Favour is a team leader in a care company that provides home care and supported living. She is based in Cardiff. Her name has been changed due to fears of workplace retaliation.

In your experience, how is the care sector broken?

So much is broken. Even just thinking about what a lot of us have been through is already making me teary. I lived here with my three children before getting into a COS sponsorship. This visa changed my reality. As a carer, I could hardly take care of my kids. Even when you’re sick or the children are sick, you’re forced to work.

A lot of people are suffering. People are depressed and enduring severe mental and physical challenges. Just a few months ago, my colleague was forced to work during her pregnancy. The employers are gods over migrant workers. You have no agency over yourself or your family. People are living in anxiety and in fear. This summer, carers were driving around all day in the heat waves, getting sick. Nobody cared. But we do this job with everything we’ve got. As Africans, we’re full of love, and we go into this work as part of an imbued collective responsibility to take care of parents and elders. It’s something we do back home. But here we’re treated as slaves, and no one wants to hear it. Instead, the government may actually make it worse.

What would be the impact of a fifteen year wait for permanent settlement?

The fifteen year proposal makes my blood boil. There was an agreement between me and this government. No one should treat me or my child like less than others. A lot of us come from very strong backgrounds back home; I originally came to this country on a scholarship for a second master’s degree, and then a PhD. I’ve been to conferences at the United Nations and I know my impact.

But now, I am a migrant worker. When I and others decided to do this route, we told each other, ‘Ah, it’s not five years. Let’s close our eyes. It’s sixty months,’ and we’ve been counting down ever since. Now, someone is telling me fifteen years. Before I came here, I never had any health challenges. Should I begin to tell you what I’ve been through? One time, I had a health emergency coming back to Cardiff from Port Talbot late at night. I blacked out and the next thing I knew, an ambulance arrived. My employer was impatient. ‘When are you coming back to work?’ they asked. I had to scream. Are you mad? I told them that I value my life and I’ll come when I can.

This system has put me into poverty. I still have my own standards, and if I reduce them to the level they want me to go to, I’m going to lose my mind. The bills are always piling up, waiting for you. There have been times when I’ve asked myself if I should just end it all. Then I look at my children. They didn’t ask me to bring them here. If I die, what’s going to happen to them? I think the government is targeting our children with these rule changes. They want to subject more children to no future.

Fifteen years of this? We shouldn’t even be talking about it. There’s no way we’re having that, and we’ll fight.

What kind of change do you want to see in social care?

As part of UNISON’s Fair Visa Campaign, we’ve been able to build a very strong migrant workers’ network. We’ve met with government ministers and the King. At the moment we’re fighting for the five year visa to be maintained and the fifteen-year scheme to be rejected with force. We’re also working on a sector-wide visa. 

We’ve had success so far. In Cardiff Council, for example, migrant workers and a UNISON regional organiser were able to secure a migrant workers’ charter. The charter is a document that makes the council protect migrant workers against all this injustice and to adjust the way they give out their contracts. They’ve committed to only commissioning care companies that pay at least a real living wage, cover travel time and training, and give actual payslips. The council will also act against employers that threaten carer’s sponsorship and will help carers find new work if their company falls apart or if it loses its license to offer sponsorship.

We’re also working on getting our employers to recognise UNISON in our workplaces to make life a bit more bearable. We’re building momentum. When you organise, there’s no way you’re not going to win. But it takes all of us working together.

Lydia is a care assistant in a dementia care home. She has previously worked in supported living, domiciliary care, and supported people with disabilities. She is based in Dorset.

In your experience, how is the care sector broken?

The care sector is broken because it’s unregulated. This causes chaos for people who are subjected to sponsorships and skilled worker roles. People are not treated as people, but as immigration statistics and numbers to fuel the economy. There’s nothing human about it.

When I first arrived in this country, I went to my sponsor near Cambridge. Eight of us were put in a two-bedroom house for two weeks without work and without proper privacy. We were quickly moved to another place in Huntingdon, then to another place in Peterborough. I called the sponsor and told him that I had paid nearly £12,000 in order to come and be given work, and now he was doing nothing. He told me to go find work myself, like cleaning dishes and utensils in a hotel, or to try to find a job at care homes in the area. After I threatened to report him I was able to leave and got myself a very small, broken down car. I then went to Hertfordshire and worked for someone else who wanted to sponsor me, but I knew she wasn’t operating properly and wanted me to lie about my experience. I refused to lie, so I eventually left that job and tried to find work in Somerset. After Somerset, I came to Dorset.

I don’t want to be emotional, but it has been a very, very long journey. I’ve had to sleep in that small car during cold winters. I’d be in petrol station car parks and use public facilities to wash. I’d have to ask clients for food. I developed arthritis in my knees. At one point, I contemplated suicide and I thought it was the end. But instead I’ve decided to fight.

