A New Enbridge Pipeline Spurs Opposition in Central North Carolina

Enbridge, is a Canadian company

The 28-mile conduit is part of a huge natural gas infrastructure buildout in the state that Duke Energy says is necessary to keep up with demand, especially from a coming wave of data centers.

By Lisa Sorg

May 9, 2026

Source: Inside Climate News

Image by Pax Ahimsa Gethen

SILER CITY, N.C.—John Alderman opened the letter, sent by certified mail from an attorney in New Orleans. 

This is trouble, Alderman thought. It can’t be good news.

In late April Enbridge, a Canadian company, announced its plans to build a new 28-mile natural gas pipeline through Chatham County, from Siler City to Moncure. As contractors survey potential routes, they want access to Alderman’s land.

“I resent a letter like that,” said Alderman, who lives in western Chatham County. “We are informed, without asking, that someone is planning to trespass on our land. Everything in it is an affront.”

John and Gloria Alderman live in western Chatham County. Enbridge plans to build a new natural gas pipeline, a segment of which would route through their property. Credit: Lisa Sorg/Inside Climate News

Company spokeswoman Persida Montanez told Inside Climate News the pipeline will serve the broader regional energy needs in fast-growing Chatham and Lee counties, and not specific projects, such as data centers. Preliminary routing shows the pipeline would connect to Enbridge’s existing system near Siler City, head southeast and end near Moncure.

The pipeline would bypass Pittsboro, but could potentially cross several creeks that feed the Deep River, as well as traverse other main waterways, the Rocky and the Haw.

Construction could begin in fall 2027, with a service date of spring 2028. Total project costs have not yet been determined, Montanez said.

Enbridge will have to apply for, and receive, various state permits for the project; if the pipeline crosses waterways, it will need a federal water quality permit as well.

This is Enbridge’s second major pipeline project in the state since 2024, when it bought Dominion Energy’s natural gas business in North Carolina. The first is the T15 pipeline, which will run 45 miles from Eden, in Rockingham County, to Duke Energy’s two new natural gas plants near Roxboro, in Person County. 

These projects are part of the state’s immense natural gas buildout that, if completed, will emit hundreds of tons of planet-heating greenhouse gases and other harmful pollutants into the air each year. 

Natural gas companies and Duke Energy say the projects are necessary to meet the growing power demands, especially of data centers. Critics, including environmental groups, consumer advocates and the Public Staff of the N.C. Utilities Commission, counter that those demand projections are inflated. 

The result, they say, will be hefty profits for fossil fuel interests and higher customer rates, a hotter planet and habitat destruction.

Alderman is 72, of Viking stock and tall with deep-set brown eyes and short white hair. He lives with his wife of 52 years, Gloria, off the grid in a spacious, solar-powered, modern stucco house in a 195-acre woods that once belonged to International Paper. The couple grow their own fruits and vegetables. In 2023 they received a federal grant to sequester carbon in their forest; within two years, it could store as much as 100,000 tons.

“We’re carbon negative,” Alderman said. He drove his Ford Lightning, an electric pickup truck, charged with solar panels, down an old farm road and over a 550 million-year-old fault line that is now his gravel driveway. “Everything we’ve done has been geared toward combating climate change. And here we have the irony of ironies—a stinking gas line going through our property.”

A Threat to Three Rivers

John and Gloria Alderman met as undergraduates in ecology class in 1974. Both became biologists, and he specialized in endangered species, including mussels, fish and snails.

Throughout his long career, Alderman has witnessed species on the brink of extinction—and beyond. He was the last person to see many types of  mussels alive in a four-state area. He waded, swam or dove in highly polluted waterways, including wading in radioactive water and mud up to his chest near the Savannah River nuclear site to search for rare mussels.

Inside the Aldermans’ home is a wall of framed newspaper cartoons. One shows Alderman staring down bulldozers that threaten sensitive habitats. In another, his feet are trapped in hardened concrete, as special interests threaten to push him off a pier. 

“John’s seen so much,” Gloria said, with admiration in her voice. She is petite, with shoulder-length light hair and kind eyes. “His work was fighting. John is not shy.”

John Alderman is a retired endangered species biologist who specialized in mussels, fish, snails and other aquatic life. Credit: Lisa Sorg/Inside Climate News

When the Aldermans bought the land six years ago, they knew Duke Energy had a permanent easement toward the front of the property, where the utility runs a high-voltage transmission line. But they couldn’t have known that some day a pipeline could plow through their land and some of the most pristine habitat in Chatham County.

“I think with maps,” Alderman said, projecting the proposed route, overlaid with other geographical features, on his wide-screen TV. He pointed to the route of a new water main, part of an expansion by regional water utility TriRiver, as the first domino to fall. 

No one conducted environmental impact studies for the infrastructure project, whose original purpose was for emergency backup. Instead, Alderman said, it has sparked new subdivisions and development throughout western Chatham County. And now here comes the Enbridge pipeline. 

“The water line was the catalyst,” Alderman said. “Everything is connected.”

The Rocky and the Deep rivers run through this part of the county and flow into the Cape Fear River Basin, which is besieged by PFAS, 1,4-dioxane and other contaminants. These waterways are ecologically significant, but because of pollution and habitat loss, extensive portions appear on the federally impaired waters list. The Atlantic pigtoe, a native mussel not seen since the 1970s, has been extirpated from these waters, Alderman said. 

If the Enbridge pipeline crosses the waterways, more aquatic life could be displaced or even lost, he fears.

“I’ve seen the tremendous effects of climate change on small streams and rivers,” Alderman said. “These rivers are under the gun. If we ever want to restore the Cape Fear River, it’s because we saved the Rocky and the Deep.”

