trade standards, the EU’s ability to export rules because access to its internal market matters. But there is also a softer, stranger effect, namely the projection of European cultural legitimacy. Eurovision, football, film festivals, museums and universities help decide who is normalised, who is celebrated, who is rendered controversial, and who is placed outside the family photograph in international relations.

Boycotts live in that space between law and culture. They are rarely pure and they are often inconsistent. They can be performative, selective, and morally self-flattering. But they can also be one of the ways ordinary people, artists, institutions and states refuse to let illegality and immorality become routine and normalised. The long struggle against apartheid South Africa is the obvious historical reference point, not because every case is identical, but because it shows how cultural and sporting exclusion can form part of a wider ecology of pressure. The Apartheid Convention declared apartheid a crime against humanity. The ICJ’s Namibia advisory opinion developed the logic of non-recognition in relation to South Africa’s unlawful presence in Namibia. UN debates over cultural, academic and sporting boycotts helped turn South African apartheid from a domestic policy defended by a state into a global legitimacy crisis.

None of this means that boycotts mechanically produce justice. South Africa’s transition was shaped by internal resistance, international pressure, economic change, geopolitical shifts, labour movements, legal campaigns, cultural isolation and political negotiation. But the cultural boycott mattered because it denied apartheid the comfort of normality and recognition. It told athletes, musicians, universities and states that neutrality toward racial domination was itself a position.

That is the uncomfortable question now. If international law imposes obligations of non-recognition and non-assistance in relation to unlawful situations, and if cultural institutions trade in recognition, prestige and normality, can those institutions plausibly say they have no role at all? Not every cultural event must become a sanctions committee. But neither can every cultural event hide behind the microphone stand. When Europe excludes Russia from Eurovision but includes Israel, the problem is not only inconsistency. It is the impression that some violations disrupt the moral order, while others are treated as regrettable complications within it that can be accommodated, forgiven, and/or forgotten.

The same question should not stop at Israel. If the principle is consistency, it must also travel to friends and powerful hosts. The 2026 FIFA World Cup will be held across the United States, Canada and Mexico. FIFA’s human rights policy commits it to respecting internationally recognised human rights, and the World Cup 2026 human rights framework presents the tournament as a platform for diversity, inclusion and positive impact. Yet the American Civil Liberties Union and more than 120 civil society organisations have issued a travel advisory warning of risks for visitors to the United States, including arbitrary denial of entry, detention or deportation, expanded restrictions on travel, invasive screening, surveillance, suppression of protest, and mistreatment in immigration detention. UN experts have also condemned recent US action against Venezuela as a breach of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and a possible act of aggression

Again, the point is not that every legal situation is identical. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s occupation and conduct in Gaza and Lebanon, and US action against Venezuela each raise distinct legal questions. The point is that international law loses authority when it is heard only as the music of condemnation for adversaries. If cultural institutions are going to invoke values, disrepute, inclusion, equality and human dignity, then they must accept that audiences will ask whether those words have content, or whether they merely decorate the interval act.

Which brings us back to Bangaranga. Perhaps for many that new little word does more work than expected. Eurovision’s defenders will say that the contest offers escapism, and there is truth in that. People need joy. They need spectacle. They need songs about love, heartbreak, nonsense, desire and occasionally wolves dancing to synthesizers. But escapism is not the opposite of politics. Sometimes it is what allows people to keep breathing in a political world that would otherwise suffocate them. The problem comes when escapism becomes legitimacy laundering, such as sports or music washing. Music can create solidarity, but it can also soften the edges of brutality. Cultural inclusion can open doors, but it can also confer normality on states and institutions whose conduct is under grave legal scrutiny. The decision to boycott is therefore not an attack on music. It is a claim about what music is being asked to carry.Europe’s post-war dream was never only bureaucratic. It was cultural, legal and emotional. It imagined that after occupation, fascism, genocide and total war, another kind of order could be built, imperfect, compromised, often hypocritical, but still oriented toward peace, dignity and the rule of law. That dream is under enormous strain. Perhaps it always was. But the answer to hypocrisy is not to abandon standards. It is to apply them more honestly. Bangaranga, then, should not be read as naïve optimism. “Everything is possible” is not always good news. War is possible. Apartheid is possible. Genocide is possible. Aggression is possible. Double standards are possible. So are boycotts, refusals, pressure, solidarity, memory and change. Eurovision united through music while part of Europe stayed away. That absence was also a performance. It said that unity without law is choreography. It said that culture is not innocent when it helps decide who belongs. And it said that even in the glitter, perhaps especially in the glitter, people are still listening for the difference between a slogan and a value.Email

Michael John-Hopkins

Dr Michael John-Hopkins Senior Lecturer in Law School of Law and Social Sciences (LSS) Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Oxford Brookes University

2026-05-18T04:29:00.195-07:00

Shawn Fain’s UAW Is Facing Strong Headwinds

By Nelson Lichtenstein

May 17, 2026

Source: New Labor Forum

UAW President Shawn Fain holds up a copy of the original Troublemaker’s Handbook while addressing the closing plenary session of the 2024 Labor Notes conference in Chicago. (Jim West)

Editor’s Note: This article appears as the United Auto Workers (UAW) union prepares for its 39th UAW Constitutional Convention, scheduled for June 15-18, 2026. A version of this article will appear in the Fall 2026 issue of New Labor Forum.

The strength of a union and its leadership can be gauged most accurately when the headwinds are strongest: when political opponents command the White House and Congress, when the economy sours, employers play hardball, layoffs proliferate, and new organizing drives stall out. Many American unions confront that situation today, but members and leaders of the United Auto Workers (UAW), who assemble this June for their first constitutional convention since reformer Shawn Fain was elected union president more than three years ago, might be feeling it more acutely than anyone else in the labor movement.

At the convention, almost a thousand delegates will debate a wide variety of topics, from the level of strike pay and union dues to a ban on hiring most non-UAW members onto the union staff. There will be speeches on how to stop layoffs in UAW organized factories and how to get the organizing drive in the South going again. And once the convention is over, we’ll also know who is running for top office in the union. Fain and his team of 13 executive board candidates, dubbed the “Stand Up Slate” after the 2023 “Stand Up Strike” against the Big Three automakers, will face opposition. Still, his team is likely to retain control of the union after October 2026, when a government-appointed monitor counts the mail-in ballots sent to upwards of a million UAW members and retirees in the weeks before. After conversations with scores of unionists in recent weeks, Fain says he feels “confident” about the outcome.^[1]

But just holding office is hardly the point. Fain and most of those who backed him have sought to make the UAW once again synonymous with working-class power and militancy and transform the union into the “vanguard in America,” a phrase coined by Walter Reuther, the UAW’s legendary president, right after his caucus won full power in the union in 1947. That ambition has set a salutary standard for all labor partisans, but it has been thwarted by obstacles arising from within the union and without, circumstances and problems that in one degree or another bedevil all progressive insurgents who find themselves in high union office.

Fain’s presidency has attempted to reverse decades of union defeat, decline, and demoralization. Beginning in the early 1980s, when all industrial unions faced competition from abroad and union busting at home, the UAW has bled members, power, and political influence. In the late 1970s, UAW had a million and a half members, with nearly 100 percent of all automobile production in the U.S. union made. Today, the union has a working membership of 400,000 (half the number of the union’s retirees), and of that number only about 150,000 work in the core auto industry. In the U.S., half of all production is non-union, with Toyota, Nissan, Mercedes, and other foreign companies intensely hostile to the UAW.

But even more debilitating was the sense of passivity and resignation of so many in the union leadership. As UAW president Owen Bieber, who in the 1980s and 1990s presided over some of the union’s most consequential setbacks and concessions, told historian John Barnard, “Things that we had to do. We did.”^[2] That defeatism was exacerbated by two things: the Soviet-style rule of an increasingly insular one-party “Administration Caucus,” and the growth of a collaborative industrial relations ideology that attempted to cast labor and capital as partners in a common endeavor. Not unexpectedly, a wide variety of corruptions spread through the union staff and hierarchy, ranging all the way from various forms of nepotism and favor trading that enabled loyalist rank-and-filers to win cushy staff jobs at Detroit’s Solidarity House or in one of the regional offices; to the California golf junkets and outright theft of union dues that led to the criminal conviction and jailing of a dozen union leaders, including two former presidents.

This was the context, in 2020, where genuine reform finally became possible in the UAW. When a Michigan district court appointed a federal monitor to supervise the transformation of the union, a rank-and-file group, Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) put the free and fair election of a new cohort of union leaders at the top of their agenda. In a government-supervised referendum, the membership voted to junk the system whereby convention delegates, all too often beholden to the existing leadership, chose union officers and instead instituted a one-person, one-vote union-wide ballot.

When the votes were counted in 2022 and 2023 (there was a runoff among the two presidential contenders), a haphazardly cobbled reform slate swept every office it contested. Shawn Fain, once an electrician from Kokomo, Indiana, became president, while Margaret Mock, an African American woman who had worked most recently at the Stellantis Warren Michigan Truck plant (Local 140), became Secretary-Treasurer, responsible for a wide variety of duties including purchasing, auditing, and strike assistance.

Fain did not know Mock very well, but since he was running against Ray Curry, who was just the second Black UAW president, her presence on the ticket was important. But a clever electoral strategy was hardly a hallmark of the slate headed by Shawn Fain. Normally, no two candidates would come from the same local. But in 2022 Rich Boyer, whom Mock had known since the beginning of her career, was also from Local 140, though not a top leader there. He was elected a UAW Vice President in charge of Stellantis.

