One of the criticisms of Starmer is that no-one believed him. He just seemed ideologically untethered.

Here comes Andy Burnham with a ten-year plan. He said on Friday he would stick to the 2024 Labour manifesto commitments. Yet the very first thing he seems to be doing is abandoning a key pledge. Andy Burnham looks set to approve Rosebank the UK's biggest untapped oil field within days of taking over as PM.

This is from page 52 to of that manifesto:

This isn’t just an ecological disaster. It’s a human rights nightmare too.

As LustraSke has pointed out:

“Rosebank is owned 80% by Equinor (the Norwegian state oil company) and 20% by Ithaca Energy.

Ithaca is majority-owned by Delek Group, an Israeli conglomerate. Delek is on a UN list of companies whose West Bank activities raise serious human rights concerns.

This isn't hypothetical money. Ithaca has already paid Delek over $1bn in dividends since 2020, $569m of that in just 2024-25, plus another $101m in April this year alone.”

Source: The Ferret.

These licences - Rosebank and Jackdaw - were ruled unlawful in 2025 at the Court of Session, in Edinburgh (Greenpeace and Uplift's judicial review, 2025
CSOH 10, decided by Lord Ericht on 29-30 January 2025.)

But these policies have been lobbied by Scottish Labour MPs and heralded by the Tories and Reform. It’s a cosy consensus that denies reality.

All of this comes amid a brutal heatwave and as the realities of climate breakdown manifest themselves everywhere. Huge wildfires have destroyed more than 100 homes in Norway. The Cairngorms have been on fire for days, prompting evacuations of the area, and a wildfire on Salisbury Crags has been raging. It’s the third in twelve months. More than 2,700 people died in England and Wales from heat-related causes during the recent record hot spells; and more than one million workers depend on the UK’s net zero economy.

Kevin Keane, who seems to be simultaneously the Energy Correspondent and the Environment Correspondent for BBC Scotland wrote this gushing piece celebrating Burnham’s decision: Is Burnham promising a new dawn for North Sea oil and gas?

As Fossil Free London put it: “Andy Burnham has a decision now. Prioritise the safety and health of the British people and invest in the homegrown renewables and green jobs we need - or continue to subsidise and appease the billionaire oil barons setting our world on fire.”

The New Clause 107 to the Representation of the People Bill was tabled by Reform UK’s deputy leader Richard Tice and co-signed by every sitting Reform MP would require all election publications material to be “in the English language or the Welsh language” only.

Ironically, the The Representation of the People Bill, if voted through, would allow 16 and 17-year-olds to vote at the next general election. The legislation is also aimed to tighten rules around political donations, protect against foreign interference, and move towards automatic voter registration.

The proposals are the ultimate consequence of the sort of sneering Muscular Unionism developed under the Tories (remember Penny Mordaunt tweeting out “Important continuity in the territorial offices. Congratulations to all three”) and it’s the high-point of Reform connecting with core supporters in the Shires and cringe-infested recesses of Unionist Scotland. But it’s also deeply Trumpian. The idea of the singularity, that is that the entire society must bend to the will of the one-dimensional and that any variant is a threat. The singularity is white, male, Christian, heterosexual, neurotypical and English-speaking. This is the default world. Diversity is, in this world, by definition bad. Trump’s war on language is explicitly political [Lost Words].

Of course the idea of criminalising the use of Gaelic is also deeply colonial.

The SNP’s Maree Todd said: “This despicable anti-Scottish amendment is deeply telling – Reform wants to see any trace of our native languages removed from Scottish politics.”

“Not content with plans to cut our MSPs and ‘review’ the powers of Holyrood, (Reform leader Nigel) Farage and his cronies want to threaten jail time upon anyone in Scotland who publishes political materials in Scots or Gaelic. We know Reform could not care less about Scotland, but this move is all too reminiscent of the brutal anti-Gaelic laws of the Highland Clearances.”