As a carer, I’ve experienced employers who have manipulated my wages and refused to pay mileage, forcing me into poverty despite working seven days a week. I’ve worked days and nights, been subjected to inhumane conditions and experienced the true meaning of racism. I’ve been threatened and fired for speaking up, and I’ve resigned when I couldn’t take it anymore. At the moment, I’m halfway through my curtailment period, meaning I only have one more month to find a new job before my visa is cancelled.

There are two other specific ways the sector is broken. First, carers are in debt. We cannot afford council tax or electricity because of the low compensation that we receive. We are low paid, but we are not low skilled.

Second, there’s a major issue with risk assessments. Employers are not keeping carers safe. Just last year, my countrymate Irene Mbugua, a live-in carer, was killed by her service user in Birmingham. She was beaten to death and her body was just left there. There had been indications that the service user was presenting as unstable and wasn’t taking his medication, but it seems that the company didn’t do anything. In the end, there are now four children without their mother.

I love this work. It’s something that I want to do, but I want to do it with safety, fair working conditions, and without coercion.

What would be the impact of a fifteen year wait for permanent settlement?

That would mean fifteen years of not seeing our children. Fifteen years of being treated like dogs. Fifteen years of no career growth, of stagnation, of being taxed for the benefit of others with no access to public funds ourselves. Fifteen years of not being considered part of society. Fifteen years of ungoverned torture. No.

What kind of change do you want to see in social care?

In addition to what my comrades have said, I want to see three things. First, I want a sector where there’s actual monitoring and evaluation. If the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the local authority, or other bodies are not coming to see that what needs to be done is actually done, then it will continue as it is. I also want to see training. A lot of people are not being trained, and it is wrong to throw people into the deep end without proper support. Third, we want our public funds. We’re members of the public and we’re contributing to society, so we should have recourse to public funds.

Princess is a carer for a community care agency, traveling from home to home to attend to vulnerable individuals. She is based in London.

In your experience, how is the care sector broken?

We’ve all gone through so much that it’s not easy to talk about it. For a long time I broke down in tears when I shared my story. So much is wrong with this system. First, the employers have been given unchecked power. The government didn’t consider the abuse that would result from giving so much power to an employer. When many of us arrived in this country, some of the people that recruited us actually had no work to offer us. All they did was say: ‘Oh, you can find your way.’ You saw people who were living comfortably in their home country now going to food banks and begging for food because they couldn’t work. We were ready to do the work, but we were unfortunate to meet employers that decided to take advantage of many of us.

When people are given work, they are overworked. You see carers working 60, 70 hours in one week. At some points in my life in this country, I’ve had to wake up at 5:00 AM and leave my home at 5:30 to get to my first client at 5:50. I’d drive all day, and not finish until about 10:00 PM. Overall, I’d be on the road for about 18 hours and only get paid for 8 or 10 hours. When you ask an employer for mileage or for travel time, they tell you that they’re doing you a favour by keeping you in the country. That’s too much power given to just one person.

Carers are consistently treated like slaves. Managers will just give you a client without a risk assessment, putting our lives at risk just because we are on COS. Service users’ relatives bully us and talk down to us. I’ve had someone tell me: ‘You Blacks have to come and do this work because an average English person won’t do this.’ That is unacceptable. The same man told me: ‘If I do anything to you, if I say anything to you, your employer won’t do anything, because they value profit over your welfare.’ And he was right. Managers have raped people on COS, and the victims couldn’t speak out. Why? Because they know that saying anything about the injustice meted on them will mean them going back to their home country. Many people have nothing to fall back on, so how do you expect them to speak up and risk going back? An employer could go to sleep, wake up, and decide to send an email to the Home Office to say you’re no longer working with them just because you question whatever abuse they’re inflicting on you.

This has a huge impact on families. For example, a new mum just back from maternity leave can receive staggered shifts. That means she doesn’t even know when she’s supposed to work. She’s trying to figure out how to manage childcare, and keep in mind, as women on COS, we have no recourse to public funds. Those fifteen hours of free childcare? We can’t access it. You have to pay so much to be able to keep your child somewhere, and you’re working from 6:00 AM until about 9:00 or 10:00 PM. What time do I have to show love to my child when I’m doing these hours five, six, seven days a week? I can’t spend time with her. I can’t say, ‘Oh, let’s go on holiday.’ We can’t go on holiday because my employer will tell me that I have no right to go on holiday, that I’m not here to enjoy the British lifestyle. I am here to work. One time I asked my employer, ‘Are we here as slaves or are we here as humans?’ I was told that the employment law of this country does not apply to anybody on COS. That means that the COS is slavery dressed as a visa.

What would be the impact of a fifteen year wait for permanent settlement?

For the government to say, ‘Oh, we’re going to add extra years for you,’ is unacceptable. On what basis will our years be extended? On the grounds that we’ve not paid enough in taxes, or because they fear we would want to access benefits? We are hard-working people. We pay taxes and National Insurance (NI) — NI that we will not benefit from. They don’t see what we’re contributing in the moment, just what they think we’ll want in the future.