Once in office, Fain had less than six months to prepare for negotiations, and a possible strike, with Detroit’s Big Three: Ford, General Motors (GM), and Stellantis, which had taken over most of the old Chrysler production facilities. Since Fain defeated Curry by just a few hundred votes, he hardly had a united rank and file behind him. Perhaps even more important, most of the existing staffers and local union officers were skeptical of his leadership. That made Fain particularly dependent on the crew of thirty-something East Coast activists he recruited to his staff. These included Jonah Furman, who as communications director put a brilliant series of union advocacy messages online; lawyer Benjamin Dictor, heavily involved in the UAW’s decision to break with past practice and conduct simultaneous negotiations with all three Detroit based automakers; and Chris Brooks, a key strategist and Fain’s chief of staff. ^[3]

Brooks, who hailed from Chattanooga, Tennessee, the site of a big Volkswagen (VW) factory, had been a reporter for Labor Notes, a newsletter-cum-organizing center long critical of the old UAW, and then an organizing director at the NewsGuild. Energetic and determined, Brooks played a key role in shaping the innovative strike strategy in the fall of 2023 that generated what even the most anti-union commentators considered a pathbreaking union victory. But Brooks has also been described, even by admirers, as “arrogant” and a “know-it-all.”^[4]

In a memo Brooks wrote at the outset of his tenure, he outlined the big, disruptive changes he wanted the new Fain team to put forward: “Everything we do, at every stage, must be reinforcing the message: there is a new sheriff in town, something different is happening. This starts with who is appointed to what, who does and does not get fired, and by demonstrating the willingness of the new leadership to embrace new ideas and new practices.” As for the union’s old guard, Brooks expected resistance and resentment. “The mantra of the counter-revolution is going to be ‘we’ve never done it this way,’” he wrote. “People will be upset because their jobs are going to change and because new things are being expected of them.”^[5] As Brooks would later put it, “newly elected leaders can’t be saddled with the top lieutenants of the incumbents they have just defeated.”^[6]

Not unexpectedly, disdain for the “white boys from Brooklyn” spread through some offices at Solidarity House, the UAW headquarters. But Fain stuck by his new staffers, telling the Wall Street Journal — which would soon publish a twenty-first century version of an old red-baiting meme by highlighting the “new hires who never worked in an auto factory” — that “I thought it was important to bring in people that weren’t ingrained in the system.”^[7] That fall, when the resentment of some veteran UAW staffers became manifest, Fain doubled down at a large staff meeting. He had his crew of thirty-somethings stand up on the stage, then told the audience that he would “slit the fucking throats” of anyone who “messed” with his new hires.^[8]

This tension between outside activists, often from middle-class backgrounds, and those veteran unionists who have worked their way out of the shop and into the ranks of the union apparatus, has been endemic in the labor movement, especially evident when reformers assume power in a union. During the UAW faction fight of the mid-1940s, Reuther won support by denouncing Communist-oriented staffers—not just because of their politics, but because they had come from outside union ranks. Just a few years later, some of the more conservative officers on the UAW executive board saw the brain trust around Reuther, many from New York, as an “alien faction.” In the summer of 1949, this resentment exploded when southern-born Vice President John Livingston denounced Brendan Sexton, editor of the UAW’s Ammunition, as one of the “obnoxious long-hairs” who peddled socialist ideas on union time.^[9]

This same insider-outsider tension reemerged when the United Mine Workers’ Arnold Miller won a surprise victory against a profoundly corrupt regime early in the 1970s and then imported a cohort of New Left activists to help him reform the union. But the old-fashioned red-baiting became so intense that Miller soon purged headquarters of a group whose skills were admittedly useful, but who were also seen as occupying posts that should have gone to deserving and loyal mineworkers.^[10] Just a few years later, when Ed Sadlowski campaigned for president of the Steelworkers, just four international representatives out of 600 supported his insurgency.^[11] Even unions like the Communications Workers of America (CWA), urban and occupationally diverse, have encountered this tension, reports Bob Master of the New York/New Jersey CWA region.^[12]It’s almost an “existential” issue, observed one union reform advocate, who told me that in conversations with many UAW members that “99 out of a 100” thought the union should not hire from the outside. But that must be weighed against the larger purpose of the union. “Is the UAW a jobs program for 500 people or is it a movement to change the lives of 500,000 workers and their families?”

A Tumultuous Reform Process

All this set the stage for what would turn out to be a highly consequential meeting of the UAW executive board in February 2024. By this time, the UAW had turned its sights on organizing the non-union auto factories in the South, first VW in Chattanooga but also Mercedes in Vance, Alabama and Toyota in Georgetown, Kentucky. Immediately after the conclusion of the 2023 Stand Up Strike, all the non-union companies raised wages to meet the new UAW standard. Fain called that the “UAW bump.” Upwards of ten thousand Southern auto workers signed union authorization cards, many with little or no encouragement from a UAW organizer.

“The workers are ready,” Fain told his executive board. “This is our time…We haven’t seen a moment like this in our lives and we may not see one again…it is not a time for half measures and being conservative. It’s time to swing for the fences.” A “generational leap” could rebuild the UAW, said Fain, not unlike that of the founding generation in the 1930s and 1940s.^[13]

Fain was here outlining a theory of momentum organizing, an approach to unionization pushed forward by Chris Brooks and many of the new staff hires, that eschewed the careful planning and step-by-step organizing of the sort most unions practiced when confronted by management hostility and worker hesitation. That approach, one refined and advertised by the late Jane McAlevey, was essential in normal times, but now Fain and his team wagered that the UAW’s exceptionally high-profile strike had created a “movement moment,” a “brief period in time that workers are ready to join by the thousands.” ^[14]

Of course, that did not mean that the union could neglect the recruitment and training of union advocates in the factory and community. But even here, the UAW was trying something new. It had been trying to organize the big VW complex in Chattanooga for more than a decade, and a handful of veteran staffers were on the scene. But Fain wanted to inject more energy and elan into the effort. He therefore recruited nearly a dozen West Coast unionists, who had won their spurs in university organizing.

Their leader, Carla Villanueva, who held a Ph.D. in Latin American history, would later argue, in a New Labor Forum article co-authored with Michael Belt, that at both VW in higher education momentum was hardly enough. The UAW’s big National Labor Relations Board election victory at VW (73 percent voting for the UAW in April 2024) was the product of an intense cadre building effort in every department and on every shift, so that nearly all the 4,300 workers understood the stakes.^[15]

Regardless of the organizing methodology, Fain and his team wanted to strike while the iron was hot, while union enthusiasm in the South was high, and before the Tennessee business and political elite could mobilize. The UAW had appropriated $40 million for the organizing campaign, so Furman sought to hire a couple of D.C.-based media and consulting firms, both of which had close connections to the Biden administration or the Democratic Party. They would spread the UAW message on billboards and on television and social media throughout East Tennessee. The contracts would be worth upwards of half a million dollars each and both would be “no-bid,” an exception to the “three-bid” procedure mandated by the outside monitor and the UAW constitution. Fain and Furman argued that delay would sap the momentum, and, equally important, the three-bid contract procedure would alert anti-union forces in Tennessee to the renewed UAW effort.^[16] In years past, billboards the UAW sought to rent had instead been secured by the National Right to Work Committee and other business groups, who emblazoned them with messages like “The UAW Wants Your Guns” and pictures of derelict factories with the tag line, “Detroit: Brought to You by the UAW.” ^[17]

But Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock was unwilling to cut corners. In December 2024, she had angered Furman and the rest of the Fain team when she refused to sign off on one of the D.C. contracts. Her office had spent the Christmas holidays vetting Conexion, the media company Furman wanted, but the delay angered Brooks, Fain, and other newcomers—just one more instance, they thought, of Mock not grasping the need for organizing speed and message. Thus, for example, when the 2023 strike began, Mock wanted to save money by using up the many thousands of generic picket signs stored at various UAW local offices, much to the annoyance of Furman and Brooks who had crafted strike-specific messages. And then there were the petty holdups and reimbursement denials when organizers found their UAW credit card unworkable. In one instance, Mock rejected a $151 pizza bill, paid by Brooks with his personal card, when Shawn Fain visited Chattanooga to meet with key UAW organizers.

Complained Fain, “every time we make a request, we’re being investigated like we’re doing something corrupt…we get blocked and it turns into a damn fight just to get done what we need to get done.” To which Mock replied that because of the corruption scandal of just a few years back, she was indeed “strict” when enforcing UAW expenditures guidelines. “I was sent here with a mandate,” she argued, “The membership said, go in there and you protect our money at all costs. Am I counting dollars and pennies and nickels and dimes? Absolutely. That’s my job.”^[18]

But Mock’s outlook embodied more than just green-eyeshade rigidity. Early in her tenure, according to union staffers, she had unsuccessfully tried to get her son on the UAW staff focused on Stellantis.^[19] Later, her hostility to Brooks and other new staffers—and her defense of the old system whereby union jobs were a reward for years of service—became clear when she told the executive board, “I am totally against hiring anybody from outside. We have hundreds of thousands of members…So I take offense that our people aren’t qualified.” That’s a sentiment she will put forward in a resolution, prohibiting “nonmembers from exercising policy making, strategic direction or supervisory control” at the UAW’s constitutional convention in June 2026. ^[20]

While that’s a popular sentiment in the ranks, Mock was almost entirely isolated at that February 2024 executive board meeting. Significantly, she had no support from Chuck Browning, a veteran UAW officer, then Vice President in charge of Ford, who had been a Curry partisan in the election just a year before. Browning, however, was now an enthusiastic supporter of Fain’s “kick ass” organizing strategy, and he thought the new UAW president entirely within his rights to reassign some of Mock’s responsibilities so as to eliminate what he also considered her obstructionism.^[21] Thus the union’s executive board stripped Mock of some 11 departments under her supervision, prompted by a report from the UAW’s compliance officer asserting that she had used her authority “to delay, obstruct, or even block the work of other departments.” For “weeks and even months” she used the Purchasing Department to drag out approval of vital union tasks. It was a “dereliction of duty,” concluded the report.^[22]

Enter the Monitor

Margaret Mock may have lost the battle on the UAW executive board, but she had a powerful ally waiting in the wings. In May 2021, the Michigan federal court that oversaw the union’s corruption case appointed Neil Barofsky UAW monitor, a post that gave him a wide-ranging mandate to investigate virtually any aspect of the union’s activities to “remove fraud, corruption, illegal behavior, dishonesty, and unethical practices from the UAW.” Barofsky, a former prosecutor and a Democrat, was the Treasury Department’s Special Inspector General in 2009 and 2010 overseeing the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program, after which he wrote a book, Bailout, asserting that because of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s regulatory favoritism to the banks, the American people “should be enraged by the broken promises to Main Street and the unending protection of Wall Street.” Thereafter, Barofsky joined the law firm Jenner & Block, where he co-chaired its New York-based monitorship practice.^[23]

It’s a lucrative business, in the U.S. and abroad, where courts and government agencies use monitorships as part of various investigations, legal settlements, and regulatory actions. Big companies like Credit Suisse, Citigroup, Glencore, GM, Uber as well as the New York City Housing Authority have been Jenner & Block clients. With at least three partners working with Barofsky on the UAW monitorship, Jenner & Block billed the union more than $25 million in the four years that ended in 2025.^[24]

Courts have imposed monitorships on unions far less frequently than on companies and other government entities. Beginning with the Teamsters in 1989, monitorships at the Laborers and Carpenters have supervised fair elections and excluded officials guilty of outright corruption from union affairs. But Barofsky saw his mandate at the UAW as far more intrusive, a perspective derived from his work with corporations and government agencies where he saw “a flawed or dysfunctional corporate culture” as the object of reform and rehabilitation. But “fixing a broken culture is no easy task,” wrote Barofsky in a monitorship handbook written by Jenner & Block attorneys. To do so required “the successful monitor to develop a deep understanding of the company’s business and financial objectives.” In other words, Barofsky was going to be a nanny correcting and cajoling a set of potentially wayward wards.^[25]

Such a perspective may or may not have worked when it came to the hierarchically structured capitalist enterprise, but trade unions are something else again. If the monitor does in fact create conditions under which a free and fair election can be held, democracy itself holds the solution to the most important problems that emerge within the union. That is the rough-and-tumble democratic union “culture” that represents real reform. It is unlikely that Barofsky had much of a feel for that dynamic. His firm had contracted out the sometimes-complex work involved in holding both the UAW referendum on a one-member, one-vote basis and the subsequent election of all the top officers. And in all his many reports on the transgressions he saw in UAW governance, there was nary a word of understanding that the whole point of the union was the mobilization of a working class for effective combat with enterprises of enormous wealth and power. ^[26]

Barofsky exacerbated these difficulties when on December 13, 2023, he made a phone call, “strictly on a personal level,” to President Fain, then in Pennsylvania for a Mack Truck negotiation, urging him to rethink the UAW president’s talk at a Capitol Hill rally the next day where several unions would call for a Gaza ceasefire. Fain’s appearance was in line with a recently adopted UAW executive board resolution on the Israeli incursion, a position that reflected the growing strength and radicalism of that portion of the union, largely in the Northeast and on the West Coast, composed of grad students, contingent faculty, public defenders. ^[27]

When Barofsky made the phone call, he was actually in Switzerland, where he was investigating the extent to which Credit Suisse had failed to divulge previously unreported relationships between the bank and the Nazis. Barofsky was clearly among those equating opposition to the Gaza war with a species of anti-Semitism, a sentiment that he punctuated by describing how his children had been “harassed” when passing a UAW protest where members were holding signs and “chanting hateful comments.”

