It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, November 02, 2025
UK
FBU General Secretary calls for Employment Rights Bill in full
“Ditching any part of the Employment Rights Bill would be a disaster for the Labour government and Keir Starmer as Prime Minister.”
By the Fire Brigades Union
The Fire Brigades Union is calling for the government to stand firm and deliver the Employment Rights Bill in full, following reports of talks with businesses seeking to water down new workers’ rights.
The union says any watering down of the bill would be a “betrayal” of Labour’s popular manifesto promise, and calls for Starmer to go further in strengthening workers’ rights with a second bill.
Fire Brigades Union General Secretary Steve Wright said:
“Ditching any part of the Employment Rights Bill would be a disaster for the Labour government and Keir Starmer as Prime Minister.
Extending workers’ rights is easily the government’s most popular policy. Workers suffered nearly 15 years of attacks on their wages and conditions under Tory rule. Labour was elected on a firm commitment to reverse that.
Any watering down of this legislation under pressure from big business and corporate lobbyists would be a clear betrayal of Labour’s manifesto promise and a signal that the interests of boardrooms are being put before the rights of working people.
In the wake of last week’s disastrous by-election defeat and dire opinion poll ratings for Labour, it’s vital that the Employment Rights Bill is delivered in full. The Prime Minister must then go even further by passing an ‘Employment Rights Bill 2’ later in this parliament.
Meanwhile, the Chancellor must announce a substantial increase in workers’ pay in next month’s Budget, including a generous increase in the living wage.”
“We need the Health Secretary to step up, come forward with a proper offer on jobs, on pay.”
Tim Tonkin on why the British Medical Association (BMA) have announced plans for new industrial action.
Resident doctors in England are set to strike next month, following the Government’s failure to agree a credible plan for jobs and pay restoration.
The BMA resident doctors committee England has announced doctors will stage full walk-out action from 7am on 14 November, while urging Health Secretary Wes Streeting to avert the action by returning to the negotiating table.
The announcement comes after resident doctors’ leaders met with the health secretary on 13 October to find a way forward on addressing pay erosion and job shortages.
RDC had hoped the dialogue would see the Government recognise doctors’ concerns by providing a mandate for a multi-year pay deal or by agreeing to targeted in-year improvements to resident doctors’ pay.
In confirming the latest strike dates, RDC chair Jack Fletcher (pictured above) lamented the need for further industrial action, while stressing that the situation was ‘disappointing but not unredeemable’, and urging Mr Streeting to resume talks in good faith.
He said: ‘This is not where we wanted to be. We have spent the last week in talks with Government, pressing the health secretary to end the scandal of doctors going unemployed … a situation which cannot go on.
‘We talked with the Government in good faith – keen for the health secretary to see that a deal that included options to gradually reverse the cuts to pay over several years, giving newly trained doctors a pay increase of just a pound an hour for the next four years.
‘We hoped the Government would see that our asks are not just reasonable but are in the best interests of the public and our patients, and would also help stop our doctors leaving the NHS.
‘Better employment prospects and restoring pay are a credible way forward that would work for doctors, work for Government and work for our patients. Sadly, while we want to get such a deal done, the Government seemingly does not, leaving us with little option but to call for strike action.’
Dr Fletcher added: ‘That is disappointing, but it is not irredeemable. Wes Streeting inherited an NHS falling apart through decades of underinvestment, but restoring our pay over several years, along with concrete plans to create more jobs and training place, would go a long way towards the start of a new and better health service.
‘We need the Health Secretary to step up, come forward with a proper offer on jobs, on pay. We need him to embrace change and make an NHS fit for doctors and fit for patients.’
Job shortages and pay restoration are at the centre of resident doctors’ dispute with the Government.
A recent BMA survey of 4,401 resident doctors reveals 34 per cent of respondents say they have been unable to secure substantive employment or regular locum in time for August this year.
Through its 10-year plan for the NHS in England, the UK Government has pledged to create an additional 1,000 speciality training places. However, doctors have warned that such an increase is insufficient and will not be implemented swiftly enough.
The Government has also declined to discuss solutions to pay, despite resident doctors in England having seen their salaries eroded by 21 per cent since 2008.
Dr Fletcher said: ‘Sadly, the Government has not been willing to offer the kind of radical plan needed that would keep doctors in work and reduce waiting lists. Strike dates are the only possible outcome.