Of course Reform’s language fascism is probably aimed at ethnic communities, after their by-election loss in Gorton and Denton in which they poured derision on the Greens for publishing a leaflet in Urdu.

But the impact is linguistic colonialism and an effort to impose a Unionist language template. There are four legislatures in the United Kingdom. There are many languages both indigenous and not. All should be welcome as you attempt to communicate across a diverse society during an election.

Reform’s language fascism will only backfire massively on them in a week when they have already been humiliated.

Here’s the SNP’s new MP (former SPAD) Jack Middleton explaining why he supports Jackdaw and Rosebank:

The news was manna from heaven for The Times’ Alex Massie, who has carved out a lucrative career snearing at the idea of Scottish independence and, at times Scotland itself. In a remarkable tirade in The Times, Massie celebrated Middleton’s pronouncement on oil. He does this for two or three reasons. First, it reasserts his founding belief in the current economic system, which he clings onto for dear life and which defines his politics. Second, it reaffirms his hatred of the environmental movement and discussion of climate change, which he abhors. Third, it drives a wedge between the SNP which has previously celebrated its ‘world-leading climate targets’, and now seems more and more confused on climate policy.

We are witnessing catastrophic climate change across vast swathes of Europe. Nature and wildlife cannot cope with this intense heat. Food and energy systems are under threat. Brutal, relentless heat continues in Spain with up to 44C again. The records include 41.4C at Gerona Airport, the hottest July day in history.

Revelling in the idea of an influential member of the SNP advocating new oil explorations, Massie oozes:

“At some point, choices must be made. You are with the energy realists or you are with the tree-hugging fantasists.”

How do you explain the seeming disconnect between lived reality and the commentariat?

For writers like Massie the defence of the established order, both economic and constitutional is paramount. For Panglossian Tories like Massie, nothing is really wrong in the world. Every single article can be distilled to ‘Everything’s Fine’.

In the Edinburgh Review (A Reading from Noam Chomsky and the Scottish Tradition in the Philosophy of Common Sense), James Kelman writes: “Finding ways of denying reality is a key function of the mainstream intelligentsia.”

He goes on to quote Noam Chomsky: “The intellectual elite is the most heavily indoctrinated sector (of society), for good reasons. It’s their role as secular priesthood to really believe the nonsense they put forth. Other people can repeat it, but it’s not that crucial that they believe it because, after all, they are the guardians of the faith. Except for the very rare person who’s just an outright liar, it’s hard to be a convincing exponent of the faith unless you’ve internalised it and come to believe it.”

As system collapse kicks-in and the standard of everyday life deteriorates the level of cognitive dissonance between the sort of journalism being described here and the world around us will become more and more absurd. But then we live in a world where we are all continuing as if nothing is really happening, so these weird narratives can continue.

In a sense, as climate breakdown accelerates, it will become more and more essential that key figures and propagandists talk about ‘energy realists’, even as the ecological consequences of late capitalism become terrifyingly clear.

The consensus of the political class, as expressed by Bowie and Middleton is mirrored by the media class. As Carbon Brief points out, UK newspapers have already published 63 editorials this year calling for more oil and gas extraction in the North Sea.

Carbon Brief writes:

“The national outlets, including the Sun, the Daily Telegraph and the Times, argue that the nation “needs” more North Sea drilling to provide “home-sourced oil and gas” amid a “full-blown energy crisis”.

These newspapers seek to blame energy secretary Ed Miliband’s “net-zero crusade” for curbing UK fossil-fuel production – despite supplies dwindling for decades before he took the role.

The push for North Sea drilling in newspaper editorials – considered a publication’s formal “voice” – is part of a wider rejection of net-zero policies by the UK’s right-leaning press.

Figures ranging from ex-Labour prime minister Tony Blair to hard-right Reform UK leader Nigel Farage have repeated similar arguments that more drilling will “boost” the UK economy.

Even US president Donald Trump has weighed in, attributing, in part, the resignation of Keir Starmer as UK prime minister to him “fail[ing] badly” on North Sea oil.”