Maybe they’re afraid that people will leave care. Oh, really? Is that supposed to be our fault? Is that supposed to be our headache? You created a route and you said after five years you should be able to settle, and now you’re afraid that I’m going to leave that route? What more do they want from migrant workers? You can’t keep people in care without their consent. It’s none of the government’s business what we do after five years.

A change to fifteen years will also mean that children stay on the same status as their parents for ten extra years. The UK government always talks about child poverty, but when it comes to children of migrants, those children are not children enough. They need to be treated differently because the system accepts their parents as slaves.

We have a prime minister who is empathetic towards our plight. We need people to hear us and know what we are going through. We applied for a visa. We paid every dime we were meant to pay. We are contributing as much as we can into the system. So the government is not doing us a favour: we made an agreement and we are providing a service. Fifteen years is unacceptable. We will not take it.

What kind of change do you want to see in social care?

I want a social care service where there’s a sector-wide visa rather than employer sponsorship. I want people to be able to move jobs when they are not treated well in their place of work and to not have to accept abuse, injustice and bullying just because they want to remain in this country. I want a system that will protect mothers and children, and a service that is well-remunerated so migrant workers don’t have to live in abject poverty and depend on debt to live their life, to support their children through school, or pay their bills on a daily basis. I want a well-regulated social care service where individuals are treated with dignity and respect, not as slaves because of the colour of their skin.

Oluwabunmi has worked as a carer in a nursing home for three years. She is based in Yorkshire.

In your experience, how is the care sector broken?

Abuse, discrimination, intimidation, racism and the false narratives that have been put out there to discredit our efforts as migrant workers in this country. Since COVID 19, the UK government has failed to confront how badly the care sector has been managed by the employers. We have experienced hell from our bosses and we cannot speak out because our immigration status is tied to this employment. Those of us who try to speak out are discredited, suffer abuse, and have lost visa sponsorship. We don’t have a voice. The UK government isn’t listening to our pain or seeing our hard work. We pay taxes, feed our children, take care of ourselves and contribute to the community, all without recourse to public funds. We are not slaves. We are human, and we should be treated as such.

What would be the impact of a fifteen year wait for permanent settlement?

We made the life-changing decision, based on this government’s promise to us, to come to this country and work. The government promised that after five years we would be given ILR. It’s unfair to change the goalpost after you’ve made a promise. This decision would also affect our children because they can no longer be dependents on our carer visas after they turn eighteen, so they will be forced to fend for themselves. A fifteen year wait for status ensures this will happen, and it is unacceptable. We want the government to keep its word, ensure that the sector is regulated, and take power away from the employer. If the government does this, we’ll be able to work with dignity and respect. I’m not afraid of going back home. I’m only afraid of employers and the UK government subjecting me and my children to abject poverty and unstable mental health in this country. We know that we deserve better and by God’s grace we will get better. We have had enough, and we can no longer tolerate this.

What kind of change do you want to see in social care?

I agree with everything my comrades have said. I would only add that we need better record keeping. There needs to be proper data analysis of the migrant workers’ contribution to British society. All we’ve seen are false analyses and false narratives, which don’t tell the reality of what is going on in the care sector or for migrant workers as a whole.

Parts of the movement had previously assumed that climate science could speak for itself, and that enough public awareness would precipitate political change. The task was to leverage popular power to appeal to the state and private capital. This produced campaigns centred on the Green New Deal, a framework that revived Keynesian stimulus policies to turbocharge investment in renewables.

The mainstream British climate movement relied on vague appeals to ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ towards the planet. Yet this universalism papered over the role of imperialism in driving the climate crisis and its uneven effects across gendered, racialised and class lines. Demands to protect ‘our future’ from ecological disaster elided those in the Global South for whom that future had already arrived. The GND was a reflection of this narrow politics, based on national emissions targets and green jobs within Britain.

This solely national perspective opened the door to the strange convergences we see today: militaries commended for adopting sustainable aviation fuel reforms while remaining some of the largest contributors to the climate crisis and so-called ‘green transitions’ powered by extractivism of critical minerals in the Global South. A truly eco-socialist agenda, resting on democratisation, decommodification and decolonisation, was meanwhile pushed to the margins. The movement’s strategy of pressuring the state for concessions suffered a further setback when Keir Starmer scaled back his major green investment strategy and energy companies doubled down on profits from oil and gas.

Partly owing to its middle-class character and ‘post-material’ concerns, the British climate movement began to stagnate in the 2020s, becoming little more than a single-issue campaign. It missed a crucial opportunity to develop working-class power through an expansive green program. Its isolation from national liberation struggles in the Global South, and its failure to recognise the root causes of the climate crisis in capitalism and imperialism, echoed a larger structural weakness on the left.

This stagnation was deepened by surveillance, criminalisation and policing. Groups like Just Stop Oil were heavily repressed. The external assault combined with internal challenges: professionalisation, cults of leadership, unsustainable organising methods. Many young people radicalised by the climate crisis were absorbed into professionalised spaces, while grassroots collectives failed to translate the mass demonstrations into long-lasting structures capable of tackling the task at hand.