Not unexpectedly, Fain took offense, not only because it was impossible for the monitor to make a “personal” phone call, given the legal and supervisory authority at his command, but also because of the veiled charge that either Fain or others in the UAW were anti-Semitic. Said Fain at a later executive board meeting: “For anybody to ever fucking say I’m anti-Semitic, brother, I’ll fight your ass in front of this building in a heartbeat.”^[28]

Fain was willing to let it all pass after the call. But then in mid-February, Barofsky e-mailed the entire executive board, this time prompted by a message he had received from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which noted that UAW Local 7902, composed of NYU and New School lecturers and teaching assistants, issued a pro-Palestine resolution and come out in favor of BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) against Israel, which might put that union in violation of a New York State anti-BDS law. This prompted another round of recriminations. At an executive board meeting Barofsky attended remotely from New York, Ben Dictor, who made a point of mentioning that he became bar mitzvah at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, took the lead in pummeling the monitor. He called the ADL, who Barofsky cited in questioning the UAW’s Gaza stance, an outside “interest group” and wanted to know if the UAW was being billed for “unsolicited political advice” based on concerns raised by an outside third party. ^[29]

Barofsky was humiliated; “lesson learned,” he later admitted.[30] But as Ken Paff, a founder and leader of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, put it, “Monitors are powerful. If you go to war with them, you’re going to lose.”^[31]

Until that conflict, Fain had maintained “a pretty collaborative working relationship with the monitor,” said one UAW official.^[32] However, within days of the February 2024 executive board meeting where she was stripped of her posts, Margaret Mock complained to Barofsky of what she saw as a set of illicit and retaliatory persecutions. Almost immediately, he sent the union a request for all its internal communications bearing on that potential transgression. This inaugurated more than a year of investigations and interviews in which Barofsky probed and judged the degree to which Fain and his close assistants had unjustly harmed Mock and also Rich Boyer, the Stellantis vice president who was also stripped of some of his responsibilities in May 2024, after it became clear that during the 2023 negotiations he had permitted his corporate adversaries to actually strengthen an attendance policy that had long been an irritant for thousands of factory workers.

Barofsky’s Javert-like investigation turned up a good deal of damaging information on Fain, Brooks, and other unionists in their corner. None of it was criminal or corrupt, but it did violate what the monitor thought to be good governance and ethical practice. Fain had made the determination to sideline Mock late in 2023, so Brooks and Furman colluded with the union’s ostensibly independent compliance officer to edit and revise portions of the report that indicted Mock for her delays and other transgressions. Barofsky also thought it untoward that Fain, seeking to deflect any charge of racism, had Laura Dickerson and LaShawn English, both African American women on the union’s executive board, formally introduce the compliance report for discussion. When Barofsky sought thousands of internal UAW documents, e-mails, and other messages related to these issues, Fain and his team either delayed their release or attempted to delete some of them from their computers and iPhones. From Barofsky’s perspective, all this was emblematic of a “union culture that remained mired in fear and distrust,” with staffers “scared to death, scared to lose jobs if they don’t march to [the President’s] tune,” because his approach is “you’re either with me or against me.”^[33]

Such divisiveness was real, but Barofsky’s solicitude for frightened staffers reflected a set of corporate values that saw culture rather than politics as the site of reform and renewal in a 400,000-member union whose new leadership was seeking, however imperfectly, to create a more effective combat organization. Thus Labor Notes’ Jane Slaughter, who has been a keen observer of UAW affairs for decades, offered a rather different and more persuasive interpretation of the union’s internal tensions: “Old guard UAW staffers at the international and in the regions, often using their staff union, have dug in their heels against the new expectations, filing dozens of grievances—and griping about new staff who came on with a different attitude. A strict staff contract limits elected leaders’ ability to dismiss holdovers standing in the way.”^[34]

But Barofsky’s will would not be thwarted, at least for a season. Finding that Fain had acted with “illegitimate and retaliatory intent” after both Mock and Boyer had been stripped of their responsibilities, Barofsky threatened to take his charge to the Trump Justice Department unless the UAW caved. And that the union did in late 2025, agreeing to retore to Mock and Boyer all the departments and assignments lost the previous year, while demoting Jonah Furman and forcing Chris Brooks to resign under pressure. ^[35]

Towards the Next Internal Election

Neither Mock nor Boyer are members of the slate Shawn Fain has assembled for the general membership election that begins when ballots are mailed out this August. Mock is running for Secretary-Treasurer, but at this writing, it does not look as if she will anchor an opposition slate. As one veteran unionist on Mock’s side during the UAW’s internal conflicts told me, there’s “no political basis for the formation” of such an opposition.^[36] While Mock has come to represent the outlook of the old Administration Caucus, which former president Ray Curry has even sought to revive, her perspective has little in common with other Fain opponents, largely sectarian radicals and self-starters who never signed on to his agenda in the first place. ^[37]

Because Fain’s new electoral team, the “Stand Up Slate,” is composed of several figures who were members or backers of the old Administration Caucus, some observers have described it as either a “more progressive version” of that caucus, or perhaps even the UAW’s “Thermidor.”^[38] Only three people who were part of the original UAWD-backed slate in 2022 are still on the Fain ballot lineup, and the UAW president has chosen as his new chief of staff, Brandon Keatts, who worked for many years under Chuck Browning. Fain told me he was “disgusted” with the three years of executive board infighting and wants to groom a new generation of union militants, but in the meantime, “I need people who know how the union works.” So, there are some “holdovers” from the old regime.^[39]

Fain is right to combine forces, because if the union is successfully moving forward, then many of the old divisions transcend themselves. Brooks has cited an old organizer maxim: “we win people over, we don’t write them off.”^[40] Thus, Mike Miller, the West Coast director, wanted more money and support for his organizational work in higher education, so in 2022 he backed Ray Curry, a calculated bet that the old regime would hold on to power and purse. But once Fain was in, Miller quickly became a team player, forming a productive alliance with the younger and more radical Brandon Mancilla, director of the New York/New England region, where colleges and universities were also a big organizing target. That kind of programmatic integration may well be more difficult in the Midwest auto centers, where many local unions are still controlled by a set of “get along, go along” leaders unwilling to mobilize their membership for shop-floor fights with management. They may well expect officials like Laura Dickerson, another Browning protégé now running for vice president and Brandon Campbell, a Chrysler/Stellantis veteran staffer, candidate for Secretary-Treasurer, to protect their interests.^[41]

But the fate of UAW’s revitalization will also be shaped by conditions over which union leaders have little control, and here the near-term prospects are hardly bright. The Trump Administration’s about face on the electric vehicles (EV) transition has made the UAW’s organizing effort much more difficult, North and South. There have been layoffs at GM’s Factory ZERO, near Hamtramck, which built electric trucks and SUVs, and at the Ultium Cells battery plants in Lordstown, Ohio and Spring Hill, Tennessee. Near Memphis, Ford’s BlueOval SK joint venture with a Korean battery maker has dissolved, putting in jeopardy a narrow UAW election victory at this large buckle of the mid-South “battery belt.” Workers getting the shaft at such new production facilities are as likely to blame Fain’s UAW for not protecting their jobs as they are to pin responsibility on GM, Ford, or Trump. That’s one reason for the demise of the UAW’s once hopeful Southern organizing drive.

Meanwhile, Stellantis workers are furious that for the first time in over a decade, they will take home no profit-sharing checks in 2026 while checks of upwards of $10,000 are in the pipeline at GM and Ford. Stellantis reported a $26 billion loss in 2025, largely attributed to the cost of the on-again, off-again EV transition. Layoffs have mounted since the UAW’s 2023 strike, with blame for the failure of the company to reopen its Belvidere Assembly Plant, then considered a signal victory for the UAW after the union convinced the company to reopen the plant through the strike, landing on Fain’s shoulders. Not unexpectedly, support for the Stand Up Slate may well prove weak among the nearly 40,000 UAW members at Stellantis. And since Mock has roots among these workers, their disaffection may constitute her one chance of retaining power and office in the union. ^[42]

Such discontent exists throughout UAW ranks, not unlike the economic and social disquiet now spreading in so many working-class neighborhoods. So, the forthcoming UAW election, free, fair, and un-gerrymandered, will constitute more than a referendum on the Fain leadership. It will be a token of the larger hopes and frustrations confronting tens of millions of American workers.

Notes

^[1] Author’s phone conversation with Shawn Fain, April 28, 2026.

^[2] John Barnard, American Vanguard: The United Auto Workers During the Reuther Years, 1935-1970 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 477.

^[3] Nora Eckert and Mike Colias, “Activists Helped Get Huge UAW Win – New hires who never worked in an auto factory transformed union’s strategy,” Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2023, A1.

^[4] Author’s telephone interviews with Bob Master, April 23, 2026; and Steve Early, April 21, 2026.

^[5] As quoted in Harold Meyerson, “A House of Labor Divided,” The American Prospect, April 1, 2026.

^[6] Chris Brooks, “Four Lessons from the UAW’s Turn Toward Class Struggle,” Jacobin, February 2026.

^[7] Eckert and Colias, “Activists Helped Get Huge UAW Win.”

^[8] UAW Monitor’s Twelfth Report, June 10, 2024, p. 15.

^[9] Nelson Lichtenstein, Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 312.

^[10] Author’s phone interview with Grace Hale, April 21, 2026.

^[11] Author’s interview with Early.

^[12] Author’s interview with Master.

^[13] UAW Executive Board Minutes, February 20, 2024.

^[14] UAW Executive Board Minutes, February 20, 2024; and see Chris Brooks, “Seizing the Moment: Lessons from the Front Lines of the UAW’s Fight to Scale Up,” New Labor Forum, vol 35, no. 1 (Winter 2026); and Lichtenstein, “The United Auto Workers’ Southern Offensive,” New Labor Forum, vol 34, no. 1 (Fall 2024).