‘That is disappointing, but it is not unrecoverable. After inheriting an NHS falling apart after decades of underinvestment, Mr Streeting has the opportunity to make a fix. A multi-year pay deal and a radical jobs plan can be the start of a new and better health service. And it is surely better than a future of yet more industrial action and longer waiting times for patients.’
RDC has advised members it will contact them with further information ahead of next month’s planned strike action.
“We are diverse, multicultural, multiracial, of all faiths and none — and together we say: No Pasaran.”
By Apsana Begum MP
There is no sugar coating it: these are very difficult times.
The-far right have attempted to march through the East End of London, they have targeted hotels housing asylum seekers, and there is a rise in the far-fight all over Europe.
Governments are cutting services, attacking working class communities whilst scapegoating migrants.
Politicians are participating in perpetuating the lie that migrants are the problem are whipping up anxiety and fear.
All over, the political establishment are repeating the absurdity of one of the greatest political myths of modern times – that the way to defeat the bigoted far-right is to pander to them. That poverty and austerity are inevitable. The consequences of this are very dangerous.
Austerity and disempowerment are a climate upon which racism, discrimination, and bigotry thrive.
It’s in that context, that the position of the Labour leadership has been impossible to defend.
Keir Starmer’s infamous comments about Israel’s right to cut off electricity and food to Gaza had quite rightly shocked and angered people. And then just a week before Election Day last year, the dog-whistle scapegoating comments about Bangladeshis sparked outrage and fear.
I know that these present serious questions regarding the consequences of political positions taken on civil liberties, migrant rights, attacks on democracy, Palestine and support for big business and privatisation – and I will never accept child poverty or pensioner poverty as a normal part of our society and that there is nothing that can be done about it.
Because we know in East London that injustice and inequality are not inevitable.
If there is no money for our children to live free from poverty or for our older people to enjoy their later years without hardship – then the money must be found.
If the way our economy is run means that large scale human suffering and wasted potential is unavoidable then it is up to the Government to change the way that the economy is run.
The reality is that local people are angry with the political establishment that has not only been complicit in the genocide in Gaza but have viciously tried to censor and repress anyone showing compassion with Palestinian suffering.
This is alongside the attacks on our right to protest stifled through successive government legislation from the Public Order Act which needs to be repealed, to the Policing and Crime Bill.
But I look around me, and I am inspired by you all coming out on the streets today to defend our local communities in a beautiful way – and yes that does include you, the women of Tower Hamlets, who have been leading as organisers too!
From the Jewish communities and allies opposed fascists at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, to the murder of Altab Ali brought people out onto the streets and where the Bangladeshi communities led the anti-fascist mobilisation in the 1970s.
From the coalition of women and people from working class backgrounds that drove the BNP out of Tower Hamlets in the 1990s, to the communities came together in mass demonstrations against the Iraq War in the anti-war mobilisation in 2003:
We continue to diversity as a strength, and where our communities include migrants from all around the world.
We know that our struggles for freedom are connected with struggles against oppression everywhere around the world.
We will remind ourselves in those traditions that hardships are overcome and they are overcome collectively.
It’s from the strength, that we say to all those trying to spread their intolerance, division and hatred: We are diverse, multicultural, multiracial, of all faiths and none, and from all around the world.
We will continue up for ourselves, from Poplar to Whitechapel and beyond for each other, and for all of our diverse communities in the UK.
“The approach of Lenin – utilised critically and creatively – can help us as we seek to make use of Marx’s approach in our own time.”
Paul le Blanc discusses the connections between Marx & Lenin’s ideas and what they could mean todayin the monthly Marx Matters series organised by Arise.
In his 1936 classic Man’s Worldly Goods, Leo Huberman made a key point regarding Lenin’s relation to Marxism. Here’s what he said:
Seventeen years before the end of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx died.
Seventeen years after the beginning of the twentieth century, Karl Marx lived again.
What had been theory with Marx was put into practice by his disciples — Lenin and the other Russian Bolsheviks — in their seizure of power in 1917. Before that time, the teachings of Marx had been familiar to a small group of devoted followers; after that time, the teachings of Marx had the spotlight of the world focused on them. …
One could argue that this is oversimplified. After all, throughout Europe’s mass labour movement, the teachings of Marx were embraced, in some form, by working-class activists and intellectuals well before 1917, with spill-over in North America and elsewhere. Yet there is validity to Huberman’s point on at least two levels.