This is part of a wider vilification of Ed Miliband, portrayed as a dangerous radical and Net Zero, portrayed as a danger to civilization. In this bizarre world even the most palliative and tokenistic changes to policy are perceived and projected as existential threats to the system, which, in a sense they are. If the logic of capital accumulation, endless growth and exploitation are revealed as the cause of ecological catastrophe, that is a dangerous moment.

If Massie represents the apogee of entitled denialism, he is not alone. It’s for good reason that "Tell the Truth" was the foundational first demand of Extinction Rebellion. Creating alternative media spaces which speak truth to power (and people) remains more essential than ever.

The Herald reports: “Currently, there are 17 hyperscale data centre proposals moving through Scotland’s planning system. If all are approved, they could consume up to one and a half times Scotland’s peak electricity demand.”

You can petition against them here.

This backlash against a technology with horrendous consequences, socially, economically, ecologically and psychologically, and elusive tangible benefits is rightly accelerating.

In the face of such an uprising the SNP National Council has now voted to support a moratorium on new hyperscale data centre developments. In the face of such bog-standard common sense for a pause - the response to this democratic intervention is predictable.

Sandy Begbie CBE, chief executive of Scottish Financial Enterprise (SFE) has declared: “The adoption of a moratorium is a policy that would undermine economic growth.” Ah - the Gods of Growth would be displeased!

Begbie said: “The SNP was elected two months ago with the explicit aim of putting economic growth at the heart of government.”

“The adoption of a moratorium is a policy that would negatively impact investor sentiment towards Scotland.”

“As we have said before, data centres are a critical part of the national infrastructure of any high-performing economy.”

The fetishisation of endless growth on a finite planet is terrifyingly stupid. But the old shibboleths are repeated:

Growth is good

Endless growth is better

‘Investor Sentiment’ is always the priority (whatever it means)

Communities should be ignored

Technology is an Unquestionable Good, even if you have no control over it

Believe what the Broligarchy tells you

A ‘High-Performing Economy’ is a good thing (whatever it means)

The rapid rise of the question of the ecological consequences of data centres exposes some major problems about how democracy is functioning in Scotland.

As Wee Jinty put it on Twitter: “That poses a wider question Scotland now has to answer. What should good governance look like when a country faces unprecedented demand for its energy, land and water?”

And, going beyond that, how does good governance work when you don’t own any of your energy infrastructure? When the mindset means that extractivism is seen as an eternal good and when energy sovereignty is a complete myth?

As the writer Coll McCail has put it: “The promise of Scotland’s hyper scale data centres is already beginning to unravel as the reality becomes clear: Our resources are to be drained to fill silicon valley’s pockets. Astonishingly, the Scottish Government remains supportive.”

Mapping the Reindustrialisation of Scotland

There’s now a neat symmetry between Scotland, North and South. If the Highlands and Islands have been pockmarked by hundreds of onshore renewable projects [catalogued in detail here], now the Central Belt is to be littered with vast data centres.

Grotesquelly, Scotland is now united in extractive exploitation for energy-guzzling and energy-generating industries we don’t need and communities don’t want.

‘Energy’ conceived as a commodity rather than a resource or a utility is sold - like so much - via Scotland but not for Scottish people.

‘Data’ conceived as a vital part of ‘national infrastructure’ is assumed to be a necessity without any evidence of the benefits it brings, other than to placate ‘investor sentiment’.

But ‘reindustrialisation’ appeals to both Northern Burnham fans and those clinging on to a historical sense of, often gendered, agency. But if this idea of ‘reindustrialisation’ plays well in both the ‘North West’ (sic) and the actual North East, it suffers some of the same nostalgia for hearkening back to bygone eras and denies climate reality.

It’s hotter now than at any time in 125,000 years.

You are living in climate hell.