^[15] Michael Belt and Carla Villanueva, “It’s All About the Leaders: Manufacturing Wins in the UAW,” New Labor Forum, April 14, 2026, https://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2026/04/14/its-all-about-the-leaders-manufacturing-wins-in-the-uaw/.

^[16] UAW Executive Board Minutes, February 20, 2024.

^[17] Stephen Silvia, The UAW’s Southern Gamble: Organizing Workers at Foreign-Owned Vehicle Plants (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023), 119-20.

^[18] UAW Executive Board Minutes, February 20, 2024.

^[19] Three people, including Fain, have made this claim in conversations with me.

^[20] UAW Executive Board Minutes, February 20, 2024; copy of Mock’s resolutions in author’s possession.

^[21] UAW Executive Board Minutes, February 20, 2024.

^[22] Monitor’s Twelfth Status Report, June 17, 2025, page 65.

^[23] Ben Protess and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, “Neil Barofsky, Old Foe of Bank Bailouts, Said to Be a Monitor for Credit Suisse,” New York Times, June 23, 2014.

^[24] Kimberly Ricci, “High Cost of UAW Corruption Keeps Going Up, and More Financial Findings from the Union’s LM-2,” Labor Relations Link, April 7, 2026, https://news.lrionline.com/cost-uaw-corruption-federal-monitor-lm-2-2025/.

^[25] Neil M. Barofsky, Matthew D. Cipolla and Erin R. Schrantz, “Changing Corporate Culture,” in The Guide to Monitorships edited by Anthony Barkow, Neil Barofsky, Thomas Perrelli (London: Law Business Research, 2020).

^[26] Author’s phone interview with Will Bloom, April 20, 2026.

^[27] E-mail, Benjamin Dictor to Neil Barofsky, “UAW Ceasefire Resolution,” Outlook.office.com, February 19, 2024, online; Ryan Grim, “The UAW’s Federal Monitor Twice Pressured the Union to Back Off its Call for Gaza Ceasefire, then Launched an Investigation,” Drop Site News, July 11, 2024, https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/shock-documents-reveal-the-uaws-federal.

^[28] UAW Executive Board Minutes, February 21, 2024.

^[29] UAW Executive Board Minutes, February 21, 2024; and see “Resolution: UAWD Opposes Attacks on the UAW by the Government and Billionaire Class and Calls for the Replacement of Federal Monitor Barofsky,” October 2024 Annual Meeting, https://laborforpalestine.net/2024/10/13/resolution-uawd-opposes-attacks-on-the-uaw-by-the-government-and-billionaire-class-and-calls-for-the-replacement-of-federal-monitor-barofsky/.

[30] UAW Executive Board Minutes, February 21, 2024.

^[31] Author’s phone interview with Ken Paff, April 20, 2026.

^[32] Grim, “The UAW’s Federal Monitor Twice Pressured the Union to Back Off Its Call for a Gaza Ceasefire.”

^[33] UAW Monitor’s Thirteenth Report, November 14, 2025, page 8.

^[34] Keith Brower Brown and Jane Slaughter, “The UAW’s Rank-and-File Takeover Isn’t Over Yet,” Labor Notes, October 2024.

^[35] UAW Monitor’s Twelfth Report, page 84; UAW Monitor’s Thirteenth Report, page 5, 10.

^[36] Author’s phone interview with Bill Parker, April 19, 2026.

^[37] Breana Noble and Robert Snell, “Ex-UAW President Ray Curry Calls on Reuther Administration Caucus, Criticizes Current Leaders,” Detroit News, July 21, 2025; Shannon Jones, “Major Shakeup at UAW headquarters as Crisis of Bureaucracy Deepens, World Socialist, December 19, 2025.

^[38] Author’s Zoom interview with Andrew Bergman, April 28, 2026.

^[39] Author’s phone conversation with Shawn Fain, April 28, 2026.

^[40] Brooks, “Four Lessons from the UAW’s Turn Toward Class Struggle.”

^[41] Author’s interview with Bergman.

^[42] Luke Ramseth, “Stellantis Says No 2025 Profit Sharing Checks for its U.S. Autoworkers,” Detroit News, February 26, 2025; Neal Boudette, “Shawn Fain, Who Pledged to Reform UAW, Faces Internal Dissent,” New York Times, September 15, 2025, B1.

This article was originally published by New Labor Forum; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.

2026-05-18T04:23:21.103-07:00

Texas’ Radical Past Points to a Possible New Future

The People’s Party history shows how to build a working-class movement

By Steve Early, David Griscom

May 15, 2026

Source: Barn Raiser

LONG READ

First banner of the Southern Farmers’ Alliance. Founded in Lampasas, Texas, in 1877, the Farmers’ Alliance sought to answer the question posed by S.O. Daws, one of its founding members: Why is it those “who work most get least, and those who work least get most?” The movement grew to one million members, organizing farmers to establish cooperative stores, mills, and cotton gins, and negotiate directly with merchants. Image from Dunning (ed.), Farmers' Alliance History and Agricultural Digest. (Washington, DC: Alliance Publishing Co., 1891) (Wikipedia)

Long before the Lone Star State started shifting, in the 1990s, from blue to red—after a century of Democratic Party domination—some working-class Texans had a reputation for being a different kind of “red.”

They were the radical farmers and laborers who formed the backbone of the People’s Party and later the Socialist Party in the southwest. Their rise and decline as grassroots critics of both major political parties is now chronicled in a new book called The Myth of Red Texas: Cowboys, Populism, and Class War in the Radical South (OR Books, 2026).

Red Texas is not your standard ramble through Old West lore. Instead, it focuses on popular agitation for social and economic justice in the age of the original robber barons. Its author is David Griscom, a writer and political activist based in Austin. In addition to exploring Southern labor history with Jacobin, he co-hosts a podcast called Left Reckoning, which regularly critiques the shortcomings of MAGA Republicans and their putative foes in the Democratic Party.

In a recent article for Jacobin, Griscom took Texas Democrats to task for their misguided “belief that that some combination of mobilization and favorable demographic shifts will deliver victory. It’s the kind of thinking that inspires passive campaigns and disastrous election results.” The opposite of this approach, he writes, is the kind of working-class politics represented by James Talarico, who won Texas’ Democratic Party Senate primary in March. Such class-centered campaigning “is about convincing voters to see politics in a new light and see themselves as members of a larger group of working people, bucking the culture war, and uniting around a simple message of economic populism.”

In this Barn Raiser interview, we asked Griscom what lessons from the past—drawn from his state’s largely forgotten history—might be useful in present day campaigns against the big money and corporate power that’s riding high again in Texas and too many other states.

(Cover by OR Books; David Griscom headshot by Bobby Scheidemann)

Barn Raiser readers live in a lot of places where the brand of “economic populism” they’re exposed to is the MAGA version. It’s business-friendly and anti-labor, has a lot of elite backing and is often riddled with nativism and racism. You’ve written a new book that deals with an older form of populism found in Texas and other rural states more than a century ago. What’s the difference between that populism and the Trump product on sale today?

I think populism probably is one of the most abused words in American politics. As the label is often applied now, you’re a populist if you use any kind of “us against them” rhetoric. In the Texas populist movement, there was certainly plenty of that. But it was coming from everyday people who were talking about themselves versus the railroad industry, the big banks and a state government beholden to these special interests. That kind of economic populism reflects real personal experience, and it has the potential to unite working people around shared economic interests.

What motivated you to debunk the “myth of Red Texas”? I understand that President Lyndon Johnson’s grandfather, Samuel Johnson Sr., was once a People’s Party leader in Texas, before his grandson became a New Deal Democrat who articulated his vision of “the Great Society.” Did you have any similar family ties to populism?

There are a few reasons I wanted to write the book. I’ve always found this history to be very interesting, and we find ourselves to be in a similar political moment. One of my favorite quotes from an early populist leader posed the enduring question: “Why is it that those who work most get least, and those who work least get most?” As I look around right now, I see a lot of people asking similar questions. Like small farmers in Texas during the 1870s, 1880s and the 1890s, many working people today are finding that the current system isn’t working very well for them.

They’ve been betrayed by both the political elite and the economic elite, and some are actively trying to figure out how to push back. That makes this a good moment to write about populism, in its original form, asking similar questions about how you link people across different regions and states. How do you organize industrial and agricultural workers? And unite them around common interests?

These are major political questions that progressives are still wrestling with today. As a Texan, and a very proud one, I’ve always been interested in the state’s history. But I often found that the story of everyday working people took second place to grand narratives that focused on a single individual, usually a larger-than-life Texas character.

Now, in my book, there’s plenty of fascinating folks. But one of the striking things about this era was just how expansive the populist and socialist movements were. They weren’t just about one individual doing good things in politics; they were rooted in collective action. Everyday people came together, fought for a better life, and developed the capacity to govern themselves.

Can you give us any little-known highlights of your state’s agrarian radical traditions?

So much of the official history of Texas emphasizes the role of the elites—the bosses and the masters—not everyday people. In Red Texas, I tell the story of the “fence cutters.”

Texas wasn’t as devastated during the Civil War as the rest of the Confederacy. So, afterwards, there was a great deal of Northern and British investor interest in the state. These absentee owners started buying up tremendous amounts of land. And that massive bonanza coincided with the invention of barbed wire.

Previously, there had been an actual physical limit to how much land you could claim for yourself. If you have to build a fence out of rock, there’s only so many rocks that you can pull from the ground. The new capitalist class, which began enclosing large parts of the state, didn’t just surround their own land with wire fences; they also barred access to streams and grasslands. It prevented small landholders and also landless cowboys from being able to raise cattle because they couldn’t move from place to place or get access to water.

In Texas there was always this idea of the open range. It was this understanding that the land belonged to the people. So this entire tradition of cowboying was at risk due to the spread of barbed wire. In response, landless cowboys and poor farmers started cutting fences, and it very quickly became a political movement.

They mounted such a threatening hit-and-run revolt against enclosure that the power structure, at the time, had to restore “law and order” by creating the Texas Rangers to track them down and arrest or kill them.

This photograph was staged by photographer Solomon D. Butcher to illustrate fence cutters and the tensions between farmers and ranchers created by the appearance of homesteads on the open range. It is unlikely, however, that these desperadoes were likely to do much damage with their wooden wire cutters, a detail lost on many historians over the years who published this photograph as historical event. (Nebraska State Historical Society)

The Rangers, of course, have shrouded themselves in myth and legend. Yet more Texans today, with deep roots in the state, are likely to be descendants of those who broke the law, rather than those who enforced it.

In central Texas, much of that region’s fascinating history has been misunderstood and misremembered. In the mid-1800s, its new settlers included immigrants forced to leave Germany after the failed revolution of 1848. As political radicals and supporters of the Union, they were very much against slavery. When the Civil War began, Confederate soldiers went from town to town trying to conscript people into their rebel army. The Germans refused to participate, and their draft resistance led to a pitched battle in a state that was part of the Confederacy.

It’s fascinating to drive through that part of Texas of today and know that it was once the heart of the abolitionist movement in the state, then a few decades later, a hotbed of Texas populism, and then a hotbed of Texas socialism.