The Triangle Innovation Point

The pipeline would run through a portion of County Commission District 2, represented by Amanda Robertson. She spent years fighting a different project, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would have traversed 150 miles through eastern North Carolina. After intense public opposition, project co-owners Dominion and Duke canceled it in July 2020—but not before hundreds of acres of private land had been irreparably destroyed.

“Now we’ve got yet another pipeline, and I will do everything in my power to find a way to stop that from happening,” Robertson said. “It’ll be a fight.”

About 800 people live in Moncure, an unincorporated town in far southeast Chatham County. Although rural, the area also lies along an economic development corridor that includes long-time industries: Arauco, which manufactures and laminates composite wood panels; two brick factories; a quarry; and Duke Energy’s former coal-fired power plant, now a coal ash recycling facility.

Robertson served on the county planning board when, with the help of a contractor, it developed a “small-area” growth plan for Moncure. She felt delighted that two-thirds of the area would remain as agriculture, woods, parks and conservation. 

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But over the past four years, new projects have encroached on the town. The Enbridge pipeline would terminate at the nearby Triangle Innovation Point (TIP), where more than 1,000 acres of forest were clear-cut for the Vietnamese electric vehicle company VinFast to build a factory. The project is four years behind; construction hasn’t begun, but the habitat has been destroyed. 

A 750-megawatt data center is also proposed for the TIP, but that venture is in litigation with the county over a moratorium commissioners enacted in February.

“What we’ve seen throughout North Carolina is that where the gas goes, the data centers follow, and vice versa,” said Emily Sutton, the Haw riverkeeper. “There’s an inflated energy projection because of the proposed data centers, and so if we don’t get a handle on data center expansion, we’re going to continue to see more and more of these fossil fuel projects.”

“Surviving Climate Change”

The blueberry bushes are blossoming in the Aldermans’ garden. Swaths of clay soil had been tilled in preparation for a summer garden. The sugar snap peas were sown and now just need some rain.

Gloria worked with an architect to design the Aldermans’ home, with precise measurements that align with the Earth’s revolution around the sun. To capture maximum sunlight, the house and its solar panels face due south, aligned with the South Pole. Two porch pillars signify where the sun rises on the summer and winter solstices. 

The Aldermans’ garden is framed by a fence that John laid by hand using stone from an old house that was on the property. Credit: Lisa Sorg/Inside Climate News

The house is fireproof. The walls are 9 inches thick. Concrete floors keep the inside cool, even on 90-degree days.

“Surviving climate change, that’s the key to what we’re doing,” Alderman said. “And the pipeline flies in the face of everything we’re trying to do here.” 

Eminent domain is a power usually reserved for the government to take private property to build public projects, such as roads. However, the law allows private companies to use the authority as long as the project is in the public interest. 

In both cases, the landowners must be fairly compensated for the property.

Landowners can go to court if the parties can’t agree on a price. 

Alderman sent a certified letter back to the attorneys representing Enbridge. “I told them in no uncertain terms, ‘You can’t do this. Explore the alternatives,’” he said. “Stay off my property.”

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

In Yet Another Industry Handout, Trump EPA ‘Just Took a Sledgehammer’ to Coal Ash Rules

“Ultimately, if this rule is finalized, human health will suffer, and taxpayers will be left with the cost of cleaning up their rivers and drinking water.”

A worker moves coal refuse to be prepared for transport at a land reclamation project site in Center Township, Pennsylvania, with the shuttered Homer City Generating Station in the background, on June 12, 2024.

(Photo by Scott Lewis for The Washington Post via Getty Images)


Jessica Corbett
Apr 09, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Amid mounting calls for the removal of US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, the EPA chief on Thursday announced proposed changes to coal ash rules, which critics blasted as another gift to polluters at the expense of public health.

Officially called coal combustion residuals (CCR), “coal ash—the toxic byproduct of burning coal—contains hazardous pollutants, including arsenic, boron, cadmium, chromium, lead, radium, and selenium, which are linked to serious health harms such as cancer, heart disease, and brain damage, among other lasting impacts,” noted the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

Specifically, as The Associated Press reported, the EPA “proposed easing standards for monitoring and protecting groundwater near some coal ash sites, rolling back rules forcing the cleanup of entire coal properties instead of just places where ash was dumped. The revisions would also make it easier to reuse coal ash for other purposes.”

While Zeldin claimed the “commonsense changes to the CCR regulations reflect EPA’s commitment to restoring American energy dominance, strengthening cooperative federalism, and accommodating unique circumstances at certain CCR facilities,” Environmental Protection Network’s Marc Boom responded that “letting companies avoid cleaning up waste sites that may be leaching toxic metals into groundwater and nearby waterways, while weakening protections and accountability, is not common sense.”

“EPA’s top priority should be protecting people’s health, not sacrificing it for corporate expediency,” argued Boom, senior director of public affairs at the group, which is made up of former agency staff. “EPA may call these safeguards ‘impractical,’ but anyone living downstream of coal ash sites holding thousands of tons of waste knows that requiring cleanup and monitoring is a necessary and basic standard.”

NRDC senior attorney Becky Hammer called the pending rollback just “the latest in a long, long, line of Trump administration giveaways to fossil fuels industries,” which have also included repealing EPA rules that targeted chemical pollution from coal-fired power plants, declaring a national energy emergency, and scrapping the 2009 “endangerment finding” that underpins all federal climate regulations.

Other advocacy organizations were similarly critical of Thursday’s announcement. Daniel Estrin, Waterkeeper Alliance’s general counsel and legal director, pointed out that “coal ash is contaminating water at nearly every active and retired coal plant in the US.”