First of all, the 1917 revolution, which Lenin was central in helping to lead, and the consequent Communist International, which Lenin was central in helping to organise, had a powerful global impact on all continents and among all peoples. It generated among many thousands and, ultimately, millions of people – those hostile as well as those sympathetic to the revolutionary upheaval – an awareness of, and for many an intensive engagement with, the multifaceted body of Marxist theory which Lenin and his comrades utilised and propagated.
Related to this, what Lenin represented and helped generate contributed to remarkable developments in Marxist theory and analyses not only in various parts of the world that had little or no previous experience with this body of thought, but it opened new pathways of Marxist thought in the early Soviet Republic of 1918-1930, and also throughout Europe, including the unfolding of what came to be tagged “Western Marxism” (whose foundational figures – George Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Korsch – emerged from the leadership of the early Communist movement, of which Lenin was a central reference point).
There were certainly creative innovations within Marxism, independent of Lenin, from the 1890s through to 1917 – but there was, at the same time, a powerful tendency toward convergence between the thought of such innovators and the thought of Lenin. Two outstanding examples can be found in the work of Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky. Although both of these outstanding revolutionary Marxists were in no way dependent on Lenin’s own contributions, and more than once became involved in heated polemical exchanges with him, over time Luxemburg and – even more – Trotsky were increasingly drawn into the Leninist orbit.
What Lenin represented and helped generate contributed to remarkable developments in Marxist theory and analyses not only in various parts of the world that had little or no previous experience with this body of thought, but it opened new pathways of Marxist thought in the early Soviet Republic of 1918-1930. This impacted profoundly throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas, also spilling over into the other inhabited continents of Africa and Australia.
Built into Lenin’s approach to Marxism was a blend of respect for the structure and underlying principles of Marx’s approach, with an inclination to be open and innovative in applying that approach. He complained that many Marxists of his time saw “capitalism and bourgeois democracy in Western Europe following a definite path of development” and projected this as a universal model. “Certain amendments,” he insisted, are required: “While the development of world history as a whole follows general laws, it is by no means precluded, but, on the contrary, presumed, that certain periods of development may display peculiarities in either the form or the sequence of this development.”
For example, “because Russia stands on the borderline” between European and non-European countries, she was “bound to reveal certain distinguishing features; although these, of course, are in keeping with the general line of world development, they distinguish her revolution from those which took place in the West European countries and introduce certain partial innovations as the revolution moves on to the countries of the East.”
Related to this reality were other key elements in Lenin’s political orientation. The predominance of the peasantry in such countries as Russia, combining with the “open Marxism” inseparable from the dialectical approach, contributed to Lenin’s conceptualisation of a worker-peasant alliance so central to his strategic orientation. Lenin’s revolutionary internationalism – more intensive than was the case with many Marxists – was entwined with the dialectical necessities involved in making a proletarian revolution in non-industrial Russia.
This dovetailed with an essential resistance to the complex dynamics of imperialism – in the form it took as a keystone of the tsarist system, making Russia a “prison house of nations,” as well as in the form it took through the voracious global capital accumulation process at the heart of the modern capitalism. Such imperialist realities engulfed a majority of the world’s peoples, oppressed by competing and contending elites of the so-called “Great Powers.” This raised, for Lenin and his co-thinkers, the need to support struggles for national self-determination among oppressed peoples, while fighting against the nationalism of oppressor nations.
Lenin summed up his approach to Marxism, more than once, with succinct clarity:
“Our theory is not a dogma, but a guide to action,” Marx and Engels always said, rightly ridiculing the mere memorising and repetition of “formulas” that are capable of marking out only general tasks, which are necessarily modifiable by the concrete economic and political conditions of each particular period of the historical process.
Eight components seem essential to Lenin’s Marxism:
A belief in what Georg Lukács called “the actuality of revolution” – or as Max Eastman once put it, a rejection of “the people who talked revolution but did not intend to produce it.”
commitment to utilising Marxist theory dialectically, not as dogma, but as a guide to action, understanding that general theoretical perspectives must be modified through application to “the concrete economic and political conditions of each particular period of the historical process.”
Building up an organisation of class-conscious workers combined with radical intellectuals – operating as a revolutionary collective, both democratic and disciplined – capable of utilising Marxist theory to mobilise insurgencies to replace the tyrannies of Tsarism and capitalism with democracy and socialism.
An approach to the interplay of reform struggles with the longer-range revolutionary struggle, permeated by several qualities –
(a) a refusal to bow to the oppressive and exploitative powers-that-be,
(b) a refusal to submit to the transitory “realism” of mainstream politics,
(c) a measuring of all activity by how it would help build the working-class consciousness, the mass workers’ movement, and the revolutionary organisation that will be necessary to overturn capitalism and lead to a socialist future.