During the United States’ involvement in World War I, which the Socialist Party in Texas and Oklahoma strongly opposed, some Anglo-Texans tried to terrorize their German-American neighbors because of their perceived war-time disloyalty to the United States of America.

Once you start scratching beneath the surface of Texas history, you find examples of many beautiful and inspiring acts of resistance, but also political repression and violence in response.

In some progressive circles today, there is renewed interest in challenging “the duopoly” (i.e. domination of politics by conservative Republicans and corporate Democrats). Could you explain what made the People’s Party, in its heyday, a viable third party with a strong grassroots base?

It’s fascinating to read founding documents of the People’s Party and its policy positions. On one hand, they included very lofty demands, because they were willing to be radical. But, at the same time, their proposed solutions were extremely practical, because the party sought basic, simple reforms of the system that everyday people could understand.

In Texas at the time, many small farmers saw themselves as workers. Protection of laborers and recognition of trade unions were important demands for them. The populists also wanted to create cooperative stores and, on a much larger scale, bring railroads under public ownership and regulate corporate America in other ways.

The federal government was so pig-headed at the time that it was creating an economic crisis by refusing to expand the U.S. monetary system from the gold standard. Populists demanded the incorporation of silver as backing for the dollar, which became a big galvanizing cry in rural America. The folks running Washington and Texas weren’t interested in looking out for everyday folks. So, when the powerful refused to acquiesce to the demands of the people, that showed which side they were on and led to the further growth of Texas populism.

Who are some historians, academic or popular, who have plowed this field before? Did you find the work of Lawrence Goodwyn, a fellow Texan, helpful in terms of your own research and writing?

For direct sources, being able to access, with my laptop, digital archives with all the historical papers of the populist and the socialist movements has been a real boon. Goodwyn’s book on populism remains a must-read for anybody interested in this period. In Red Texas, I cite him heavily.

One of my objectives—in addition to reintroducing people our radical past in Texas—was reconnecting progressives of my generation to the trail blazing work of historians and thinkers like Goodwyn and James Green. Before he wrote about mine worker history and many other topics, Green’s first book, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895-1943, was a study of the pre-World War I Socialist Party in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas. My hope is that readers of my book will go out and buy a copy of Goodwyn or Green’s work as well.

You’re a modern-day podcaster, using technology to attract popular audiences to Left Reckoning. But even in the days before radio, TV, or internet existed, there was a similar corporate domination of the mainstream media that exists today. Could you explain how populists and socialists used alternative newspapers—like Appeal to Reason, The Rural Citizen and The Rebel—to reach farmers and workers?

These publications were indispensable. Reading them more than a century later, it is fascinating to see how their political ideas were propagated in Texas and other big agricultural states. Their widespread distribution facilitated organizational communication and provided a popular forum for debate and discussion of the issues of the day.

Now, some people might be asking how these papers could have flourished in a period when the level of literacy, especially among poor and working-class people, was lower than it is today. That problem was addressed by a really important populist practice called “front porch readings.” And by the use of traveling lecturers.

The Rebel began weekly publication in 1911 as the paper representing the Socialist party in Texas, based out of Hallettsville, Lavaca County. Its motto was: “The great appear great to us only because we are on our knees—Let us arise.” (Vol. [3], No. 115, Ed. 1 Saturday, September 20, 1913) (The Portal to Texas History)

As I describe in the book, somebody in the community who was literate would literally sit in front of a house, gather neighbors around them, and share news and commentary from a paper just arrived at the post office. This was both a great way to get information out and it helped create community, unlike today when modern forms of media encourage us to consume things in isolation. It’s nice to get good ideas piped directly into your home, but it’s even better to share them as a part of a movement building process.

You describe the political “encampments” that brought people together in sparsely populated rural areas. What were these events like?

During the summer season, a slower period for farmers, there were massive gatherings across Texas. These encampments would last for weeks. They would feature nationally known speakers from the populist and socialist movements, like Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Victor Debs. Recalling his experience on the stump in 1914 among all those sunburnt Texans, Debs was struck by the religious fervor of the crowds, which included whole families. To attract such an audience, you also needed to have a big band, a good cold source of water for people to swim in, and good food, all of which made politics fun and enjoyable.

In the book, I describe a social gathering among members of the Brotherhood of Timbers Worker, a rare radical inter-racial union. It was a very powerful moment in the Jim Crow South when black and white workers came together, enjoying brisket, beans and ribs. And what could be more Texan than good barbecue and a good party?

Such events helped foster a spirit of solidarity and community that’s either missing today or too much of an abstract idea. But when the bosses and their government started attacking such movements—and they did—people were more apt to stand up and fight for each other.

It was not long before agrarian radicals started mounting major electoral challenges to the Democratic Party. What were some of the tensions and political differences between the populist and socialist movements that you write about and mainstream Democrats during this period?

In the book, I describe a major debate in the 1880s within the Farmers Alliance, a precursor to the People’s Party, about whether to support Democrats or run candidates as part of a third party. The populists who favored participation in the Democratic Party got their first major victory by electing 300-pound James Hogg as governor of Texas in 1890. He ended up putting some important regulatory reforms in place like a state Railroad Commission.

Hogg wasn’t particularly interested in going beyond that and building a “cooperative commonwealth,” as many in the Farmers Alliance wanted. He definitely didn’t like these pesky farmers bothering him about who he appointed to Railroad Commission, after it was established. He started to wage war on the populist cohort within the Democratic Party. This led more radical elements in the movement to pursue third-party building. That allowed them to campaign on a platform that really spoke to the needs of farmers and other people still left out of politics, because they didn’t have powerful friends in Austin.

As early 20th century successors to the People’s Party in Texas, local socialists also had some electoral victories but, with less voter support. They were great champions of the state’s impoverished tenant farmers. To defeat its rivals on the left, the Democrats put forward a whole list of proposals lifted directly from the platform of the Socialist Party, albeit watered down. So both of these movements—in victory and defeat—ended up giving voice to people still under-represented in state legislatures and Congress today.

Do you see any echoes of the populist movement today, such as in Dan Osborn’s union-backed race in Nebraska for a U.S. Senate seat in 2024 and again this year?

I think Osborn’s campaigns are a very important development for labor when it comes to politics. Running as an independent is a smart political strategy in Nebraska. It allows him to criticize the Republican establishment, while also being able to criticize the Democratic Party, which, let’s be honest, has also betrayed the interests of working-class people.

The most important thing about his campaign message is that it’s really simple. It’s simple and conveyed by face-to-face discussion of kitchen table issues that are affecting everyday people. Being a past local leader of the working class, not just somebody who’s talking about the working class, makes him a very effective voice for populist politics. Running more candidates with union backgrounds should be a big part of efforts to revive democracy in this country.

Let me ask about a fellow in Austin who for many years was the best-known progressive populist in Texas. How does Jim Hightower’s singular career, which included a long stretch in the 1980s as the state’s elected agricultural commissioner, fit into your story?

As a political figure, Hightower very much fashioned himself as an inheritor of our state’s populist tradition. His early electoral success was a testament to its continuing viability, but his ascendancy coincided with the end of an era in which the Democratic Party was dominant in Texas.

As agriculture commissioner, Hightower came up with a lot of creative ideas for supporting small farming in the state, some of which were considered kooky at the time. Unfortunately, his tenure in office was cut short. The free market policies that ended up dominating Texas agriculture afterwards helped decimate everyday family farmers, rather contribute to their survival.

Hightower’s lasting legacy was his ability to speak to working-class people. His podcast is great, his writing is great, and we still see him around town here in Austin. I think he’s a very positive figure. Whenever you listened to him and saw that cowboy hat on his head, you knew he was upholding the political tradition that I describe in the book.

In 2019, Jim Hightower, former Texas agriculture commissioner and standard bearer of modern Texas populism, visited the founding site of the Texas Farmers’ Alliance, in Lampasas County. (Jim Hightower)

In its late 20th century heyday, Arkansas Communities Organizing for Reform Now (ACORN) had a number of chapters in Texas and operated very much in the spirit of the old populists. ACORN knocked on doors and signed members up in poor and working-class communities. It also did some low-wage worker organizing through the vehicle of an independent union. Are there grassroots groups like that challenging corporate power in Texas today?

During the 1930s in Arkansas, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union operated in much the same way. They would send organizers into rural communities, where it was relatively easy to find people, where they socialized in predictable places, and everybody knew each other.

Today, we live in a more isolated world, a very antisocial era, and I don’t think that’s accidental. Labor unions, where they exist, continue to play the most constant role in working people’s lives. We’ve also seen the growth of local chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America, which does both political organizing and community work. One of the big challenges facing anybody who does this kind of work is finding effective ways to put these ideas into practice.

You mentioned “religious fervor” a little earlier. A state legislator and former seminarian now running for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas has, in your words, “infused his Christianity with an economic populist message” and “tapped into growing anger against the billionaire class.” Can James Talarico turn Texas blue in November?

Talarico winning his s primary race was exciting for multiple reasons. He has inspired a lot of hope, especially among Texas Democrats. Most people recognize that they’re kind of getting screwed, they’re getting left behind, and things are changing in the state. The Republicans have been very effective turning some of the resulting anger, frustration, and anxiety against new Texans, the people who have moved here recently.

Talarico’s message is focused on the top, not the bottom—on the elites and those who have benefited from this kind of system. He says that the class of top earners in Texas are responsible for a lot of our woes. This encourages people to think about things more on a class level. It allows some who might otherwise vote Republican to feel included in his messaging. And that’s very important in a state dominated by the Republican Party for so long.

In 2018, when Beto O’Rourke ran for our other U.S. Senate seat and lost narrowly to Ted Cruz, he went to every county in Texas, which was a good strategy, even if it didn’t end up winning him many votes among deep red conservative Texans

It assured people who were advocating for him—and volunteering and participating in his campaign in those places—that they were fighting for someone who was able to stand on his own two feet, even in hostile territory. Talarico is similar when it comes to his willingness to spar about the meaning of Christianity. We’ll see how effective it ends up being at converting Republicans on the religious right.

Does Talarico have any antecedents in the populist movement?

Actually, he reminds me of one of my favorite figures in Red Texas, the Reverend G.G. Hamilton, a Methodist preacher from Cromwell, Texas, who drew crowds advertising his events as debates against socialism. In the course of an incredible speech, he would passionately convert to the socialist position, saying, “Will socialists err? Of course! They’re only human, but I would rather stand with the masses than with the masters.”

What Talarico did in his primary race was test an idea that we never really got to see come to fruition during Bernie Sanders’s second campaign here in Texas. The counties where Talarico did well were places that Bernie did very well during the 2020 presidential primary. Talarico also did well in parts of the state that have been trending to the Republican Party in recent years, including large portions of South Texas which historically had been part of the Democratic Party’s “blue wall.”

That showed a willingness to fight for voters who have been moving away from the Democrats in recent years, and that’s a good orientation. One advantage for Talarico is who he faces in November—either Ken Paxton or John Cornyn, two of the most crooked or disliked people in Texas politics. The buzz is certainly there for Talarico.