“By gutting these safeguards, EPA is abandoning its duty to protect impacted communities by allowing preventable contamination of our rivers, lakes, streams, and groundwater,” he said. “The longer the coal industry is allowed to delay closing and cleaning up its toxic waste sites, the more difficult and costly it becomes to fix the damage. By failing to enforce the law, EPA is letting polluters continue harming people and wildlife without accountability.”

Like Estrin and Hammer, Earthjustice senior counsel Lisa Evans framed that proposal as “yet another handout to the coal power industry at the expense of our health, water, and wallets,” and warned of the dangers of delaying closure and cleanup. She said that “ultimately, if this rule is finalized, human health will suffer, and taxpayers will be left with the cost of cleaning up their rivers and drinking water.”

Although “the Trump administration just took a sledgehammer to the health protections in place for toxic coal pollution,” Evans added, “Earthjustice has successfully defended these safeguards in court and will do so again.”

Nick Torrey, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, which has secured commitments to clean up over 270 million tons of coal ash in US communities, similarly said that “doing the bidding of industrial polluters instead of protecting ordinary families and clean water is shameful, but we are ready to keep fighting against coal ash pollution.”

“Letting coal-burning utilities set the agenda has been a disaster for communities across the South, resulting in coal ash spills and hundreds of families forced to live on bottled water for years under the threat of coal ash pollution,” Torrey highlighted. “The Trump administration and coal ash polluters want to take us back to the bad old days of arsenic, lead, and mercury from coal ash contaminating our water.”

In addition to facing a flurry of lawsuits over policies prioritizing the climate-wrecking fossil fuel industry—whose campaign cash helped President Donald Trump return to the White House last year—the administration has recently been hit with demands to remove Zeldin from more than 160 advocacy groups and nearly 300 health experts.

“This EPA’s actions to put polluters first, at the expense of our health, are dangerous and will be deadly,” states the health experts’ open letter, organized and released Thursday by the Climate Action Campaign. “Administrator Zeldin has abandoned his sworn duty and must be held accountable for his agenda.”

As Zeldin Embraces Climate Crisis Deniers, 290+ Health Experts Demand His Removal

“We cannot tolerate an EPA administrator who treats our families as expendable.”


US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin participates in a discussion at the EPA in Washington, DC on April 2, 2026.
(Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Apr 09, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Hundreds of health experts are demanding the removal of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin over his gutting of key regulations that they say will endanger Americans’ livelihoods.

A letter released Thursday by Climate Action Campaign outlines Zeldin’s threats to public health and explains why he should not be serving as the top US environmental regulator.
RECOMMENDED...


‘Game Over Zeldin’: 160+ Climate and Health Groups Say EPA Chief Must Go


“Administrator Zeldin is pursuing a deregulatory agenda that will result in a massive increase in health-damaging air pollution, toxic chemicals, and climate-heating greenhouse gases,” says the letter, which is signed by nearly 300 medical experts, including physicians, nurses, and public health researchers.

“And just last month, the administration laid bare its decision to no longer count the economic value of health benefits when setting Clean Air Act rules,” the letter adds, “refusing to acknowledge the value of lives saved, hospital visits avoided, and lost work and school days prevented.”

The letter also points to the EPA’s February decision to revoke the so-called “endangerment finding,” which gave the agency authority to regulate greenhouse gases as threats to public health.

Repealing this finding, the letter contends, “will increase the frequency and severity of climate disasters.”

According to a Wednesday report from The Associated Press, Zeldin celebrated the EPA’s revocation of the finding while delivering a keynote address at the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank that has long pushed climate denialism.

“Today is a moment to celebrate,” Zeldin said at the event. “It is a day to celebrate vindication.”

Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign, said her group decided to organize the letter among medical experts because “Lee Zeldin is too dangerous to ignore.”

“When health experts—the people who see the effects of pollution on their patients every single day—say enough is enough, the rest of us need to pay attention,” said Alt. “Zeldin is not just failing Americans. He is actively endangering us. We cannot tolerate an EPA administrator who treats our families as expendable.”

This is the second “Game Over Zeldin” letter, following another from over 160 advocacy groups, including Climate Action Campaign and Moms Clean Air Force, last month.

 

Concrete as a carbon sink

KIT researchers model and test concrete parts with CO₂-binding cement

Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT)

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KIT researchers are testing the climate-friendly C-SINC concrete for load-bearing capacity, durability, and safety

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Credit: Cynthia Ruf; KIT

Concrete is a climate-damaging construction material because of the cement it contains, which acts as its binding agent. The production of cement clinker, a key ingredient of cement, is responsible for about 8 percent of global CO₂ emissions.

 

“These high emissions result from the energy consumed during production, but especially from the deacidification of limestone during the production of Portland cement clinker, which is the most common binding agent for concrete,” explained Professor Frank Dehn, who heads the Institute of Concrete Structures and Building Materials and the Materials Testing and Research Institute at KIT.

 

There are already substitute materials for cement, such as fly ash from coal combustion and ground blast-furnace slag. However, these materials will become scarce in the foreseeable future due to Germany’s coal phase-out and the industrial transformation of the steel industry. Developing sustainable alternative cement substitutes is the goal of C-SINC, an EU-funded project involving researchers from Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Spain. Dehn’s working group tests the suitability of the new types of concrete that can be produced with these cement substitutes.

 

CO2 Bound Permanently

The focus is on magnesium silicates that react with CO₂ to form magnesium carbonate in a targeted and accelerated mineralization process. As a secondary cement additive, this material can be used to replace part of the clinker. “By using CO₂ that’s extracted from industrial exhaust gases (in other words, removed from the atmosphere), not only can we lower emissions due to concrete, we can also make it work as a carbon sink,” Dehn said. “The CO₂ isn’t just stored, it’s chemically bound in a mineral. It remains firmly bonded, so it can’t escape over very long periods.”