One of the most interesting voices in this debate is Mary Lockhart, from Lochgelly in Fife, close to both the disastrous Exxon Mobil’s plant at Mossmorran [Mossmorrans Catastrophic Emissions and Flares Demand Urgent Motion ] and the proposed hyperscale data centre at Auchtertool.

Lockhart writes:

“When Labour spoke about Great British Energy, many people in Scotland heard a promise that Scotland would be at the heart of a publicly owned clean energy future. The manifesto said Great British Energy would be headquartered in Scotland, that Scotland would be the “powerhouse” of the clean energy mission, and that local people and communities would benefit directly from energy production.”

“But the energy question is no longer abstract. In Scotland, it is now bound up with nuclear generation, Small Modular Reactors, grid expansion, battery storage, mega data centres, transmission lines, land use, community consent, and who actually benefits from the infrastructure built around us.”

“Great British Energy must not become another badge placed in Scotland while the real strategic decisions are taken elsewhere. Nor should “Scotland as powerhouse” mean Scotland as host, Scotland as generator, Scotland as landscape, Scotland as grid corridor — while Scottish households remain cold, bills remain high, and communities are expected to carry the consequences of decisions made over their heads.”

We desperately need a dose of urgency, democracy and reality into the debate about Scotland as real place, not a battery for Big Energy. We desperatly need to energise democracy and democratise energy.

The really desperate thing about this predicament is that we have all of the real opportunities before us to genuinely empower rural Scotland with community-owned renewables and transform Scotland instead of selling it off to foreign-owned energy corporations.

Sportswashing Trump

The backdrop to the championship is of course the brutal draconian Trump regime sportwashing its domestic atrocities in ways that are reminiscent of the Argentine Junta of 1978. People who baulk at the comparison are ignoring the collapse of the rule of law, the concentration of power, the use of military might on civilian populations, police violence, systemic racism, book censorship, the disappeared, and mass incarceration in detention centres.

It’s impossible to talk about the politics of the world cup in the USA without mentioning this, though Mexico and Canada are co-hosts and the wider ramifications of political issues go beyond America’s internal regime to the very structure of the game itself.

Game Alteration

But if the architecture has echoes of fascism, and the hosts state violence is unprecedented, the Americans and FIFA have torn-up the Beautiful Game and turned a ‘game of two halves’ into a game of four quarters, simultaneously Americanising and Commodifying a sporting spectacle at a structural level.

The ‘hydration breaks’ are a commercial farce, booed at by fans in every game. It disrupts the flow of the game, gives managers and coaches time with their players when they would normally have to work it out for themselves and shoehorns a global game into an American norm. It’s been hugely unpopular but football associations and fans will have to exert a wlot of pressure on FIFA for it not to become embedded in the game.

This is a glorified ad-break - see also the ‘half-time show’ in the final - but it also represents the reality that sporting events are going to have to change massively as climate breakdown ensues. We haven’t really caught up with any of this as we slide into ecological disaster. The current model - lets fly millions of people around the world for sporting fixtures, is ridiculous.

Exclusion

Aside from the structural changes to the very nature of the game, the US have also undermined the very idea of a World Cup as an equal and level-playing field for participants.

Like the barring of the Somali referee Omar Artan who was denied entry to the United States.

The 34-year-old, who was set to become the first man from his country to play an on-pitch role at the finals, was turned away by border officials in Miami despite holding a diplomatic passport and a single-entry US visa.

And the disgraceful treatment of the Iranian side. Iran's squad has only been allowed to enter the United States the day before a match and leave again on the same day as the game, under the terms of their visas. That prompted Iran's head coach Amir Ghalenoei to describe his side as the "most oppressed" team at the tournament.

Lumumba Vea

Before we explore the other side-stories of the politics of the current World Cup, one story which is being overlooked is the Democratic Republic of Congo’s representation ny super-fan, Michel Kuka Mboladinga.

Nicknamed “Lumumba Vea”, which means “Lumumba lives”, Mboladinga’s distinctive look is in tribute to his country’s first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba.

