By Simon Pirani. Republished with thanks from Labour Hub The disastrous failure of the government’s ECO4 scheme – which was supposed to retrofit homes with insulation, heat pumps and solar panels –…

Russia’s federal security service (FSB) is preparing a new case, for high treason, against Ruslan Siddiqi, the Russian-Italian anarchist serving a 29-year sentence for sabotaging a train carrying m…

Experiments with free public transport, introduced in some of the world’s biggest cities to tackle the fuel price crisis, are proving successful. In Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam and Tehran, Iran – whi…

By Simon Pirani What, really, have socialists learned from the Russian war on Ukraine? Has it changed our understanding of the way that imperialism works? Tell us we were right all along? Reflectin…

By Simon Pirani. Republished from the Ecologist, with thanks Skyrocketing charges for heating and hot water from council heat networks in Lambeth, south London, are to be challenged at a judicial r…

A guest post by JOHN DAVIES The Serbian general and war criminal Ratko Mladić, the butcher of Srebrenica and too many other places to mention, died last week. It’s an opportunity for reflection, an…

The Russian political prisoner Andrei Trofimov has appeared on a video link to a court hearing on Thursday, after four months’ loss of contact. His supporters, who fear he was being mistreated in t…

By Simon Pirani A Ukrainian court this month found Bohdan Syrotiuk, a Trotskyist, guilty of high treason and jailed him for 15 years – solely for words he wrote about the war. This assault on free …

This summer’s heat waves have hammered home the reality of climate change, and highlighted, again, the gulf between the government’s timid efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and what scientist…

Reposted from the Fare Free London web site The government could make all bus journeys in the UK free, at a cost of about £5.6 billion per year, a report by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) shows…

The government’s Local Power Plan will fail to boost community renewable energy projects  if regulatory and market obstructions are not swept away, campaigners say. An obsessively centralised …

By Simon Pirani. Republished with thanks from the Ecologist The UK government’s plan to shift to electrified, low-carbon heating of homes could be heading for ruinous failure without public sector …

This statement by HK Anti-War Mobilisation was published on facebook on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, in February. It deserves to be shared widely – please copy an…

At a Green Left zoom discussion on 23 June about “the Green party and NATO”, I argued that we can support resistance to Russian imperialism while opposing NATO. I was on a panel along with Paul Ing…

Russian-Speaking Leftists, a group based in Germany, on 19 May published this interview with a socialist activist living in Russia who, they write, “stands for revolutionary defeatism”.[1] I transl…

This post is based on a talk I gave at the Ecosocialism conference in London on Saturday 30 May, about the Fare Free London campaign, in which I participate, and the wider movements of which it is …

By Nagraj Adve Seeking to cushion the impacts of global warming is like aiming at a moving target. What’s worse, the target is now moving faster. Over the last decade or so, there has been a signif…

By Simon Pirani Russia’s political prisoners are “outcasts in their own land,” Sergei Dudchenko, a biker tortured and framed by the security services, told his trial judges this month before being …

Over four years into Russia’s war in Ukraine, some of the Russians imprisoned in its early days are still in jail. Even people with no previous political activism have been landed with long prison sen...

This is the final statement by Aleksandr Nesterenko, one of thousands of political prisoners in Russia, to an appeal court on 31 March. He appeared at the appeal via a video link from prison, and s…

TRY ME FOR TREASON is a 50-minute film, in English, featuring speeches made by anti-war protesters in Russian courts. It has been made by a group of actors to draw English-speaking audiences’ atten…

By Simon Pirani We need a collective discussion about “what the hell can we do to get out of the catastrophe that is growing all around us?”, my friend and comrade Bob Myers wrote on this blog (27 …

A review by BOB MYERS of Life on Earth (Past, Present and Future!), by Roy Ratcliffe This book made me confront my own prejudices and dogma right from the sub-title, which is “From a Revolutionary-…