An insistence that the revolutionary party must function as “a tribune of the people,” combining working-class struggles with systematic struggles against all forms of oppression, regardless of which class was affected – deepening and extending into the centrality of a workers’ and peasants’ alliance in the anti-Tsarist struggle.
A strategic orientation combining the struggle against capitalism with the struggle for revolutionary democracy.
Characterising global capitalism as having entered an imperialist stage, involving economic expansion beyond national boundaries for the purpose of securing markets, raw materials and investment opportunities, embracing all countries in our epoch, with a majority of the world’s peoples oppressed by competing and contending elites of the so-called “Great Powers.”
A consistent, unrelenting revolutionary internationalism: understanding that capitalism is a global system, seeing struggles against exploitation, oppression, and tyranny, that global solidarity and global organisation are essential to socialist revolution.
I’d like to conclude with an excerpt from a very interesting book that I’ve been reading, entitled Global Marxism, by Simin Fadaee [See-min Fad-eye]. It deals with nine revolutionaries from the so-called “third world,” the Global South – East Asia and South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America – who were profoundly influenced by the understanding of Marxism that was popularized by Lenin. She quotes the recently deceased sociologist Michael Buroway, who tells us that Marxism as a tradition resembles
a tree with roots, trunk, branches, twigs, and foliage. Its growth has an “internal logic” of its own founded in the roots, the “fundamental” writings of Marx and Engels. But it also possesses an “external” logic responsive to the climate and winds of the time.
“In other words,” Fadaee [Fad-eye] adds, “context impacts the way we embrace Marxism, but it also inspires new questions that need to be answered to tackle today’s problems as well as those of the future.”
It is, of course, possible to construct a more stable, consistent, unchanging, pedantic version of Marxism – which makes it much easier to talk about, to write about, to give lectures about, and to utilise in developing critiques of a variety of activist efforts and real-life struggles (including those represented by Lenin). But on this, I think, we would be better served by considering a complaint from Lenin himself about the failure of some Marxists – in times of revolutionary struggle – to understand the need for “the utmost flexibility,” preferring instead to “walk around and about” this dynamic inherent in genuine Marxism “like a cat around a bowl of hot porridge.” In response to such pedantic misuse of his ideas, Marx was moved to comment: “All I know is that I am not a Marxist.” The approach of Lenin – utilised critically and creatively – can help us as we seek to make use of Marx’s approach in our own time.
You can watch Paul le Blanc speak on this in the second of the monthly Marx Mattersseries here.
Marx Matters is a series of in-person and online talks from prominent writers on Marxism exploring the relevance of Marx’s work today. You can buy a ticket to help fund the whole series here.
You can get tickets for the 2nd November Marx Matters event, “Marx and Multipolarity,” here.
You can get tickets for the 7th December Marx Matters event, “Marx on Ireland – Lessons for our struggle today,” here.
The Government is doubling down on a system designed for corporate gain rather than public need, suggests Cllr James Valentine.
The Government’s new Planning and Infrastructure Bill is being sold as a game-changer for housebuilding, the legislative key to unlocking its election promise of 1.5 million new homes. But beneath the fanfare, it is hard to see who really benefits.
The Bill claims to ‘streamline’ England’s planning process by cutting red tape to get homes built faster. Yet much of the old machinery stays firmly in place. The core planning framework remains untouched, along with the risks of building in the wrong places and the failure to guarantee genuinely affordable housing.
Take flooding. Even with repeated warnings from the Environment Agency and the Committee on Climate Change, an estimated 100,000 of these new homes could still be built on the highest-risk flood plains. The “sequential test,” which is meant to steer development away from flood-prone areas, remains intact. Developers have long mastered the art of proving that their floodplain projects ‘cannot go anywhere else’. A recent tweak to official guidance in September 2025 has only tilted the rules further in their favour.
Meanwhile, the economic logic of planning has not shifted. Policy still assumes that developers deserve a 15–20% profit margin as standard. Affordable housing requirements, negotiated through Section 106 agreements, are routinely watered down through “viability assessments,” legal loopholes that allow developers to claim that meeting affordability targets would make their projects unprofitable. Shelter estimates that up to 80% of affordable homes disappear this way before the first brick is laid.
The Government and the Mayor of London have now agreed to change the quota for the amount of affordable housing for new developments in London from 35% to 20% and because of the viability loophole, the notional 20% is bound to be reduced further.