Covid-19 also exposed the fundamental limitations of a strategy based on demanding concessions from the state. As Andreas Malm has noted, capitalist states are repearedly proved incapable of anything more than ‘treating the symptoms’ of planetary crises ‘once they had blasted through the bodies of populations’. But even that seems generous: many Global North states preferred to let the pandemic run riot rather than risk the most minor disruption to accumulation.

Co-opted and hollowed out, the climate movement was powerless to resist the sequence of events that followed. The US, Europe and Britain abandoned meagre commitments to climate action, turning instead to a programme of rearmament unprecedented in the twenty-first century. Economic stagnation created space for climate denialism and fossil fuel accelerationism to take hold in British electoral politics, accelerating the rise of the far-right. Labour governments, first under Starmer and now under Burnham, have rowed back on climate commitments in pursuit of the illusory goal of ‘growth’.

October 7th crystallised existing contradictions both across the left and within the climate movement. Some climate organisations recognised that the same systems of fossil fuel extraction and militarism driving the climate crisis were also fuelling the genocide in Gaza; but the political space to make those demands was highly restricted.

When activists organised an open letter in solidarity with Palestine in December that year, leading climate organisations were notably absent. Their leaderships overruled internal dissent or found themselves constrained by funding models that place serious risks on criticism of Israel or support for Palestinian self-determination. This exposed a generational rupture, with the environmentalist old guard increasingly disconnected from a younger, more militant base radicalised in opposition to the genocide. While some leaders still urged activists to focus on simply lobbying national policymakers, Gaza revealed the need for internationalist climate justice, as the US, Britain and Israel collaborated in the annihilation of life and the eclipse of our planetary future.

This fundamentally altered the direction of the climate movement. Seasoned climate organisers pivoted to supporting Palestinian liberation: shutting down arms factories, resisting the expansion of state repression and forming new groups demonstrating the links between far-right politics, oil lobbyists and billionaires profiting from genocide.

This wasn’t all new: many who joined Palestine Action’s early direct action before 2023 were involved with Extinction Rebellion, knowing that British militarism and Israeli arms companies were among the primary drivers of the climate crisis. Yet 7 October expanded the boundaries of the climate movement, making its overlap with anti-imperialism more explicit. Since then, US aggression has escalated from Palestine to Iran, Venezuela to Cuba. While there has not yet been a unified response from climate organisations, individual climate activists like Greta Thunberg, who rose to prominence through the 2019 Fridays for Future school strikes, have actively tried to break the sieges on Gaza and Cuba, illustrating both the necessity to expand the remit of climate politics and the institutional inertia preventing a movement-wide shift.

These wars of aggression have demonstrated the extent to which US militarism is driving the climate crisis. The US military is the single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels worldwide, its bases and warships frontline emitters of greenhouse gases. Our Resisting Rearmament report with Climate Vanguard details how Britain has subordinated itself to US monopoly capital, pursuing rearmament to maintain its ‘special relationship’ in this new and even more dangerous phase of empire.

If climate justice is concerned with protecting the conditions for human and ecological life, then struggles supporting the national sovereignty and liberation of the Global South are inherently climate struggles. The people of the global South are fighting to secure a future for us all against US-led global hegemony.

Eco-populism has recently surged under Zack Polanski’s Green Party. Parts of the climate movement have pivoted towards this electoral project and sharpened their emphasis on class politics. At the same time, ambitious ecological organising projects have emerged: Anakbayan UK has campaigned against British mining in the Philippines, the Palestinian Youth Movement has launched the People’s Embargo for Palestine, and local groups across Britain that have used direct action to target RAF bases and mass picket arms factories. Climate Vanguard have also developed radical political education for young people, who have in turn formed the Orbit cadre group with the aim of driving eco-socialist politics in various other left organisations.

In the labour movement, workers are now organising around anti-imperialist and ecological demands. Unite Hospitality members in Glasgow have launched a BDS-aligned service boycott at the Glasgow Film Theatre and are building an industrial strategy for Palestine. Workers for a Free Palestine is organising civil service workers to engage in work refusals; and Healthcare Workers for a Free Palestine is coordinating across the NHS to end the renewal of the government’s contract with Palantir. The Heat Strike campaign is pushing for a legally recognised maximum workplace temperature and a heatwave furlough scheme, providing a clear possibility for anti-war and climate organisations to link Britain’s involvement in the war on Iran and hosting of US bases to climate breakdown and rising prices.

The aim must be to bring these currents together in recognising that Britain’s role in the imperial system must be dismantled as a precondition of climate justice. We must push beyond eco-populism and build towards eco-socialism. By orienting the climate movement towards this horizon, we can begin to confront the underlying weaknesses that led to its stagnation. The old climate movement — with its professionalisation, its isolation from the left and its inability to confront imperialism — cannot and should not be revived. Something new must take its place.