 

Putting the Material to Use Quickly

Under the direction of an industrial partner, the research teams are not only developing new materials in the lab. Their primary objective is to quickly put concrete with the new cement to use as an actual construction material. KIT is playing an important role in the efforts. “Using machine learning strategies and structural-mechanical modeling, we’re investigating how the binding agent behaves in concrete, how to best mix the concrete, and how well it works in practice,” Dehn said. “We’re doing that on a small scale, and in real large-scale structural elements as well.”

 

KIT’s strength is its tight integration of simulation, experimental research, and large-scale, realistic testing at its materials testing facility in Karlsruhe. “With simulations and machine learning, we can predict which concrete formulations will work. Then we plan experiments to test our predictions. We want to work out reliable parameters that show that concrete with the new binding agent is climate-friendly and satisfies requirements for load-bearing capacity, durability, and safety,” Dehn said. 

 

About C-SINC

The project is funded by the European Innovation Council (EIC) within the framework of its Pathfinder Challenge entitled “Towards cement and concrete as a carbon sink.” The funding amounts to about EUR 4 million over four years, of which about EUR 1 million will go to KIT, the only German partner in the project consortium as well as the only German university funded by the EIC in the Pathfinder program. Besides KIT and the coordinating company, PAEBBL AB (Sweden), other partners are Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands); Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium); the Spanish National Research Council and PREFABRICADOS TECNYCONTA S.L. (Spain); and, in a supporting capacity, Holcim Technology Ltd. (Switzerland). 

What are the Prospects for Renewing Social Democratic Agency in Britain?

By Neil Dawson

February 28, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

LONG READ

A massive column of demonstrators occupying the full width of the Strand after the start of a procession from Trafalgar Square to Hackney's Victoria Park in a "Carnival Against the Nazis" organised jointly by the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism, April 30, 1978 | Image via Morning Star UK

A social democratic order is one in which society, through the state, asserts control over the market and subordinates it to the common good.  Something like a social democratic order was created in Britain in the three decades after World War Two.  Organized labor allied with parts of the middle class expressed demands that were effectively represented by the state, resulting in an egalitarian politics of redistribution and extensive public welfare.  The specific configuration of agency underpinning this order – working class power, a cross-class alliance, and democratic statehood – has long since dissipated, defeated by forces of the right.  Yet its revival is “imperative” if social democracy is to be reestablished in Britain, as various commentators on the left have stressed.  What, then, are the prospects for renewing social democratic agency under present conditions? 

We shouldn’t delude ourselves.  The prospects certainly aren’t good.  Britain’s working class is fragmented and disempowered.  The part of the middle class most likely to ally with workers on material grounds is culturally antagonistic towards them.  There’s no effective political vehicle for representing popular demands for social democracy; and the British state remains heavily dependent on international capital.  Yet we shouldn’t succumb to despair either.  Certain domestic and international trends hint at opportunities for reviving working class power, for rebuilding an alliance between workers and parts of the middle class, and for restoring democratic statehood.  These trends – a graduate class whose material interests increasingly align with those of workers, and moves towards state interventionism and economic nationalism – are inchoate at this stage.  But we may be able to push them in a social democratic direction.    

Working Class Power

The basic pillar of postwar social democracy was the organized working class.  In this period, trade union membership peaked at 55% of the workforce and around 70% of wages were set by collective bargaining agreements.  As the balance of class power tilted from capital to labor workers commanded a higher share of national income.  As a result, economic inequality reached an historic low and life chances expanded. 

Working class power was enabled by certain structural conditions.  Britain’s economy at this time was geographically dense and logistically rigid.  Workers were concentrated in large numbers, both in their workplaces and in adjacent communities.  These sites were “associationally rich environments” conducive to class consciousness and solidarity, as Eric Blanc points out.  And as Timothy Mitchell shows, vital goods during this period were often transported along “narrow channels” connecting industries, cities, and ports.  Workers could block these arteries, disrupt the economy, and so win concessions.  

The sector best exhibiting these conditions was the coal industry, which is why miners have often been at the forefront of labor militancy, both in Britain and elsewhere.  In Britain, coalmining was concentrated in central and northern England, central Scotland, and southern Wales.  It employed hundreds of thousands of people who typically lived in ‘tightknit’ pit communities.  Miners were heavily unionized, with the postwar membership of the National Union of Miners (NUM) peaking at over 300,000; and they could exert strategic power.  In 1972, the NUM won a dispute with government over pay and conditions because its members blocked “the distribution of coal to industry … paralys[ing] the nation’s economy”.  

It’s no coincidence, then, that when capital – represented by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party – moved to restore its power in the late 1970s, coalminers were the principal target.  Thatcher’s defeat of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike marked “the defeat of the organized working class as a whole”, as David Edgerton writes.  This victory was strategic, restructuring the British economy in a way that makes reconstituting working class power incredibly difficult to achieve.  

The first step in this defeat of working class power was ending Britain’s dependence on domestic coal.  Coal remained a major source of UK energy production well into the 2000s, but the liberalization of the energy market in the early 1980s meant that an increasing share of the coal used came from abroad.  This internationalization of the coal supply undermined the NUM’s ability to disrupt the economy.  Whereas the 1972 Miners’ Strike forced the government to mandate a ‘three-day week’ to curb energy use, the much longer 1984-85 Miners’ Strike led to no electricity shortages.  