It is no wonder the big housebuilders, many posting returns of up to 30%, have welcomed the Bill. Looser planning, more greenbelt land to exploit, and no new curbs on profit all work in their favour.
Housing Secretary Steve Reed’s slogan, “Build, baby, build,” sounds less like a social mission and more like a sales pitch. Ministers can rail against ‘Nimbys’ and talk up ‘builders versus blockers’ all they want, but it is a distraction. The real story is that, in the name of growth, the Government is doubling down on a system designed for corporate gain rather than public need.
The result is predictable: more homes in the wrong places, fewer that ordinary people can afford, and a planning system rebuilt once again to keep the developers happy.
James Valentine is a Councillor for Kempston West Ward, Bedford Borough.
Tom White’s grandfather, a carpenter-builder, died in 1995 at the age of 64 in excruciating pain from malignant mesothelioma, the only known cause of which is exposure to asbestos. His grandmother received compensation from the Department of the Environment totalling £4, 710. Four years later, asbestos was banned in the UK.
In 2021, the Health & Safety Executive recorded that asbestos had killed around 5,000 people in Britain, although many researchers believe that this is a serious underestimate, and that the real total was closer to 20,000. Around seven million tonnes were imported and used between the 1870s and the late 1990s and we are still living with the consequences — Britain has the highest per capita rate of mesothelioma in the world.
Despite the ban, asbestos remains in place in thousands of buildings across the UK – there has been no coordinated removal programme. Meanwhile, over a million tonnes are still mined every years and only 71 countries have banned the material.
Racial capitalism
Bad Dust traces a history of the asbestos disaster. The first half of the book examines the highly profitable mining of the mineral in apartheid South Africa, where the price of asbestos trebled in the decade to 1960. By the mid-1950s, young mineworkers were being diagnosed with asbestosis after only a few months of employment and were often sacked without compensation, when they became too sick to work. Many were drawn from a wide hinterland across southern Africa and returned home to die in poverty.
An extremely interesting detail here is the development of an analysis by South African Marxists that the modern apartheid state, far from being an aberrant hangover from the Boer frontier, was something more fundamental. They argued that the formalisation of the state’s racism and authoritarianism was traceable to “the ‘mineral revolution’ of the late nineteenth century, the penetration of Southern Africa by British capital and imperialism, and the accompanying growth of the migrant labour system.”
Far from being an archaic anachronism that the economic development of the country would sweep away, modern apartheid was essentially an economic system – racial capitalism. White traces how the radicalisation of anti-apartheid forces in South Africa – particularly through the development of the Azanian Peoples’ Organization – led to calls for a complete ban on the asbestos industry. “We’d rather starve than sell our lives,” Building Allied Mining and Construction Workers Union General Secretary Pandelani Nefolovidwe said at the launch of the campaign in 1985.
Belated action
In the asbestos processing factories of northern England too, workers suffered from asbestos poisoning and died young, yet the owners refused for decades to pay a penny of compensation, despite the medical evidence. The 1982 broadcast of an ITV documentary, however, watched by six million viewers, brought home the human impact of the disease and led to demonstrations in several cities. It forced the government to take belated, limited action – while the asbestos companies hired private investigators to compile a dossier on the programme makers.
White believes that the failure to develop a full Occupation Health Service in the post-war years was central to the issue not being acted on years earlier. In the absence of state legislation, he evaluates the action taken by trade unions to protect their members against the health hazards associated with the material – by dockers, shipyard and building workers, sometimes in the face of opposition from their own union leaders. The TUC in particular comes in for some trenchant criticism for putting jobs before health.
The second half of the book explores the development of the anti-asbestos movement, often in the form of local community initiatives, but soon coming up against powerful national and international corporate interests. The struggle to ban chrysotile – white asbestos – seemed on the verge of victory in 1998, until the Health and Safety Commission pulled back from publishing draft regulations, apparently on the direct orders of Tony Blair’s office. The French government’s decision to ban chrysotile was being challenged by Canada, where the substance was manufactured, through the World Trade Organisation. Demonstrations at the Canadian embassies in London, Copenhagen, and Sydney followed. It was the EU, over a year later, that took the decision to ban asbestos, with the UK falling into line.
But there was no attempt to address the issue of removal, increase funding for research into asbestos-related diseases or tackle the increasingly adversarial treatment of victims. “The New Labour government,” argues White, “had a historic opportunity to fold the challenge of asbestos removal into a broader renewal of the public realm and, at the same time, to reassert social security as a right, not a favour. It did neither.”