Energy Embargo for Palestine was formed in the wake of Israel’s intensified genocide in Gaza at the intersection of climate, anti-imperialist, and Palestine organising. Since launching, we have run a concerted campaign targeting BP’s operations and its complicity in fuelling the genocide — targeting institutional partnerships with BP, mapping and exposing the supply of oil to Israel via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, and identifying points of disruption within Britain.

Climate justice should not be understood as an end in itself, a demand to be won and then set aside. It is a front in our broader struggle against capitalism and imperialism. The mass engagement of young people activated by the climate crisis, and the infrastructure developed from the past decade of movements, must be leveraged in a project that sees climate justice as inseparable from global class struggle, particularly the national liberation struggles of the Global South. The role of ecological organisations — and of those on the left more broadly — is to create the conditions for this project to emerge, and to join the fight for a just future.

AI is literally retarding our brains. If online media was once an echo chamber, it has now become a hellscape of algorithmic slop which heightens social alienation in ways that were previously unimaginable. A recent study shows that students who use LLMS to write essays exhibited reduced brain activity and diminished critical engagement compared to those who use search engines or simply their own unaided reasoning. Researchers at the MIT Media Lab found that the convenience of automated answers produces so-called ‘cognitive debt’: a clear, measurable contraction of human attention and creativity. Another study by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment identified a general fall in numeracy and literacy comprehension that coincides with the mass adoption of these technologies.

Behind AI’s consumer-facing slopverse there is a material infrastructure of staggering scale. Nvidia’s global supply chain, for example, draws tungsten from Brazil, gold from Colombia, and tantalum from Kazakhstan to manufacture GPUs at TSMC in Taiwan. These chips travel through a planetary web of logistics operators, miners, data labellers and e-waste dismantlers. Over 10,000 data centres now operate across 170 countries, but their distribution is profoundly uneven. Because the United States, China and the EU host more than half, computational power is highly concentrated in the Global North. The geography of AI thus reproduces old imperial hierarchies. The Global South provides minerals, labour and land; the North monopolises compute, patents and profit. 

All this will get worse as the different Big Tech players struggle for dominance. Amazon plans to invest $150 billion on data centres over the next fifteen years, while Meta’s projected spend on data centres was $37 billion in a single year. The United Kingdom aims to build 100 data centres by 2030, including a £10bn AI data centre in Blyth consisting of 10 buildings covering 540,000 square metres. These will all consume vast quantities of energy and water, straining local ecosystems while producing tons of greenhouse gas emissions and e-waste. 

The global data cloud has a greater carbon footprint than the aviation industry. Energy consumed by data centres alone accounts for 0.3 percent of global carbon emissions. AI advocates argue that as more hyperscale centres get built, efficiency will improve and green energy will be used more — but similar ‘net zero’ pledges by European energy companies from Shell to BP have been exposed as simply crass greenwashing scams. There’s little reason to think AI will be any different. 

People across the globe are now recognising these social costs. Between 2023 and 2025, activists blocked $18 billion worth of data-centre projects and delayed another $46 billion across 24 US states. Outside the capitalist core, similar movements motivated by environmental and infrastructural concerns are taking off. In Cerrillos, Chile, communities led by local activist Pamela Ramírez halted Google’s water-intensive facility amid a historic drought. In Dublin, Ireland, the ‘Press Pause on Data Centres’ campaign has been fighting back against data infrastructure that threatens to consume 27 percent of national electricity by 2028, while in the Netherlands the Save the Wieringermeer campaign has defended farmland and aquifers from Microsoft projects. 

The resistance to data-centre development in the UK combines struggles over land, energy, water and urban space. From East London to Buckinghamshire and Fife, objections around housing, energy grid capacity, water, pollution and work converge as communities are expected to surrender socially necessary resources to privately owned tech infrastructure, to enable AI expansion that nobody wants. 

The dispute over Brick Lane in East London, recently written up in these pages, makes this especially stark. There, the government is determined to redirect resources that could be used for housing and other social needs towards a highly capital-intensive data centre. There are over 192 data centres operating or being built around London: infrastructure won’t provide jobs or benefits to the community, but will simply become another tributary to US tech oligarch fortunes. Any opposition to them is cast as an impediment to ‘growth’. While Brick Lane is being forced through by Burnham’s cabinet despite the local mayor blocking it, Buckinghamshire was successfully stopped.

In light of the dangers of Big Tech, the scholar Dan Mcquillan advocates what he calls a ‘decomputing society’, involving the dramatic reduction of datafication and computational energy from infrastructure to culture. Decomputing requires democratic limits on data extraction and energy-intensive computation, prioritising socially beneficial technologies over capitalist efficiency. The campaign known as ‘Welcome Spring, Burn a Tesla’ has targeted Elon Musk’s Gigafactory in Berlin along with his dealerships across Europe, and the Algorithmic Sabotage Research Group has drawn up a manifesto for algorithmic disobedience: disrupting AI systems through data poisoning, misinformation loops, and ‘tarpit’ traps that flood data-scrapers with nonsense content. 