Coalminers’ strategic power was further diminished by the expansion of domestic oil.  Huge oilfields were discovered in the North Sea in the 1960s, and oil started to flow in the 1970s; but the rate of its extraction increased significantly in the 1980s, stimulated by tax cuts guaranteeing windfall profits to oil firms.  The use of fiscal policy to expedite oil production reduced Britain’s “longstanding reliance on domestically mined coal for electricity generation” and put hundreds of thousands of coalminers out of work, as Brett Christophers notes. 

This move from coal to oil wasn’t simply substituting one fossil fuel industry for another.  Rapidly extracting oil from the North Sea required massive upfront costs and advanced technology that Britain alone couldn’t provide.  Thatcher’s tax cuts therefore also served to attract international investors, which they did, largely in the form of US capital.  The British government’s dependency on American capital impacted working conditions in the oil sector.  As Charles Woolfson et al. show, British policymakers effectively gave “Louisiana and Texas oilmen” free rein to establish an “individualistic, macho, ‘kickass’, anti-union culture” in this industry, resulting in a precariously employed and unorganized labor force.  Such conditions were made worse by the fact that organising workers on far flung rigs in the middle of the sea is intrinsically difficult.  So, the switch from coal to oil supplanted a concentrated and collectivized workforce with a dispersed and unempowered one. 

The shift from the collectivism of miners to the “fragmented, non-unionized labor” of the oil sector was a portent of broader changes to the economy.  Even with the large injection of US capital, Britain in the 1980s diverted between 10-20% of its industrial investment into North Sea oil, leading to a sharp decline in manufacturing and mass unemployment.  When coupled with Thatcher’s very tight monetary policy (interest rates peaked at 17% in the early 1980s), which strengthened the pound and made exports less competitive, the development of domestic oil “virtually obliterated” British industry.  It’s a bitter irony that tax revenues from North Sea oil helped finance the welfare payments that made deindustrialization politically sustainable.  

Following the decimation of industry, production was increasingly outsourced (largely to East Asia), and a new economy based on services and on rent – or what Michael Pettis calls “short-term asset inflation” – was built.  At present, the service sector constitutes over 80% of Britain’s economy, up from 56% in 1970.  Services are by nature “very decentralized”, as Blanc points out.  Supermarket chains Tesco and Sainsbury’s together employ nearly half a million workers, but these employees are spread out across over 4,000 stores that span Britain’s length and breadth.  “[W]orkers’ power of resistance declines with their dispersal”, wrote Karl Marx in Capital Volume I, as their collective mobilization becomes much more difficult to achieve.  Deindustrialization and the rise of services have contributed to a steep decline in union density; officially, 22% of the workforce is unionized, and even this comparatively low figure doesn’t fully capture the extent of working class disempowerment, as union membership today – particularly in the public sector – is concentrated among those with degrees.  

Blanc suggests that social media may provide “new mechanisms … [for bringing] workers together”.  But as Anton Jäger persuasively argues, online platforms can’t substitute for the communities that underpinned working class power, not least because the “exit and entry costs of … simulated civil society are extremely low”.  James Schneider rightly notes that we must overcome the disintegration of “working class associational life”.  But when he states that there are “no shortages of possibilities” to do this and that we simply need to “knock on doors and organize” people, he reveals a rather shallow conception of what working class community was.  In the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, for instance, people fought “not for their own jobs, but for jobs for other miners”, as Edgerton shows.  There was a deep-seated predilection for the communal interest, an ingrained solidarity that enabled and sustained collective action.  Restoring this among today’s dispersed and atomized workers would be a far more monumental task than Schneider suggests.  

Adding to the difficulty of renewing working class power is the rentier nature of Britain’s economy.  As hinted at above, rent is income generated through the control of a scarce asset, such as a water company charging fees for the use of its pipes.  The modus operandi of rentier capitalism is to “sweat existing income-generating assets”, to extract as much from these as possible.  As a result, rentier economies are characterized by low productive investment and stagnation.  Britain certainly fits this bill: while annual rates of investment were around 20% in the 1970s, they have since dropped to lows of 13%; over the last two decades GDP per capita has barely budged, increasing from £35,000 in 2007 to £37,000 in 2024.  Under these conditions of meagre growth, the dispersed and atomized working class has been squeezed.  Whereas labor’s share of national income was 70% in the 1970s, it’s 55% today.  Rentierism, stagnation, and a declining share have all contributed to widespread precarity among Britain’s workers.  This, too, has hindered collective mobilization, as insecurity tends towards caution and passivity, not resistance.  

The barriers to working class collectivism stemming from the expansion of services and rent have been raised by a further change to the British landscape: mass immigration.  Since the late 1990s, the scale and pace of people coming into the UK has increased significantly.  In the decade leading up to the 1997 general election, annual net migration never exceeded +50,000.  In 2023 alone, net migration stood at +906,000.  Immigrants have undoubtedly brought considerable benefits to Britain.  But as various commentators show – including Perry Anderson, Christophers, and Jäger – the policy of mass immigration has heightened competition in the labor market and exerted downward pressure on wages, so exacerbating working class precarity.  Furthermore, as Erica Consterdine points out, in the pre-1997 era of restricted immigration, the policy focus was on “successful integration”, but current policy emphasizes “forging … a truly multicultural state”.  The multiculturalist approach has made working class organization more challenging. For example, attempts in 2023-24 to unionize workers at various Amazon warehouses failed due to a lack of a common language to communicate with.  As one participant in these efforts put it, we “had so much trouble with the language barrier”.  

A Cross-Class Alliance         

There are, then, formidable obstacles to renewing working class power.  But what about a political alliance between workers and parts of the middle class? 