Litigation
The limitations of what the government had done were underlined by a High Court judgment in 2001. The Court ruled in the case of a carpenter who had worked for a number of companies that because it was impossible to identify which company had exposed him to the “guilty fibre,” or indeed whether his illness was caused by environmental exposure, neither could be held liable for his death. The decision was a shock: “The proliferation of asbestos in the built environment, a situation that had been pursued relentlessly by the industry and from which it had profited enormously, could apparently now be marshalled in service of their exoneration, rather than their guilt.” After much campaigning, the ruling was overturned by the Law Lords. But the line of argument that no single company could be held responsible was championed ruthlessly by the asbestos firms in other cases.
Meanwhile, after lengthy litigation, South African asbestos mining companies reached settlements worth millions of pounds with miners whose health had been destroyed by the industry. In one case, despite the company repeatedly saying it had nothing to hide, the settlement stipulated that payment would not be made unless the plaintiffs’ lawyers agreed to destroy all the evidence they had received during the hearings. “The money from the settlements soon disappeared, much of it spent on doctors’ bills, but across the country, the asbestos remains.”
Long after the ban on asbestos, its victims continued to suffer, thanks to benefit cuts in the years of austerity. Cuts to the Health and Safety Executive budget meant successful awareness campaigns were abandoned. In 2012, it emerged that a planned year-long audit of the condition of England’s 23,000 schools would exclude asbestos. The government agreed a new compensation scheme with the industry behind closed doors where the compensation rate was set lower than the average payment recoverable in civil claims. The scheme’s narrow focus on mesothelioma meant that those suffering from other asbestos-related illnesses were excluded. Asbestos Victims Support Group Forum chair Tony Whitson described it as a “gift” to the insurance industry.
The total cost of removing asbestos from all schools and hospitals is high – around £15.6 billion. Yet an estimated 1,400 school staff and 12,600 former pupils died from mesothelioma between 1980 and 2021. Asbestos is a recyclable substance, but, as the author notes, recycling it, “like the notion of a global energy transition, raises nothing less than the question of democratic planning of the global economy.”
Will Labour tackle the crisis? If this meticulously researched book helps raise awareness and encourage more grassroots campaigning, the government might yet be forced to acknowledge the ongoing scale of the disaster and do something about it.
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
Select Committee recommends major reforms to energy bill support as UK Government publishes its climate plan
OCTOBER 30, 2025
Campaigners welcome Parliament’s proposals to make the energy system fairer, but are less fulsome about the Government’s Carbon Budget and Growth Delivery Plan.
MPs on the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee have backed a series of reforms to make the energy system fairer and support households facing a fifth winter of high bills.
In a major report on tackling the energy cost crisis, MPs recommended a permanent energy debt relief scheme funded through energy sector excess profits, automatic support for vulnerable households, a social tariff for energy and reforms to the Warm Home Discount.
The Committee also called for urgent action to fix unfair standing charges, improve data sharing to target support and overhaul Cold Weather Payments to ensure help reaches those who need it when temperatures drop.
Crucially, the Committee echoed the charities’ warnings about the growing energy debt crisis and proposed a structured, long-term solution to write off unpayable arrears without passing costs onto billpayers.
It also urged the Government and Ofgem to act quickly to rebuild trust in the energy market, strengthen consumer protections and ensure households are not penalised for reducing gas use as the energy system transitions.
Simon Francis, coordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, commented: “This report should be used to mark a turning point in the fight to end the energy cost crisis. The cross-party group of MPs have recognised what millions of households already know – our energy system has been stacked against people struggling to heat their homes and urgent change is needed.
“We are particularly pleased that MPs have backed the principle of energy debt relief funded through excess profits in the sector, alongside a social tariff, reforms to standing charges and improvements to the Warm Home Discount and Cold Weather Payments. These are landmark recommendations that could protect the most vulnerable.
“As this report makes clear, warm homes must be treated as a public health priority, with fair pricing, modernised winter protections, social tariffs and stronger rights for renters.
“If the Government is serious about implementing change, the Warm Homes Plan announced next month must be the first step. That means a £13.2 billion plan to create warmer and safer homes for those most in need, independent quality checks, skilled green jobs, trusted local advice services and prioritisation of the lowest-income households in the coldest homes.”