We haven’t really talked much about the impact of greater ethnic and religious diversity in Texas today—and the MAGA backlash against it. How are Talarico and other progressives responding to the harassment and demonization of immigrants, whether Latinos, South Asians or Muslims from the Middle East?

It’s really frightening what’s happened here in the past few years with the shift toward MAGA Republicanism. A decade ago, you had Greg Abbott, our current governor, bragging about how many people from all around the world are moving to Texas. I was very proud of that, and held that up as, like, a good thing.

Now, one of the big fixations of the state Republican Party is harassing Muslim civic organizations, including designating both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations a “terrorist organization.” When ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] crackdowns started in Texas, where Anglos are no longer a majority, you could go to Spanish-speaking markets or grocery stores, and they’d be empty. Their customers were afraid to shop, go to work and engage in social life

Many people—especially folks in major cities like Dallas, Houston and Austin, where I live—have been pushing back on this at the community level because the Democratic Party doesn’t have a lot of levers, at the moment, to push back on the state level. There’s been a greater willingness of people involved in campaigns like Talarico’s to speak honestly about ICE and its impact.

When it comes to getting new representation in Congress, we also saw some exciting campaigns in south Texas, including the primary candidacy of my friend Etienne Rosas. The political machine that has controlled the Democratic Party in that area is still very strong. It’s going to take more people doing this work of pushing back, at the local and state level, to make the significant change we need on the federal level.

Steve Early has been writing about politics or labor in Vermont since he was an undergraduate at Middlebury College more than fifty years ago. He is a former international union representative for the Communications Workers of America and was involved in organizing, bargaining, and political action by CWA members and other workers throughout New England. He co-founded “Labor for Bernie” and was active in both Sanders for President campaigns. Since moving to the Bay Area, he authored four books, including Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City (Beacon Press) about his new hometown, Richmond, California. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com.

This article was originally published by Barn Raiser; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Rebel Yell

2026-05-18T04:20:03.423-07:00

Without Political Education, Progressives Will Lose the War for Democracy

By Fouzia Chaparro-Bencheikh

May 15, 2026

Source: Convergence

Image via Convergence

Democracy is under attack in our schools—but political education can equip us to defend it and build something stronger.

Prager U, despite its name, is not a university. It is a conservative media organization that produces slick, ideology-driven videos designed to attract young people to the right, and it’s now in American classrooms. The Guardian reported in April that as teachers adopt its free lesson plans and the White House actively boosts its content, Prager U has become one of the most effective platforms for delivering right-wing political indoctrination directly to students.

This didn’t happen overnight. In September 2025, NPR reported that the Department of Education began partnering with conservative organizations—including Turning Point USA, the Heritage Foundation, and the America First Policy Institute—to design new “patriotic civics content,” despite federal law prohibiting government-directed curricula. The same administration revived the 1776 Commission, first created in 2020 to counter the racial justice uprisings and the 1619 Project. The 1776 Commission sought to recast American history as a patriotic narrative while erasing the realities of slavery and systemic racism. We are watching a coordinated effort to turn civic education into a pipeline for political obedience—and it is already in the classroom with American students.

Leftist movements committed to progressive change must meet this moment by building a national movement for political education. Political education, the process of learning that develops critical consciousness, shared analysis, and collective strategies for social change, is essential not only for countering the right’s co-option of civics, but for building a democracy capable of transformation rather than mere survival.

Political education has long been a practice among community organizers, and now it must extend far beyond activist circles. Unlike civics, which stops at explaining institutional structures and memorizing events, political education equips people to uncover the root causes of the issues we collectively face today. It interrogates power: who benefits, who is harmed, and how we can act together to build a just society. We need more spaces—in classrooms, online, and in the community—where people can engage with this deeper learning. At its core, political education builds a justice-oriented civic identity rooted in equity, solidarity, and collective dignity. It counters political obedience with political agency by developing the courage and capacity to practice democracy as a path toward collective liberation.

How We Build Political Education Ecosystems

To counter authoritarianism and build a more democratic society, political education must be constructed as coherent ecosystems rather than a set of isolated efforts. What follows is a roadmap for constructing political education ecosystems that operate across schools, philanthropy, communities, and media, ensuring that learning, analysis, and collective capacity reinforce one another. This approach treats political education not as an accessory to democracy, but as one of its essential conditions. The proposal below is to both strengthen each ecosystem and connect them so that what educators build in schools informs what organizers develop in communities, what movement journalists amplify reaches philanthropists who fund it at scale, and what funders resource flows back to the people doing the work.

Students, Educators, & Schools

Students, educators, and schools are critical actors in building political education within a broader democratic ecosystem. However, we must acknowledge that educators across the nation face growing scrutiny and even legal risk for teaching contested histories or engaging students in discussions about race, power, and social justice. In this context, the task is not simply to adapt, but to act collectively to integrate political education into curricula under constraint.

Educators can embed political analysis in how they frame history, design lessons, and facilitate dialogue, even when explicit language is limited. Students can organize peer learning spaces, lead discussions, and build collective understanding beyond the formal classroom. Schools and educational communities can support this work by creating protected spaces—through extracurricular programs, partnerships, and community-based learning—where political inquiry and civic participation can continue. When these efforts are coordinated, political education becomes a sustainable practice that persists even in hostile conditions, and continues to cultivate democratic agency.

There are already examples of this work taking shape. The Chicago Teachers Union has developed classroom resources and campaigns, such as its Lessons for Resistance series and May Day teach-ins, that connect labor history, social movements, and contemporary politics. National unions have also invested in this approach: the National Education Association’s EdJustice initiative provides educators with training and resources to analyze structural racism in education and advocate for more equitable school systems. Beyond unions, organizations such as the Zinn Education Project bring educators, students, and families together through workshops, curriculum, and campaigns that connect historical understanding to present-day struggles. Youth-led groups such as Students Engaged in Advancing Texas further demonstrate how political education can translate into civic action, organizing students to advocate for policies related to mental health, financial literacy, free expression, and student representation in school governance. Together, these efforts show how schools and educational communities can serve as anchors of political education: connecting learning, analysis, and collective action.

Communities & Movements

Communities and movement builders play a critical role in sustaining political education, particularly as formal institutions become increasingly constrained by political surveillance, censorship, and hostility toward dissent. As spaces for open political expression narrow, political education must be cultivated through distributed, community-rooted practices that do not rely on institutional permission. The task is to intentionally build and connect outside formal institutions, both online and in person, into a shared ecosystem of learning and action.

These spaces, including community study groups, political schools, popular education circles, and digital commons, should not function as isolated efforts or individual platforms (which they often do today), but as coordinated sites of collective learning where people develop shared analysis, build relationships, and move toward organized action. Strengthening political education in this context means linking these efforts through collaboration, shared curricula, and ongoing exchange. Doing so allows decentralized spaces to reinforce one another rather than remain fragmented.

There are both contemporary and historical examples of how community-led political education functions as movement infrastructure. Organizations such as the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction in Philadelphia and the Center for Political Education in San Francisco bring participants together for sustained study, collective analysis, and organizing practice, building the relationships and political clarity needed for action. These efforts build on a longer tradition of movement-based education. Institutions such as Brookwood Labor College, which trained labor organizers in the early 20th century, and its successor traditions, such as the Highlander Research and Education Center, demonstrate how political education has historically been used to develop leadership, strengthen organizing capacity, and advance social movements. In a moment marked by political disillusionment and social isolation, these models offer a path forward: political education as a shared, collective practice that reconnects people to one another and to the possibility of transformative change.

Independent Media

The media ecosystem, especially independent and social media, may be the most powerful pillar for normalizing political education as an everyday practice. Mainstream media rarely name power structures or offer structural analysis of why things are the way they are. Independent journalists, educators, and organizers have stepped into that gap, using podcasts, newsletters, and social media platforms to reach millions with the kind of contextualized, movement-grounded analysis that formal institutions either can’t or won’t provide. When this work is at its best, it reframes rather than simply informs. It gives people a way to understand their material conditions, situates current events within longer political histories, and connects individuals to collective structures where that analysis can deepen and lead to action. Progressives must recognize independent and social media as political education infrastructure, and invest in building it with the same intentionality they bring to other organizing spaces.

We saw this during the Black Lives Matter uprisings in 2020 and continue to see it in the context of the ongoing Palestinian genocide, where individuals have provided real-time political education at scale. Some have built sustained platforms dedicated to this work. Organizer Kelly Hayes, through her podcast Movement Memos and newsletter Organizing My Thoughts, offers political education grounded in movement strategy, helping audiences connect current events to organizing practice. At a different scale, political commentator Hasan Piker uses livestreaming to reach millions, integrating political analysis and historical context into accessible commentary that introduces broad audiences to structural analyses of power. Hasan connects his audience to political candidates running for office, including now New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Rae Chen Huang, and Chris Rabb, and to movement organizing, using his platform to mobilize audiences from political education into direct participation in electoral and grassroots campaigns.

At the same time, individuals are organizing hyperlocal political education initiatives—such as teach-ins, study groups, and community forums—and, in moments of crisis, building rapid-response networks that combine education with action. Organizers like Flor Martinez (@FlowerinSpanish) demonstrate this bridge in practice, using her Instagram account to educate audiences about the conditions undocumented farmworkers face while mobilizing mutual aid and organizing efforts. Together, these efforts show how individuals can transform political education from isolated acts of learning into a shared culture that strengthens alignment, participation, and collective power.

The Movement Media Alliance, a coalition of independent, movement-aligned newsrooms including Prism, Scalawag, and Convergence Magazine, where this piece is published, represents one of the most promising examples of this work taking institutional form. These outlets share a common editorial commitment: treating readers as actors in collective change rather than passive consumers of information. That commitment is political education. Movement journalism, as the Alliance defines it, helps communities learn, make informed decisions, expand their solidarities, and share solutions to the issues most affecting them. It starts from lived experience, builds shared analysis, and points toward action. This is the same arc that popular education demands, and the kind of contextualized, power-conscious journalism that shifts how people understand the terrain they are organizing in.

Philanthropy

Philanthropy plays a decisive role in determining whether political education remains fragmented and under-resourced or becomes a durable feature of democratic life. In a political landscape where public institutions are constrained and movements are often forced to operate defensively, funders must treat political education as core democratic infrastructure, not as a peripheral or short-term intervention. This requires a shift from episodic funding toward long-term, flexible investment in grassroots-led political education embedded within organizing. Funders must be willing to support the full ecosystem outlined above—educators, community-based “third spaces,” and individual-led initiatives—while also resourcing the connective tissue that links them, such as curricula, convenings, and leadership development. This means funding political education as a practice that builds critical consciousness, collective analysis, and organizing capacity over time.

There are already models that demonstrate what this support can look like in practice. Organizations such as the Highlander Research and Education Center have long combined foundation support from institutions like the Ford Foundation and The Chorus Foundation with alternative revenue streams, including earned income from royalties on movement-linked cultural assets such as the song “We Shall Overcome.” The Highlander Center reinvests resources back into the ecosystem by funding fellows to implement community projects and by serving as a fiscal sponsor for smaller organizations.