These disruptive strategies are one thing, but building a compelling social alternative is another. The classic left critique of technology reminds us that it is never neutral: that relations of power are reflected in its design, and that it therefore reproduces the capitalist imperatives of competition, scale and profit. Today, with politics lurching even further right, new technologies are absorbing reactionary tendencies from society at large. As oligarchs advocate a return to monarchy and promote conspiracy theories about the Antichrist, their fantasies become embedded in the algorithms that they own. 

The history of class struggle from the Luddites to the Writers Guild of America shows that the emancipatory potential of technology never comes from the technology itself. It comes from building enough power to fundamentally remake these infrastructures. Hence the recent movement for digital sovereignty: public clouds and computational models with transparent safety frameworks which are democratically designed, rather than imposed by the superrich. The Non-Aligned Technologies Movement aims to translate this demand into an international campaign against the unequal digital world-system. 

For such movements to succeed, they would need to be aided by a state-led industrial strategy to decommission data infrastructure or reorient it towards socially necessary functions, set by workers and users. A process of collective decomputing could meanwhile ensure that all data contributions remain in open commons, controlled by everyone rather than enclosed by rentiers. This might seem like a distant prospect. But the fact is that any technology that emerges out of intellectual monopolism and extractive supply chains will be marked by these destructive forces. Remaking the former inevitably means destroying the latter.

Both actions were led by Daniel Thomas, known to his followers as ‘Danny Tommo’, a notorious self-publicist whose backstory includes a prison sentence for attempted kidnapping. His organisation, Patriot Platform, is not a militia in any literal sense, despite its paramilitary pretensions. But it would be wrong to dismiss the matching black clothes, balaclavas and choreographed blockade as mere cosplay. It is more than just macho theatre designed to generate clips, donations and followers. Clickbait spectacle and organisational heft are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the spectacle is an essential part of the organisational process. It advertises the group, invites identification with it and tests whether an audience assembled online can assert power offline.

Dover was organised through mailing lists and peer-to-peer messaging services, allowing hundreds to assemble before the police or anti-racists had fully grasped what was happening. Portsmouth was more opportunistic. There, the unexpected decision to bring people rescued in the Channel ashore created an event around which Thomas and his allies could mobilise. Supporters were summoned through livestreams and social media. The physical crowd and the online audience reinforced one another.

Both events showcased the ‘influencer militia’ aesthetic that Thomas has long rehearsed, in which he has cast himself as a citizen-soldier defending Britain from invasion. The grandiosely named Operation Overlord, which he helped launch in late 2025, combined pseudo-military expeditions to France to harass refugees and charity workers with appeals for recruits and equipment. Its theatre was absurd, but its organisational purpose was real.

The streaming economy gives Thomas’s project a material basis. Confrontation produces content; content generates donations, subscriptions and merchandise sales; and those revenues help finance further confrontation. This is the spectacular politics of digital fascism. Patriot Platform can thus respond to an organisational problem exposed by the racist riots of 2024. They had proved how rapidly rumours and inflammatory online material could bring thousands onto the streets, but they also revealed the fragility of such protests. Crowds assembled and dispersed quickly under pressure from arrests, public revulsion and mass anti-racist opposition.

Patriot Platform asks whether something more durable can be built: a layer of people who can be contacted and redeployed once the bigger crowd has gone home.

Robinson does not lead a disciplined membership organisation. His power lies in connecting anti-migrant campaigners, streamers, wealthy donors, hardened fascists and a vast digital audience. This structure provides flexibility and distance from responsibility. Robinson can promote an action without formally organising it, creating an atmosphere in which violent confrontation is likely, and then disavowing it when it occurs.

Yet online followers are not necessarily dependable activists. Huge demonstrations can project an image of strength without leaving durable organisation behind. This was clear on 16 May, when Robinson’s attempt to reproduce the enormous Unite the Kingdom mobilisation of the previous September drew a significantly smaller turnout.

Patriot Platform attempts to compensate through a form of franchised mobilisation. Thomas operates at one remove from Robinson, recruiting and deploying activists while Robinson supplies mass amplification at decisive moments. At Dover, Robinson promoted Patriot Platform after the blockade had begun without assuming responsibility for it.

Robinson can thus gain access to a potentially more dependable street force without commanding it directly, while Thomas can gain recruits, money and authority through his proximity to Robinson. Dover and Portsmouth suggest that Thomas is trying to make racial violence less dependent upon a singular riot and more capable of being summoned, branded, repeated.

There are consequences here for the electoral far right. A scandal may weaken Reform while opening space for fascist networks to develop greater capacity on the streets, and for Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain to court activists alienated by Farage’s faltering pursuit of respectability. Years of anti-migrant agitation have now created networks and forms of political power capable of outlasting any individual electoral vehicle. The climate of Farageism strengthens organisations beyond his control, which can develop capacities of their own.

Defeating Farage at the ballot box will not by itself dismantle the networks built around the politics he has helped normalise. A hardened and organised far-right core can continue to reproduce itself and expand its forces long after an election is over, with terrifying consequences for minority communities.