In responses to Government consultations, charities and fuel poverty experts have set out the key tests the Government’s forthcoming Warm Homes Plan and Fuel Poverty Strategy must meet. These include:
Treating warm, safe housing as a public health priority and retain the target to end fuel poverty by 2030
Adopting a 10% fuel poverty measure (after housing costs)
Committing to a ten-year national retrofit programme, agreed across parties, backed by skilled jobs, apprenticeships and national standards
Prioritising the Worst First — low-income households in the coldest, least efficient homes
Guaranteeing independent retrofit assessment, performance monitoring and consumer protections
Providing free, trusted local advice services and one-stop-shops for households
Funding delivery through public spending, not new levies on bills
Introducing targeted financial support including modernised cold weather payments and social tariffs
Empowering local authorities with data access and funding to lead street-by-street schemes
Protecting tenants from ‘retrovictions’ and unfair rent rises
Simon Francis added: “Warm homes are a basic right. This must be the moment the Government finally commits to a long-term plan to end fuel poverty — not just improve averages or fund short-term schemes.
“We need a decade-long Warm Homes Plan that delivers real-world warmth, safety and affordable bills, backed by independent quality checks, trusted advice and proper protection for tenants and consumers.
“After years of delays and stop-start programmes, it’s time to get on with delivery and ensure support reaches those in deepest need first.”
The full report can be read here. The End Fuel Poverty Coalition’s evidence to the inquiry can be read online.
Government climate plan
Meanwhile the Government has published its long-awaited Carbon Budget and Growth Delivery Plan. Friends of the Earth, who took previous governments to court – twice – over weak climate plans, responded to Labour’s 238-page document.
Positives in the Government plan include:
A commitment to create 800,000 clean energy jobs by 2030 compared to 430,000 currently.
Investment in nature restoration, for example, tree planting to help reduce emissions and cut flood risk.
A focus on the fast roll-out of electric vehicles – including more public chargers.
A reduction in electricity costs for energy-intensive industry to reduce pressures for businesses to relocate.
A set of policies that together appear meet the UK’s legally-binding emissions reduction targets for 2030 and 2035.
In other areas, more ambition is needed:
More information on how the Government will cut energy costs and insulate homes.
More help for lower-income households to switch to clean, green heat pumps.
A proper plan for bringing much-needed bus services back across the country – they’ve been halved in the last decade.
Polluter-pays taxes, like a frequent flyer levy, to reduce pollution and fund green measures.
Deeper emission cuts. Our legally binding targets are the bare minimum – we can and should do more to limit climate breakdown.
Reacting to the Plan, Friends of the Earth’s Chief Executive, Asad Rehman, said: “With extreme weather events increasingly battering the planet – just as we’re seeing in Jamaica and Cuba right now – and hitting those who’ve done least to cause the crisis hardest, here and overseas, strong climate action has never been more urgent.
“There are some encouraging signs that, at long last, we have a government ready to step up and get the UK’s climate targets back on track. Crucially, the government has signalled that it recognises that meaningful climate action isn’t just a legal duty – it’s a massive social and economic opportunity too. Done right, it can deliver cheaper bills, warmer homes and thousands of good green jobs. This would help tackle the deep inequality felt across the country and build a fairer, more prosperous future.
“The last two climate plans were ruled unlawful after legal action by Friends of the Earth, ClientEarth and Good Law Project. Let’s hope this time they’ve got it right.”
Make the polluters pay. Sign Friends of the Earth’s petition here.
“The energy bill write-off con”
In other energy news, the BBC reports that thousands on benefits could have their energy debt cancelled. “Nearly 200,000 people on benefits could have their debts to their energy supplier cancelled, if they make some effort to pay what is owed,” it said. “Up to £500m could be knocked off the total under plans that regulator Ofgem wants to take effect early next year.”
But there’s a catch! The cost would be covered through an extra £5 added to everyone’s gas and electricity bill.
Labour peer Prem Sikka called it “the energy bill write-off con.” He pointed out that energy companies have made £514bn operating profit since 2020. This proposal would see no cut in their profit, just a restructuring of existing energy debt. His solution: “Nationalise energy. End profiteering.”
This collective opposition helped to delay the establishment of the Commission, as did the Irish civil war and the determination of successive British governments, Tory and Labour, to kick this can down the road. Again, Moore uses the word “duplicitous” to describe the behaviour of the Tories and then Labour’s MacDonald and the ultra-unionist J.H. Thomas to both delay the Commission’s formation and influence its outcome.