The British Labour party recognized very early on that winning parliamentary majorities required it to expand its support base beyond the working class.  Put simply, there weren’t enough working class voters to ensure a social democratic tilt in the House of Commons.  Hence Labour’s 1918 constitution emphasized the need for an alliance between the working and “professional classes”.  

Building this coalition wasn’t without its difficulties, however. Historically, the middle classes have “enjoyed a relatively privileged position in the market … meeting their welfare demands outside the state”, as Gøsta Esping-Andersen notes.  Their interests, in other words, haven’t necessarily been aligned with those of workers.  The left’s stitching together of a cross-class alliance during the postwar era was achieved through the promotion of what Esping-Andersen terms of “liberal welfare state” – a public welfare regime in which relatively generous social entitlements were available but reliance on the market was actively encouraged.  As the conflict between labor and capital intensified in the late 1970s, many middle class voters withdrew their support from this alliance, largely because they feared a “future with stronger unions and a more comprehensive welfare state”, as Edgerton writes.

Moving to the present, we have some grounds for thinking that this cross-class alliance could be revived.  Britain’s current middle class – or at least a significant fraction of it – doesn’t enjoy a relatively privileged market position.  According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, nearly 40% of UK graduates are employed in jobs that don’t require a degree.  Like many within the working class, these downwardly mobile graduates – or “fallen professionals”, to use Benjamin Studebaker’s term – often experience low wages and precarity, as well as high levels of indebtedness.  Their material interests are largely aligned with those of workers.  

It seems likely, moreover, that A.I. is going to expand the number of fallen professionals.  The top UK accountancy firms Deloitte, Ernst & Young, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, for example, have all made substantial cuts to their graduate programs, preferring to automate entry level positions.  As Holly Buck and Matt Huber argue, if this trend continues, there would be an “opportunity to build … broad … solidarity” between fallen professionals and the working class, creating a large mass in favor of a more egalitarian political economy. 

However, while fallen professionals and the working class have similar material interests, the common ground between them is also a source of division.  In a convincing analysis, Studebaker explains that the more fallen professionals’ material circumstances resemble those of the working class, the more they feel they need to distinguish themselves from ordinary workers.  As downwardly mobile graduates can’t do this through income and wealth, “all they have left … is their cultural capital”.  Consequently, they engage in “pretentious discourses” that emphasise their “cultural distinctiveness” from workers.  As Studebaker states, these discourses may flatter the “fallen professionals’ self-concept” and make them think that they are “resisting proletarianization”, but at the same time they “alienate” the working class.  

The potential for, and the cultural barriers to, a cross-class alliance were well illustrated by Labour’s performance in the 2017 and 2019 general elections.  Labour’s 2017 manifesto went some way to synthesizing working class and fallen professional demands.  It promised redistribution, investment, the abolition of university tuition fees, and a Brexit that ended the free movement of people.  Although Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour didn’t win this election, it received 40% of the vote (much higher than the 33.7% the party won in 2024) and it deprived the Conservatives of their parliamentary majority. 

This result certainly raised the hopes of fallen professionals.  They spoke of “building” on the achievement of the 2017 election and of escaping the “sprawling precariat”.  Simultaneously, however, they expressed their cultural distinctiveness from the working class more sharply.  Whereas prior to the 2017 election they complained about the “unbearable whiteness” of the Brexit-supporting working class, afterwards they declared that “[w]e are now a political constituency with power” and “[we want] to stop the country being flooded by … [this] narrow-minded effluent”.  As is well-known, such sentiments gained more traction in the Labour party over the next two years, culminating in the Corbyn leadership dropping its commitment to Brexit.  In the 2019 election, the party suffered the consequences, as large numbers of working class voters abandoned it. 

It’s hard not to think of 2017 as a missed opportunity.  If fallen professionals had reined in their pretentious discourses and emphasized their common material interests with workers, then a viable, social democratic electoral alliance may have been formed; at a minimum, this would have increased the chances of fallen professionals gaining economic security.  So, why didn’t they do this? 

One answer has been offered recently by Ash Sarkar, a prominent spokesperson for this class fraction.  She argues that fallen professionals were too young and inexperienced – not “smart enough” – to realise where their true interests lay.  As Sarkar admits, she wasn’t “able to listen” when she was in her “twenties” and being surrounded by people whose “opinions … and educational status resembled hers, led her to “overly emphasise” fallen professional “biases”.  This answer is plausible and is also a positive step, implying that should the opportunity for a cross-class alliance present itself in the future, downwardly mobile graduates might make better political decisions.  

Yet, as welcome as Sarkar’s self-criticism is, it won’t be easy for fallen professionals to rein in their pretentious discourses, and that’s because they are ultimately shaped and sustained by material conditions.  As Studebaker suggests, the “psychological benefits” – the sense of “superiority” – fallen professionals get from “sneer[ing] at ordinary workers” are immediate, while the material benefits they could get from allying with the working class are distant and very far from certain.  When they’ve already had their expectations of a bourgeois lifestyle dashed, it’s understandable that fallen professionals would not put much store in the future and so would prioritise their cultural validation in the present.  Other prominent spokespersons of this class fraction, such as Richard Seymour, continue to reject the forefronting of “bread and butter issues” that could form the basis of a coalition between fallen professionals and the working class.  Instead, they assert their sophistication through denouncing the “white working class” as “plebeian”, “racist”, and “transphobic” and therefore susceptible to “moral panics … about race, nationality or gender”.  Of course, this does nothing but repel ordinary workers once more.     

Democratic Statehood

So far, the discussion of social democratic agency has concentrated mainly on the economy and society.  In this section, the focus will be more explicitly on the state, or more precisely, the democratic state. 