Still, the far right does not have the terrain to itself. In Glasgow in July, years of organising by Stand Up to Racism, trade unions, refugee groups and community organisations produced a mobilisation capable of substantially outnumbering ‘Unite the Clans’. Actions like this, alongside the enormous Together rally in London in March, play a critical role in breaking the far right’s claim to own the streets and limiting the confidence of the hardened core around Robinson, Thomas and others.

The bedrock of this response is the crucial but unglamorous work of building local relationships and networks of practical solidarity. Counter-demonstrations remain indispensable, but their strength is built before the far right announces its mobilisation. Anti-racist organisation must be consistent, rooted in everyday life and capable of bringing people together between moments of confrontation.

The wider labour movement must draw the correct organisational conclusion. The far right is using every tool at its disposal: it is digitally connected, internationally networked and able to draw upon wealthy donors. Anti-racists therefore need a more visible and durable presence in working-class communities. Trade unions have a particularly important role, both inside workplaces and beyond them.

Where such networks do not exist, a sudden riot or far-right demonstration outside asylum accommodation can leave small numbers of anti-racists isolated and threatened communities exposed. They may find only a handful of local labour activists, faith organisations or campaigners to whom they can turn. However committed those people may be, the balance of forces is not on their side.

Robust anti-racist networks can break that isolation. They make sustained campaigning possible, develop new activists, build relationships across communities and allow conversations with neighbours who have been drawn towards the outer edges of reactionary politics. They also establish the local foundations from which a much larger response can be mobilised when the far right appears. Such activity does not substitute for confronting the far right, but it does help create the relationships and practical solidarity through which larger confrontations can be won.

Reform’s Zia Yusuf blamed last weekend’s disorder on Andy Burnham, expressing support for protesters’ ‘outrage, their anger, their terror’. He accused the Prime Minister of generating disorder by providing a police escort to people whom he claimed had ‘broken into this country’.

Yusuf’s response illustrates how far-right disorder can be politically useful to Reform even while it attempts to preserve some distance from men like Thomas. Rather than challenge the racist premises of the mobilisation, party figures can recast the violence as evidence that Britain is trapped in a migration emergency. Those creating the disorder are kept at arm’s length, while the crisis they manufacture is used to validate Reform’s diagnosis.

The far right is not a single organisation operating under a common command. Reform, Restore Britain, Robinson and Patriot Platform pursue different forms of power and frequently compete with one another. Nonetheless, they operate on the same political terrain, legitimising shared grievances while playing different roles. Recognising this interplay does not mean describing them as the electoral and street wings of a unified project. It means understanding that gains in one arena can strengthen actors in another.

Anti-racism must therefore intervene wherever those forces operate — in elections, workplaces, communities and on the streets. Stand Up to Racism’s campaigning against Reform candidates across the country is one example of how electoral advances can be contested without abandoning the mobilisation needed to confront fascists physically.

The masked formation at Dover bore an eerie visual resemblance to federal immigration agents operating under Trump. Of course, Patriot Platform remains a private far-right initiative while ICE exercises the coercive power of the state. Yet the Trump administration has incorporated far-right spectacle and vigilante violence into its immigration enforcement campaign, which has pushed deaths in ICE custody up to their highest level for two decades.

Farage is down, but he is not out. Reform retains a substantial base that has proved resilient amid repeated allegations of corruption. Renewed shocks to food and fuel prices arising from the US–Iran war and the developing El Niño could deepen the cost-of-living crisis and give Farage another opportunity to redirect economic insecurity against minority communities. Voters beyond Reform’s core might now be repelled by the impression that something about Farage is seedy or corrupt, but worsening material conditions could change their calculations.

Andy Burnham has interrupted Reform’s momentum partly by offering a rival explanation for social decline. Towns have been hollowed out by deindustrialisation, privatisation, underinvestment and the concentration of political power. The clock is ticking for his government to translate that account into improvements people can feel in their everyday lives.

The new Prime Minister also faces immediate questions over Indefinite Leave to Remain. Trade unions and Labour backbenchers are pressing him to abandon Starmer’s plans to make life even more difficult for the social-care workers and other skilled migrants on whom we rely: dramatically extending the waiting period for them to apply for settled status, as a means of deterring migration and appealing to Farage voters. This will be an early test of whether Burnham is prepared to break with the programme of scapegoating migrants that characterised the previous leadership.

The different components must work together to prevent the most right-wing party in modern British history from taking power. That imperative is clear, but it is not enough. Though Farage may be faltering, the forces nourished by his politics are not waiting for Reform to recover; they are organising autonomously. The anti-racist movement must stop them in their tracks. It must assert its presence by confronting fascists on the streets, building the social power upon which effective confrontation depends, and becoming a force that the establishment cannot ignore.

When Brazilian millionaire businessman João Havelange ousted the obsolete English technocrat Sir Stanley Rous as FIFA president in 1974 (not least due to Rous’s opposition to the expulsion of apartheid South Africa), the FIFA he inherited was an archaic bureaucracy oblivious to commercial opportunities.