It did not meet until nearly three years after the Treaty was signed. By then much had changed. Collins had been assassinated by opponents of the Treaty in August 1922. Arthur Griffith, the Sinn Fein leader, died earlier in the same month. The Irish Free State administration that followed, was led by W.T. Cosgrave who was both a poor negotiator and, contends Moore, someone whose “real concern” was not a united Ireland, but “the territory under his control, the [26-county] Irish Free State.”
The northern unionists took the Commission seriously, despite their leaders’ official boycott. Individuals, local councils, churches, business organisations and others submitted evidence. The local unionist newspapers editorialised. This turned out to be one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in the unionists’ history. It was when slogans were coined that have been echoed ever since. “Not an Inch” was one, referring to their determination to give up nothing to the Free State, whatever the Commission said. “What We Have We Hold” and “This We Will Maintain” were others.
The unionists repeated the threats and denigration of their Irish enemies that had been common in the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. This time one northern unionist said that to transfer territory to the south would hand it to “a lower civilisation.” Another referred to the Irish language as “a barbarous guttered language… something between cough and spitting.”
Many unionists argued that because Protestants owned more land, factories or paid more rates, their wishes carried more weight than the Catholic poor. There were threats of armed resistance. Moore quotes the Reverend S. T. Nesbitt of Ballyclare, County Antrim saying in April 1924 that “tens of thousands of Ulstermen would rise in their might,” if Tyrone, Fermanagh and other areas were lost.
The composition of the Commission ensured that this was never likely. Eventually, in May 1924, the MacDonald government appointed Richard Feetham as its chairman. He was born in Wales but had spent his career in South Africa and its judicial system. He was very much an empire loyalist, exemplified by his membership of the Round Table movement that promoted closer union between Britain and its dominions. Joining Feetham was Joseph Fisher, who represented the northern unionists. They had refused to nominate anyone, as part of their boycott, so Fisher was appointed by MacDonald, but, it seems, with the approval of James Craig. Fisher was a pillar of the northern unionist establishment and a former editor of the Belfast morning unionist newspaper the Northern Whig.
The nominee of the Free State government was Eoin MacNeill, a supporter of the Treaty, the Minister of Education, and most famously the man who, when a leader of the Irish Volunteers, had ordered them not to participate in the mobilisation of what became the 1916 Rising. Thus, the Commission was composed of two determined unionists and one non-militant Irish nationalist. Not only was this an uneven contest, but by then the British had moved the goalposts, with both MacDonald and Thomas indicating that the promises of Lloyd George to Irish nationalists no longer applied and that the Commission’s role was confined to minor adjustments of the border that had been operating since the 1920 Government of Ireland Act. In other words, the economic and geographical conditions were the priority over the wishes of inhabitants, a contention that echoed the northern unionists.
The first meeting of the Commission was on 6th November 1924. It took its time. In September 1925 Feetham submitted a memorandum to his fellow commissioners. This said “the wishes of the inhabitants” were “the primary but not the paramount consideration”, adding that even if the inhabitants wanted to change their territorial jurisdiction this had to be by a “substantial” majority and even then the Commission could override these wishes for “economic or geographic” considerations. These guidelines meant little would change.
They were leaked to the Morning Post in early November. It was only when northern nationalists protested that, as Moore comments “it dawned on the Free State government that it was facing a political crisis of magnitude.” MacNeill resigned as a commissioner, although he had largely gone along with his fellow commissioners’ thinking, and the Free State government even abandoned the Council of Ireland promised by the Treaty. The now Tory UK government gave the Irish a sweetener by waiving another article of the Treaty that had required the Free State to make a continuing financial contribution to the UK for war pensions and elements of historic public debt. Thus, says Moore, Cosgrave “abandoned Northern nationalists over money.”
The real winners were James Craig and the northern unionists, who in the final discussions rejected both criticisms of the alleged anti-Catholic sectarianism of his administration and suggestions to change policies associated with this. Well, to be fair, Craig did promise to recruit more Catholics to the RUC, but to be fairer still, this turned out to be another unfulfilled promise.
In the final page of his book, Moore suggests a contemporary relevance when he compares the Treaty’s Article 12 to Schedule 1 (2) of the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement. This says that the British Northern Ireland Secretary of State has the sole authority to call a border poll on reunification. As such, notes Moore, this “leaves the power in the hands of the British government, with some fearing that this could prevent a border poll.”
This may indeed be a fear, but with Irish nationalism more experienced, its northern part more militant and unionism weaker and divided, it is a fear that can be overcome. Nevertheless, it is important to understand that things can go wrong. This book helps with such an understanding. It is also a significant addition to the historiography of the British Labour Party’s colonial record in Ireland.