The democratic state was central to the legitimation and implementation of postwar social democracy.  What ‘the many’ lost out on through the operation of the market, they could (at least in part) regain as democratic citizens through redistributive policies and public welfare.  As Esping-Andersen comments, in this period states were “effective institutions for the translation of [the] mobilized power” of cross-class alliances “into desired policies and reforms”.  There was a relatively neat fit between societal inputs and state outputs.  

This neat fit didn’t just happen, however.  The British state’s ability to respond to popular demands and enact a social democratic order during this era was contingent on a number of factors.  One factor, of course, was the mobilized bloc of workers and professionals itself.  But others that we haven’t already discussed include the presence of a mass leftwing party and an international environment consistent with what Edgerton calls “economic controls at [national] borders”.  

According to Peter Mair, the mass party is defined by its rootedness in large social groups, whose members share “distinct … experiences” and who are held together by “effective … institutions”.  Based on this definition, Labour in the three or four decades after World War Two was a mass (leftwing) party.  It was rooted in the working class and trade union movement, with a membership (including affiliates) that at its peak surpassed 5 million people.  

Although mass parties such as Labour competed in elections and formed governments, their most important function from the point of view of democratic statehood was representation.  Due to their organic connection with distinct social groups, mass parties expressed and shaped their constituents’ preferences and, once in office, used state power to enact these.  Hence the 1945-51 Labour government rejected Britain’s membership in the European Coal and Steel Community on the grounds that the “Durham miners [wouldn’t] wear it”; and Labour across the postwar era converted its constituents’ demands into policies that put “the majority before private interests”.  Once in government, moreover, the mass party’s deep bonds with its constituents enabled the latter to maintain “popular control” over the former, increasing the likelihood that policy commitments wouldn’t be broken.  As Mair wrote, in this period, the mass party was essential for approximating the democratic ideal of government by and for the people.  

The British state’s ability to respond to popular demands for social democracy wasn’t just the result of Labour’s role as a mass leftwing party, though.  Also necessary was an accommodating international environment, which was established by the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference.  

From the late nineteenth century through to the 1930s, international conditions militated against the state being able to assert control over capitalism.  The main international economic institution at this time was the gold standard.  This required central bankers to defend the gold parity at which the national currency was pegged, with the result that states prioritized maintaining their balance of payments over upholding domestic employment, wages, and credit supply.  In other words, an international economic order based on ‘sound money’ took precedence over domestic stability. 

The constraints the gold standard placed on states were widely perceived by delegates at the Bretton Woods Conference as being to blame for the economic calamities and political extremism of the 1930s, which culminated in World War Two.  As such, they accepted that the postwar international economic order would have to be one that allowed states to “intervene in the economy to protect the common interest”.  What this meant in practice was a commitment to freer but not free trade, pegged but adjustable exchange rates, and capital controls.  Dani Rodrik characterises these measures as constituting a “loose framework of international cooperation” that gave the state the “room to pursue … its domestic policy objectives”.  They were vital to the emergence after World War Two of what Edgerton terms a “national economic space” in which the state could exert its “control of the economy”.  The international order created by Bretton Woods thus played an important role in permitting market forces to be subordinated to democratic politics.  

How far can we say that these conditions for democratic statehood – a mass leftwing party and a favorable international environment – exist today?  Labour at present is better classified as a party of elites than of the masses, with nothing showing this more clearly that its sources of income.  Over the last thirty years, the party has gone from being primarily financed by trade unions to relying on funds from rich individuals.  In 2023, the party received more money from two businessmen (£7.7 million) than from the entire labor movement (£5.9 million).  Since 2020, the year Keir Starmer became Labour leader, the party has been given close to £17 million from individuals and organisations directly tied to the City of London.  The party is very much in the pay of business and corporate elites.  

Lunches are never free, so it’s no surprise that as Labour has become more dependent on these elites, its worldview and policy agenda has shifted sharply to the right.  This began in the 1990s, with the New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown exalting the “open, liberal economy” and demanding that workers subject to the vagaries of the market be “slow to complain” and “swift to adapt”.  And it continues into the present, with Starmer’s government regurgitating free market mantras about “deregulation [being] essential” for growth and cuts to public welfare being necessary to “unleash … the talents of the British people”.  The notion that the market should be made to serve the common good is long gone.  

Could this notion be reasserted within Labour?  We could see the party’s turn to elites and the right as a matter of necessity, born of the defeat and collapse of the organized working class discussed in the first part of this essay.  On this basis, if the organized working class was revived, then Labour’s renewal as a mass leftwing party would follow.  Yet, we have reason to doubt that this logic applies, as Labour’s move away from the masses and embrace of the right has been zealously pursued.  The Blair governments actively executed policies damaging to the working class, such as the extension of Private Finance Initiative – which enlarged the rentier economy – and the liberalization of immigration – which heightened barriers to worker solidarity and resistance.  Starmer, a man incapable of taking a clear stand on most things, nevertheless engages in panegyrics to Thatcher, praising her for “drag[ging] Britain out of its stupor by setting loose [its] natural entrepreneurialism”.  Labour, therefore, hasn’t abandoned its role as a mass leftwing party only out of necessity but because it believes that this has been the right thing to do.  This gives little hope that its historic role can be revived. 

Could another party take the place of Labour?  This is the task that Your Party (YP) has ostensibly set for itself.  Given that YP was only officially formed at the end of November 2025, it is too early to say whether it could succeed in this task.  The signs, however, are not promising.  

Firstly, for all YP’s talk of “set[ting] down roots” in the working class and building “popular power”, the party in practice has been mainly a vehicle for channelling the cultural discourses of fallen professionals.  We see this in the preeminent position Coventry South MP and former Labour member Zarah Sultana has achieved within YP, as she is an authentic representative of this class fraction.  And we see it in YP’s statements about having “to center the most marginalized”, who the party identifies as trans people and the Palestinians.  However worthy these causes may be, they “motivate vanishingly small numbers of voters”, as the commentator Johnny Ball points out.  By placing so much emphasis on these issues, YP is significantly restricting its appeal.  