Other organizations, such as the Center for Political Education and the W.E.B. DuBois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction, demonstrate the importance of diversified support models, including foundation grants, fee-for-service income, and fiscal sponsorship models. Together, these efforts show that true political education is not a one-off program, but an ongoing process that builds leadership pipelines, strengthens organizing capacity, and deepens democratic participation. Philanthropy’s role is not to reinvent this work, but to fund it at scale and sustain resources through multi-year grants, fellowship funding, fiscal sponsorship, and capacity building resources that allow political education initiatives to grow, experiment, and endure.

The type of philanthropic investment has historical precedent at scale. The London School of Economics was founded in 1895 by members of the Fabian Society, a group committed to advancing socialist aims through research, reform, and education rather than revolution. The New School for Social Research, launched in 1919, was founded by scholars who were pushed out of Columbia for opposing the US entry into World War I, and was funded by philanthropists such as Hiram Halle and the Rockefeller Foundation. The New School became a haven for Jewish and radical academics fleeing Nazi Germany. They started as investments by progressive funders on the idea that political education belongs at the center of public life, even if both institutions have since drifted from those foundational politics.

What Now?

No single pillar of these ecosystems can carry this work alone. Not schools operating under legal threat, not community organizations stretched thin, not independent media running solely on reader subscriptions, not philanthropists funding in isolation. Political education becomes the cornerstone of democracy only when these actors work together and treat it as infrastructure rather than a one-off program. The right figured this out decades ago. Prager U was built through sustained investment, coordinated strategy, and a clear theory of change about who shapes the next generation’s political imagination.

Progressives have the theory but are missing the sustained will to match it with resources and coordination at scale. The ecosystems that further political education exist, but are isolated from one another. The work now is to connect them through shared political education curricula, coordinated convenings, cross-sector relationships, and philanthropic investment that flows across all four pillars rather than into any one of them alone. The alternative is a generation educated in obedience, and a democracy that survives in name only.

This article was originally published by Convergence; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

Fouzia Chaparro-Bencheikh

Fouzia Chaparro-Bencheikh is a political educator, writer, and founder of The Torch and The Table, a consulting practice dedicated to building political education as democratic infrastructure. Her work explores how shared analysis, learning ecosystems, and movement strategy can strengthen democratic life and collective power. She has led leadership and movement-building initiatives across 17 countries.

2026-05-18T04:18:23.301-07:00

As The Existential Crisis In The Western World Intensified, Our Personal Problems Are Getting Worse!

By Anne Farrell

May 16, 2026

Source: Pressenza

(Image by wikipedia)

The Western world is experiencing an existential crisis in today’s global world. Many people interpret and analyze the crisis through the catastrophic events that unfolded in recent years: wars, climate changes, genocide, the decline in birth rates, inflation, poverty, the acceleration of mental health problems of the youth. and the economical tensions between superpowers which could bring a possible nuclear war.

But it seems to me that analyzing the symptoms of the crisis is not enough to truly understand what is currently happening. I believe we must quickly recognize that this existential crisis is largely driven by the dissolution of old ways of thinking and doing things as our world becomes a global “space”.

The recent changes

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the world became global. For the first time in human history, human beings regardless of their culture, religion, origin, language, or bank account exist as part of one species living on planet Earth.

But quickly, the feeling of belonging to the same species became obscured has progressively everything began to be subordinated to money and competition. Nations, countries and regions were competing with one another as international solidarity declined quickly.

“Competition the sole driving behind all individual and social progress”

In the 90’, it was said that without competition social and economical progress would not be possible. Then everyone starts to compete with one another. During essential learning for the development of their personalities, most children were placed in competition with one another. A vast majority of people begin to believe in this new social and personal mandra, “competition is the sole driving force behind all individual and social progress”. Gradually, older generations, educated in a time where family and community values were stronger, joined this movement and began to compete against each other.

It took more or less two decades for human solidarity to be fatally shaken across the occidental world. Very fast, solidarity among cultures and people even between members in the same family and friends erode as the social fabric unravels. Real friendships progressively disappear and take on the character of competitors. Then interpersonal communication blocked as trust among people vanished. Within a couple both partners struggle for control, seeking benefits from the outset of their relationships and neglecting solidarity, love, and family.

Competition destroyed a large part of the social fabric of our societies

Yet, we most understand that science didn’t progress through competition. Great scientists were not involved in any competition. They were fighting with themselves. Imagine a guy like Einstein in competition with his peers or Leonardo Da Vinci, painting La Jaconde, wanting to do better than others and fighting against his peers. All artists know this well; their battle is in the mind, in the imagination. Imagine Marie Curie wanting to do better than other physicists. This idea of being in competition didn’t bring progress it bring madness and destructive chaos!

When I talk about destructive chaos, I refer to the social, political, religious and economical structures that are projecting mental forms and images from another era tainted with values of competition and confrontation. These mental forms formalize responses in people’s minds and in their action that are out of phase in relation to the needs of the present moment. These mental forms generate violence, discrimination and suffering among people and culture.

Today most people understand that the value of competition disrupts not only our relationship with others but the direction of social, economical and political events. They understand that as the global character becomes more concentrated in the hands of a few powerful men, events located 10,000 km from themselves can disrupt their job, the economy, the health and the accessibility to basic necessities (food, energy, etc). It seems like, as days pass by, in a world driven by competition both the global situation and our particular situation become more filled with problems and conflict.

A consciousness of active nonviolence

It seem to me, the most urgent task is to awaken a consciousness of active nonviolence and solidarity, enabling us to reject not only physical violence but also all forms of economic, racial, psychological, religious, and sexual violence.

In fact, we must begin by studying our own bodies, our perceptions, our beliefs, our feelings and our relationships with our friends, co-workers and family members in order to understand the situation we are living. By studying our own life we will understand the major problem with the overall appreciation of our own meaning and existence.

We aren’t powerless we can have an influence on the events. In fact, we have a choice, either we go on and pursuit a destructive tendancy driven by competition and will live more confrontation with our neighbors, our family and co-worker or we give another direction to our life by breaking our own beliefs in the mandra: competition is the sole driving force behind all individual and social progress.

It doesn’t mean we have to reject the competition values. But instead we understand that solidarity and trust among each other is the driving force for social and personal progress. In fact, we understand that trust and solidarity will reduce the violence and the suffering in our lives and around the world.

This article was originally published by Pressenza; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.

2026-05-18T04:15:13.766-07:00

Inflation, Tariffs and War

Seth Sandronsky

May 15, 2026

Grain silos in California’s Central Valley. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Inflation, a general rise in prices, increased in April due to higher costs for energy primarily (40 percent), food and shelter. “The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.6 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis in April, after rising 0.9 percent in March, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 3.8 percent before seasonal adjustment.”

Energy prices are up in no small way due to the unprovoked U.S.-Israel war against Iran begun on February 28, 2026. That violation of international law has caused 3,468 deaths and over 26,500 injuries in Iran, according to Iranian authorities, and closed the Strait of Hormuz.

An estimated 20 percent of the world’s petroleum passes through this route, which was open for business before the war began. Moreover, that closure is evidence of a U.S. defeat, writes Robert Kagan, a leading neoconservative and Iraq War hawk who co-founded the Project for the New American Century, in the Atlantic magazine recently.

There’s another factor driving inflation, according to Dan Anthony, head of We Pay The Tariffs, a grassroots coalition of nearly 1,200 small U.S. businesses that advocates against tariffs. “Tariffs raise prices,” he said in a statement. Basically, the tariffs are part of a trade war spurring inflation.

Recall that President Trump imposed tariffs, or taxes on imports from U.S. global trading partners, on March 4, 2025. The tariff rates have increased and decreased since then. To say the impacts of the Trump tariffs on aluminum, steel and other commodities from abroad has been chaotic understates the case.

Recent research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas agrees with Anthony’s assessment of tariffs and inflation. The Fed researchers found that import-dependent businesses passing along the cost of tariffs on imports have added a full percentage point to the inflation of consumer prices. What can be done?

“There aren’t many levers the government can pull to lower prices,” according to Anthony, “but permanently eliminating tariffs is one of them.” That is accurate and also unlikely at least in the short term. Further, a brief look back reveals another presidential lever available, and a precedent for it, one that coincides with a past U.S. military defeat and its role in triggering inflation.

On August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon, the Republican born a Quaker who later became an anti-communist crusader, subsequently dubbed “Tricky Dick” in the White House, imposed wage and price controls for 90 days. That lever froze wages and prices to fight inflation, an outcome of U.S. deficit spending to wage war in Vietnam. The point that I am making is that presidents have battled inflation in more than one way.

In the meantime and on a related note, President Donald J. Trump might have delayed the signing of executive orders to temporarily reduce tariffs on beef imports, and back policies to increase the domestic cattle herd. The two policy aims of these proposed executive orders seem contradictory. Are they at odds with each other? What’s really going on here?

Sarah Carden is the research and policy director at Food Action. “The administration appears to be presenting this move as a way to lower beef prices for consumers while supporting domestic cattle ranchers,” she said in a statement, “but we’ve already seen this approach fail. Previous import expansions from Argentina did not meaningfully reduce beef prices because the real problem is a highly consolidated meatpacking sector controlled by just a handful of dominant corporations.”

Consider this. Four major meatpackers control roughly 85 percent of the U.S. beef industry, according to Farm Action. This is the definition of market consolidation.

Such consolidation can and does spur higher prices. Fewer producers in the marketplace means that they can and do avoid price competition. Why should monopoly companies with consolidated market power reduce prices if competitors do not offer lower-priced products to consumers? Why cut prices except to counter competitors’ threats to grab market share and profits?

In a for-profit economic system, such a move to decrease prices absent competitive pressures to do so makes no business sense. Meanwhile, at the end of the day, domestic cattle producers, some of whom make up the base of MAGA, are feeling the pain, along with U.S. consumers and import-dependent businesses generally, coping with the impacts of inflation, tariffs and war.

Seth Sandronsky is a Sacramento journalist and member of the freelancers unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com

2026-05-18T04:15:01.815-07:00

Trump Accounts and the No Economist Left Behind Test

Dean Baker

May 15, 2026

Back when George W. Bush was doing his big drive to privatize Social Security, I got upset because he was using bogus numbers that grossly exaggerated what his private accounts would yield. The basic story was that his team assumed that stocks would provide the same returns they had in prior decades, even though the price-to-earnings ratios in the stock market were far higher than in the past, and projected GDP and profit growth were much lower. Given the assumptions being used on profit growth, their assumptions on returns were virtually impossible.

To illustrate this point, I developed the “No Economist Left Behind Test.” This challenged economists to write down two numbers, one for dividends and one for capital gains, that added to their 10 percent assumed stock returns (7 percent real returns). (For the young’uns, Bush had championed “No Child Left Behind” as the slogan for his education policy.)

I wanted to challenge the return assumptions to effectively take their money away. If the Bush Team could get away with promising an impossible bonanza from their accounts, privatization would look much better than it actually is. It was important to set the record straight.