Igor Paskar, who is serving eight-and-a-half years’ imprisonment for protesting against Russia’s war on Ukraine, is being victimised by prison authorities in Tomsk province, in Siberia. Paskar is o…

London is missing its own targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions from road transport by ever-greater margins, Simon Pirani writes. The relentless rise in the volume of traffic is the cause. I…

Russian bombing of Ukrainian civilian infrastructure and blocks of flats has continued uninterrupted this month, while attention has been diverted by the criminal US-Israeli military adventure in I…

The second of two linked articles. The first is here: European socialism, imperial militarism and the defence of Ukraine In the labour movement and civil society organisations in the UK, support fo…

A carbon capture project is being used to greenwash the expansion of one of the UK’s largest waste incinerators, at Belvedere, Kent. Cory Topco, which owns one incinerator and is building another, …

Thirty-five years ago, Turkey was shaken by strikes. An eight-week stoppage by mineworkers, between November 1990 and January 1991, won support from other workers, and took up political demands. It…

A Moscow court has sentenced university teacher Aleksandr Nesterenko to three years’ imprisonment, for sharing Ukrainian songs on a social media account. Here is a translation of Nesterenko’s final…

By Simon Pirani Electricity networks matter. Humans depend on economic and technological systems through which they run. We will depend on electricity networks still more heavily if – despite, and …

Paintings and sculptures of breathtaking beauty and power, reflecting the explosive social transformations of Africa’s most populous nation, are on show in the Nigerian Modernism exhibition at the …

“Try me for treason. I betrayed your deranged state”, the Russian anti-war protester Andrei Trofimov told the Second Western District Military Court in May. In 2023, Trofimov was sentenced to ten y…

The Second Western Military District court in Moscow last week sentenced Yulia Lemeshchenko to 19 years’ imprisonment for high treason, sabotage, and preparing and training for an act of terrorism.…

In this speech to a Russian military court, Anton Khozhaev, a trainee officer accused of desertion to Ukraine’s side, urged Ukrainians to fight on and scorned the “bio-trash” that the Russian army …

By Simon Pirani. Republished from Jacobin, with thanks On May 16, 2022, the Ukrainian artist Bohdan Ziza poured blue and yellow paint – the colours of his country’s flag – on to a municipal adminis…

Dave Temple, who died on 13 September aged 81, was a lifelong militant in the labour movement. He worked as an electrician at Murton colliery, county Durham, and played a leading part in the minewo…

Review by Simon Pirani of More, More and More: an all-consuming history of energy, by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (Allen Lane, 2024) We really are in climate trouble now. The intergovernmental climate ag…

Voices Against Putin’s War: protesters’ defiant speeches in Russian courts is published this month by Resistance Books. Here is the Introduction to the book, by Simon Pirani, first published on lin…

A guest post by BOB MYERS An amazing meeting of mineworkers and environmentalists from across the former Yugoslavia was held on 12-14 September in the small mining town of Breza. We came together o…

By Les Levidow. Reposted with thanks from the Ecologist A basic contradiction runs through UK climate policy. The government accepts that oil and gas extraction will increase, and that domestic use…

By Simon Pirani. Reposted with thanks from the We Own It! web site More rail and bus fare increases are on the way – and they threaten to undo much of the good promised by wider public ownership an…

Free public transport can open cities to all. It combats social injustice and can also help to tackle climate change, by moving away from car-centred urban transport systems. Public transport has b…

People & Nature has published three pamphlets by Tom Ackers, about the social, political and technological challenges involved in ridding the built environment of fossil fuels and of their use …

□ TOM ACKERS puts the case for a universal programme to retrofit the UK’s housing stock with insulation, in this edited excerpt from his new pamphlet. In a linked article here, he argues that a str…

□ Electrification and the installation of heat pumps should be the principle technology for decarbonising homes in the UK, TOM ACKERS argues in this edited excerpt from his new pamphlet. In a linke…