Secondly, the way YP has been organized doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in its ability to sustain the “slow boring of hard boards” required to turn itself into a mass party.  Its launch process was shambolic, including public spats between key individuals, threats of legal action, and resignations.  And the decisions at YP’s founding conference to have a collective leadership structure and to allow dual membership (meaning that members can belong to YP and another party simultaneously) seem to all but guarantee infighting and inertia.  From what we’ve seen, then, it doesn’t look like YP stands much chance of fulfilling the role once played by Labour.

What about the current international environment?  The story here is little more mixed.  

On the one hand, the days of Bretton Woods are long gone.  This framework started to be dismantled in the 1970s and over the last forty years the reality of national economic spaces in which capitalism could be controlled has given way to more internationalized economies characterized by free capital flows and (for many western countries) the outsourcing of industrial production.  For Britain, this transformation of the international economic order has had two important consequences, both of which undermine democratic statehood.  

Firstly, increased capital mobility has weakened the British state’s ability to finance public spending through taxation.  In this more open economic environment, corporations and wealthy individuals have been able to more effectively avoid paying tax.  Moreover, in this era of capital mobility, states have had to actively compete with other states “to attract investment from multinational corporations”, resulting in “benign corporate tax regimes” that have strained public finances still further, as Helen Thompson shows.  To make up for this shortfall in tax revenues, states such as Britain have resorted to higher levels of borrowing, with a large share of this debt coming from international creditors.  This situation has curtailed democratic statehood as it has placed the government’s “macro-economic decision-making at the mercy of foreign exchange markets”, to cite Thompson once more.  That is, state policies have become more focused on placating foreign creditors than on serving the needs of the British people, something that chancellor Rachel Reeve’s latest budget illustrated, with around 60% of its tax increases being earmarked to reduce debt and borrowing and so reassure bond investors.

Secondly, Britain’s deindustrialization and outsourcing of production – central to the strategic defeat of working class power – has led to chronic trade deficits.  For a few decades now, Britain has consistently imported more than it has exported, meaning that ceteris paribus more money leaves the country than comes in.  The UK therefore needs capital to flow into the country to finance its trade deficit and maintain current living standards.  Without these capital inflows the value of the pound would plummet and imports would become much more expensive.  Thus, the state is once again in a bind; it faces immense pressure to pursue policies that make Britain more attractive to foreign investors, that serve the interests of international capital.  As Aditya Chakrabortty points out, this has invariably involved deregulation and the sale of national assets to foreigners. 

On the other hand, there are indications that the post-Bretton Woods international order of free capital flows and outsourced production is not as robust as it once was.  As Ilias Alami and Andrew Dixon detail in The Spectre of State Capitalism, over the last decade, states around the world have been “intervening across economies and societies in ever more explicit and visible ways”.  This emerging worldwide trend has been driven primarily by crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic and by rising geopolitical competition; and it has mainly involved states intervening to promote national techno-industrial development and to enhance the security of critical supply chains.  Typically, these measures have been justified through “appeals to national identity” or what Alami and Dixon otherwise term “economic nationalism”.  There is, then, some movement towards reindustrialization and a world of economic controls at national borders.  

We should be careful not to push this too far.  Alami and Dixon stress that this movement towards reindustrialization and national economic controls shouldn’t be understood as a “clean break” with the post-Bretton Woods order; rather, it exists within this order.  They also emphasise that this trend isn’t a “counter-movement where states redress capitalist excesses”, of the sort theorized in Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation.  Yet they do note that if this trend continues it could lead to a rebuilding of “working class power”, and more people could come to see the state as being capable of doing “meaningful things”, such as protecting the common good from the vicissitudes of the market.  In turn, this could result in more effective popular demands for interventions of this kind, which the state would be more able to comply with due to its greater control over capital.  This is all highly speculative at this stage, but this emerging movement at least raises the hope that an international order conducive to democratic politics could be renewed. 

Conclusion

As we have seen, then, the prospects for renewing social democratic agency in Britain under present conditions aren’t good.  The dominance of services and rent, as well as the reality of mass immigration, make the overcoming of working class fragmentation and disempowerment incredibly difficult to achieve; the balance of social forces remains heavily tilted in capital’s favor.  Converging material interests between workers and fallen professionals engender cultural antagonisms that obstruct the formation of a cross-class coalition.  Even if a bloc of workers and professionals emerged there’s no mass party to represent it; Labour has abandoned this role and YP seems both unwilling and incapable of picking up the mantle.  The British state is heavily dependent on international capital, restraining its ability to put the common good ahead of narrow interests. Yet we shouldn’t abandon all hope.  While tentative at this stage, trends are in place that hint at opportunities for the revival of social democratic agency.  There are increasingly common material interests between downwardly mobile graduates and workers, and these could form the basis for a cross-class alliance; a political struggle that emphasises these similarities over cultural differences would be a step forward.  Worldwide moves towards greater state intervention, reindustrialisation and economic nationalism may have been driven by security concerns, but they at least point to the possibility of reconstituting working class power and subordinating capital to democratic politics.  It’s not clear how (or indeed whether) we can influence these moves in ways conducive to this political project, and so these questions require further consideration.          

Neil Dawson has a PhD in War Studies Research from King’s College London and teaches History, Politics, and Sociology at a Sixth Form College in Oxford, England.  He has previously written for ZNetwork and Review 31 magazine.Email