Unlike Rous, Havelange understood that the post-war Keynesian compact had given way to an increasingly unregulated, interconnected network of exchange driven by multinational corporate expansion. By partnering with Adidas and Coca-Cola, Havelange turned FIFA into a powerhouse in the age of neoliberal globalisation.

But with its lust for expanding its markets, its willingness to commercialise almost every aspect of the game and even its milquetoast and, in practice, highly disingenuous social liberalism, the FIFA of Havelange and his successor, Sepp Blatter, is now at odds with an emerging, post-globalisation world increasingly structured by protectionism, networks of patronage and ethno-nationalism.

Infantino, not coincidentally, was elected FIFA president the same year that Britain voted to leave the EU and Trump was first elected president of the United States. Infantino’s private finance sell-off plan marked the culmination of ten years navigating an age defined by what Jamie Merchant calls ‘a new inter-imperial competition for the global product’. Infantino clearly believes that Trump’s USA — and its imperial network — will be the winner.

Private finance, and particularly private equity, is essential to Trump’s project. Kushner, of course, is the brother of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared, and the son of Charles, the US ambassador to France and Monaco. More broadly, however, private equity and other forms of alternative finance were among the largest donors to Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign and actively support kindred governments around the world. In return for their support, Trump and similarly minded officials relax financial regulations and allow these firms to access capital from life insurers and pension funds. The reward them comes back around: when private equity firms destroy healthcare, water, nursing homes and other everyday necessities by loading them up with debt, far-right politicians like Trump seize on the consequent sense of social and political breakdown to advance a politics of grievance and right-wing nationalism.

Bad as this may be, FIFA’s members have for years tolerated Infantino’s imbecilic behaviour to ingratiate himself with Trump, from his preposterous ‘I feel . . . ’ soliloquy at the 2022 World Cup, to his nauseatingly sycophantic creation of a FIFA peace prize to rectify Trump’s failure to win the Nobel and his role in the Folarin Balogun affair this summer.

Equally, FIFA’s members have long been content getting into bed with amoral actors and flogging football to the highest bidder. Just look at a list of World Cup hosts: Argentina in 1978, Franco’s Spain in 1982, the flirtation with Henry Kissinger and the ‘rock solid political stitch-up’ that led to Mexico in 1986, plus Russia, Qatar, and Trump’s United States. Saudi Arabia is slated to host in 2034.

Now, however, Infantino has crossed the line. While the deal promised extra cash up front to member associations, it threatened to significantly cut future transfers by about 20%. Perhaps this seemed like an unacceptable sacrifice at a time when the tournaments are breaking revenue records. Ego, too, has surely played a significant role. UEFA, in particular, resents not having the political power to match its financial muscle and has sensed an opportunity to assert itself.

So, the deal is defeated, and the worst may still be to come for Infantino. But as the FIFPro global union of professional football players declared, ‘withdrawing the proposal does not erase what it revealed.’ Fundamental questions remain about FIFA’s place in the world and where it goes from here.

For one, can the FIFA coalition hold with ‘America First’ as its geopolitical centre? What about as real-world conflict escalates between Trump’s rogue government and the rest of the world? For all the money it generates, the World Cup is not bullet-proof.

In addition, can the federation survive the internal tensions that this has generated? The Confederation of African Football (CAF) seems more likely to remain loyal to FIFA, which claims to have invested more than a billion dollars in African football. US Soccer, meanwhile, is going against the grain of its own government by calling for ‘meaningful change’, and the Mexican Football Federation is still supportive of Infantino, despite the heightened tensions between the Mexican government and Infantino’s puppet master Trump.

At the same time, US private equity is only getting started with global football. On the club level, they’re already in the building. Real Madrid is reportedly keen to follow neighbours Atletico Madrid in selling a stake in the club to bring in more money. The influx of cash from private equity is far from a guarantee of success. Despite Chelsea owners Clearlake Capital spending £1.5bn on players over a three-year span, the team finished tenth last season, and the owners are now notorious for having turned the club into a dysfunctional laughingstock. Investment in football clubs — these strange entities that can appreciate in value while losing money year after year — is much riskier than buying a stake in a global phenomenon like the World Cup, which always makes a profit.

Above all else, this episode signals a need for a new direction altogether. There are attempts to reform the game, but they are at nascent stages, and largely focused on domestic football-ticket prices, inconvenient kick off times and changes to supporters’ terms and conditions. FairSquare’s Reboot FIFA campaign is one that all football supporters should support, but to really create pressure on FIFA to clean up its act there must also be grassroots organising across partisan club-based lines in as many member nations as possible to pressure governments into holding the likes of Infantino to account.

The 2026 instalment of the World Cup blessed millions of people with transcendent joy, excitement and even silliness. Let it serve as a precious reminder: football can’t be something we only experience as a means of escapism, nor can it be something we leave to the elites. It must be something that we come together to shape ourselves.