The test is supposed to be insultingly simple. Economists who can do all sorts of complicated math and statistics should have no problem writing down two numbers that add to 7 percent real return. But no one could do it for the simple reason that they didn’t want to make themselves look stupid.

At that time, the price-to-earnings ratio (PE) in the stock market was around 25. This means that after-tax profits are equal to roughly 4 percent of the share’s price. GDP and profits were projected to grow roughly 2.0 percent annually for the 75-year Social Security planning period.

These were the key numbers. Do you want to say that stocks would give 7 percent returns by paying out dividends, including share buybacks, equal to 7 percent of their share price? That would mean paying out 175 percent of their profits to shareholders?

Companies that pay out more than all their profits as dividends are not going to be around long. Typically, companies pay out 60-70 percent of their profits to shareholders. With profits equal to 4 percent of the share price, this buys you annual returns between 2.4 to 2.8 percent, well below the 7.0 percent assumed by the Bush Team.

Do you want to make up the rest of the 7.0 percent return with a rising share price? Okay, then inflation-adjusted stock prices will have to rise between 4.2 percent and 4.6 percent a year.

If that doesn’t seem like a big deal, remember that profits are only growing 2.0 percent annually after adjusting for inflation. Using the lower 4.2 percent stock price growth figure, the PE would have to rise to 31 after ten years, to 38 after 20 years, and 73 after 50 years. No one wanted to put their names to these projections.

As I pointed out in a piece I wrote a few days ago, the current PE in the stock market is 33. This makes the arithmetic on stock returns even worse than in the Bush privatization days. The profits for an average share of stock are equal to 3.3 percent of its share price. If it pays out 60-70 percent of its profits to shareholders as dividends or buybacks, it would give a yield of between 2.0 percent and 2.3 percent between.

That would mean inflation-adjusted share prices would have to rise be 4.7 percent to 5.0 percent annually to give the assumed 7.0 percent real return. The current inflation-adjusted growth projections for profits are still roughly 2.0 percent. This would give us a PE of 43 in ten years, a PE of 56 in 20 years, and a PE of 122 in 50 years. Anyone want to put their name to those projections?

The key point here is, contrary to the way they are discussed in the media, stock returns don’t fall from heaven. They are related to the real economy. If someone is putting on a clown show, they can claim whatever stock returns they want, but if they want to be serious, they have to say where they come from. Do the No Economist Left Behind Test!

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC.

2026-05-18T04:13:31.143-07:00

Americans: We’re Broke.

Donald Trump: No, You’re Not.

Donald Trump and the Republicans are insisting the economy is great and unhappy Americans are deluded. Just like Democrats under Joe Biden, they’re lying to themselves and everyone else — and will eventually pay the price.

By Branko Marcetic

May 16, 2026

Source: Jacobin

Not long ago, when Joe Biden was running the show, I pointed out again and again (and again) that countless metrics showed Americans were not having a good time economically, and that Democrats fixating on glowing macroeconomic stats and telling themselves the public was deluded would not change this — in fact, that it would eventually lead the party to political ruin. This was exactly what happened, as Donald Trump and the Republicans rode the wave of public discontent with the economy to the White House and control of Congress.

Now it’s Trump and the GOP who are repeating the exact same mistake that led Democrats to lose to them two years ago.

“Look in their heart of hearts, they feel good,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently said when asked about Americans’ dismal view of the US economy. “I’m not sure what they’re telling the survey people.”

At various times, Trump himself has asserted that “everything’s doing really well” and gave the US economy under him the grade of “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus,” claiming that “prices are coming down substantially.”

“I don’t think the people really feel as bad as the Democrats are talking about. The economy is doing well,” one of Trump’s loyal media boosters, Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, insisted.

“It’s phenomenal! That’s a big number!” another one, former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow, told Fox viewers about a recent GDP growth figure, in response to news about price rises. “And shows you how resilient the economy is. Business is strong. Profits are booming. That’s why the stock market is hitting all-time records.”

But as Bessent alluded to, what Americans are “telling the survey people” is a very different story compared to what Fox News hosts are telling Americans.

A record 55 percent now tell Gallup that their personal financial situation is getting worse, the fifth straight year that number has ticked up, and worse than any year of the Great Recession. More than 70 percent of Americans told a CBS News poll they’re struggling to afford food, housing, and other essentials. More than half told CNN the word “uncertainty” describes what they think about their financial futures. Young people are particularly pessimistic, with 81 percent of them rating the economy “bad” or “terrible.”

Nearly two-fifths of Americans still can’t afford to cover a $400 emergency, according to the Federal Reserve’s most recent “Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households” survey covering 2025 — the same exact proportion that said they couldn’t in the bad old days of 2024, and that said this all the way back in 2022, a year that saw the weakest self-reporting of Americans’ finances in years. This is roughly the same share that also told Morning Consult last year they either couldn’t cover that amount (18 percent) or would have to turn to a noncash equivalent to do so (25 percent), like a credit card, a loan, or selling something.

It’s not just price increases that are a worry. The share of Americans who told the Fed survey that “finding or keeping a job” was a concern ticked up five points from a year earlier, including a four-point uptick among those who found it a “major concern.”

Americans’ anxieties about health care costs are as high as ever, according to the most recent Kaiser Family Foundation polling, and in some respects have actually grown. The share of adults reporting that they had cut back on medication in various ways due to costs grew to 43 percent this year, a ten-point rise from 2025.

Okay, but if Americans really are as deluded as Trump and his people say, then maybe they’re just not answering these questions accurately. They might feel like they’re struggling with their finances, but that doesn’t mean they really are. It’s an insulting and elitist view cribbed directly from the previous Democratic administration, but let’s indulge it for a moment.

Unfortunately, there’s plenty of data that suggests that’s not the case.

Foreclosure filings spiked 26 percent from the same time last year in the first quarter of 2026, hitting a six-year high. In other words, the last time Americans filed more foreclosures was when the pandemic forced the economy to practically shut down. This is being driven by the spiking cost of home ownership, not just higher house prices and interest rates but soaring condo fees and insurance rates.

Foreclosures on home loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), a New Deal–era agency created to boost home ownership, leaped 28 percent over the year to this past March, after Trump ended several pandemic-era Biden policies helping homeowners who were behind on their mortgage payments. Trump essentially repeated a fatal mistake Biden himself had made.

At the end of last year, FHA loans hit their highest delinquency rate since 2021, though delinquencies were up across the board for every type of home loan, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s National Delinquency Survey. According to the Federal Reserve Board’s most recent Financial Stability Report, the early payment delinquency rate among near-subprime and subprime borrowers — meaning, the share of mortgages that went delinquent within a year of being opened by borrowers with poor credit scores — is above its historical median.

Delinquency rates in 2026 for auto loans (40 percent), mortgages (21 percent), and especially credit cards (57 percent) are way up from where they were during and before the pandemic. After a major dip, thanks to pandemic-era programs that eased the burden on student loan borrowers, delinquencies on that front are nearing their pre-pandemic numbers, with roughly 3.6 million defaulting over the previous two quarters alone. Survey data shows that these defaulted borrowers are increasingly older, over fifty years old, and were not behind on their payments before the pandemic — suggesting that it’s Americans who were doing okay financially before who are now increasingly struggling to keep their heads above water.

This lines up with data from the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, a nonprofit network of credit counselors. Earlier this year, the organization reported that the level of US financial stress is the worst since it started tracking it in 2018, and that the profile of the typical American seeking credit counseling had drastically changed. Before the pandemic, it had been a person earning roughly $40,000 a year, with a debt worth a quarter of their income. Today it’s someone making around $70,000 a year whose debt is half that number.

According to the most recent data, farm bankruptcies skyrocketed 46 percent in 2025 with 315 filings, likely indicating much broader suffering, as only certain farms qualify for Chapter 12 bankruptcy. Since Trump’s war on Iran choked off the supply of vital commodities, 70 percent of farmers say they can’t afford the fertilizer they need. Bankruptcies more generally went up 11 percent over the calendar year 2025, the third straight year they’ve increased, with the biggest growth happening among nonbusiness bankruptcies.

All of this suggests that metrics dating to 2024, which in a number of cases are the most recent data we have, are far from limited to that year. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies’ 2026 biannual rental housing report found that cost-burdened renters — meaning anyone spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities — hit another all-time high in 2024. (The 2025 and 2026 data won’t be released until 2028). That report found that higher-income households were increasingly falling into this category, with the biggest growth of cost-burdened renters taking place among those making $45,000–$74,999 a year.

Alongside this was what the National Alliance to End Homelessness called “an unprecedented rise in homelessness” of 18 percent from 2023 to 2024, also the most recent data from the organization. At the same time, the number of utility shutoffs nationally, collected for the first time in 2024 and published last month, outstripped by millions what analysts had estimated would be the total. It’s backed by a data analysis by the Washington Post of utilities in eleven states, which found there had been a rise in disconnections in at least eight of them from 2024 to 2025.

Maybe most ominous is what has been recently reported by businesses traditionally favored by lower-income consumers. Executives at Dollar Tree, Walmart, and McDonald’s have all said not only that they are seeing larger shares of high-income earners shopping at their stores but also that the low- and medium-income households that have traditionally been their bread and butter are struggling.

Dollar Tree CEO Michael Creedon said on a fourth quarter earnings call that the company “grew households across all income cohorts” and at an “accelerated rate,” but that “in the middle to higher income households, we see accelerated trade down.” In other words, more affluent shoppers who normally wouldn’t be caught dead in one of their stores are increasingly turning to low-cost retailers to spend less.

“We had a lot of growth with customers who are income bracket of $100,000 or above, and that’s pretty consistent with the last few quarters,” Walmart CEO John R. Furner said this past February. “The lower income segment $50,000 and below, we did see, of course, as we mentioned, some stress. In many cases, we see people living paycheck-to-paycheck.”

“We’re seeing, you know, solid growth, good growth with higher income and also gaining share with higher income for us,” McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said on an earnings call for the first quarter of 2026. “That lower income, while the declines are not as pronounced as they were, maybe, you know, six or twelve months ago when we were talking about high single digit, the low income is absolutely still declining.”

In other words, lower-income Americans are cutting back their spending on even low-cost consumer goods, and higher-income households, even those making six figures, are turning to those budget options, which they have tended to shun. This does not paint a picture of an economy that’s working particularly well for anyone, and in fact, suggests that the “K-shaped economy” — where low-income households cut back spending but high-income households keep the economy propped up by spending even more — may be slowly turning into a “backslash economy,” where everything is trending down.

That both Democrats and Republicans and their respective loyalists have just wholesale swapped talking points about this speaks to more than just the polarization that shapes how many Americans look at their country. It speaks to a political and media elite that is, no matter their party or ideology, blissfully out of touch with the lives of the people they’re meant to be serving, and which, owing to its own exorbitant wealth, simply experiences an entirely different economic reality from most of the US public.

This article was originally published by Jacobin; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.

Branko Marcetic

Branko Marcetic is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine and a 2019-2020 Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting fellow. He is the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.