He stands throughout the duration of DR Congo matches in honour of the late Lumumba, who was assassinated by firing squad in 1961.

The Congolese Football Federation will fully sponsor Mboladinga’s entire World Cup trip, covering his travel, accommodation, and attendance at DR Congo’s matches. This decision reportedly originated from a request made by the DR Congo players themselves and was subsequently approved by federation president Felix Tshisekedi.

Lumumba was killed at age 35, after serving for just three months as the first prime minister of the Congolese Republic, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He was ousted in a political coup and assassinated a few months later by mercenaries.

As Susan Williams, who has written extensively on the subject notes: “Patrice Lumumba belongs to the pantheon of great Pan-Africanist leaders of the twentieth century, alongside Kwame Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and Thomas Sankara. Currently, it is his brutal death that is being remembered. But the power of his legacy in Africa today rests on the strength of his ideals: democracy, non-violence, freedom from colonialism and white minority rule, non-tribalism, and non-alignment.”

She writes: “This legacy has also thrown up reasons to distrust the West. The CIA-backed overthrow and killing of Lumumba was a direct attack on the elected and legitimate government of the Congo. Such aggression was incompatible with America’s portrayal of itself as the world’s champion of democracy.”

Michel Mboladinga’s statue protest is therefore one of the best protests against American violence.

Come Together

Beyond the protests and exclusions individual national teams have their own stories. England have one of the most multicultural and diverse squads for years, brim full of amazing talent and are managed by a German, Thomas Tucal. But their fans have a song ‘Ten German Bombers’ - and some of their fanbase have an affinity with the far-right movement and the ethnonationalism that is sweeping their country.

The competing narratives are everywhere.

The English Football Association produced a brilliant advert for the 2026 World Cup roster reveal. The special announcement film directed by Keane Shaw and Pete Martin used the 1969 Beatles hit "Come Together" to soundtrack the 26-player roster reveal. It’s a masterpiece …

ENGLAND WORLD CUP SQUAD REVEALED WITH BEATLES THEME! 🎵 FIFA World Cup 2026

The USA faces a similar crisis of representation, caught between the rampant jingoism of MAGA America and a talented squad. As El Pais reports: “Of the 26 players called up by Mauricio Pochettino, 12 are Black and three are Latino. That fact confronts the U.S. president with the reality of the territory he governs.”

“Among those who will stand for the U.S. anthem are, for example, Alejandro Zendejas and Ricardo Pepi, both forwards for the U.S. team. Zendejas is originally from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and grew up in El Paso, Texas, from six months of age, where Pepi was born. Pepi has confessed that he always leaned toward El Tri because of his parents, who are Mexican like Zendejas’, but in the end it was the U.S. team that showed more interest in him.

The Latino trio is completed by midfielder Cristian Roldán, whose father is Guatemalan, his mother Salvadoran, and who was born near Los Angeles. “I have suffered a lot of racism, but nothing comparable to that experienced by the Black community. It matters a lot to me to bring about that change,” he said five years ago when he joined an organization of Black players in Major League Soccer (MLS).”

The tournament is the biggest sporting event of the world and it is not suprising that teams and nationalities are struggling with narratives of identity, language and power. It remains to be seen whether ordinary fans around the world can wrestle the sport from the powers that be that want to hijack it and distort it into a giant corporate spectacle to project their own pathologies.

As the train left Manchester yesterday, the BBC and SKY followed it as if its destination would be somehow unexpected. But, in reality, and in lived experience, we all know where the Burnham train is going.

The coverage was reminiscent of the OJ Simpson car chase coverage in 1994 in a White Bronco, though I think earnest pundits would have preferred us to consider the dramatic return of Vladimir Lenin to Russia from exile in Switzerland in 1917.

Here’s Lenin’s journey:

Here’s Burnham’s journey.

I love how Burnham’s journey maps so neatly over the proposed HS2 rail link, once, famously championed as a Saviour of the Union because it would ‘Unite the Country’:

In part, this media circus is an attempt to rehabilitate the two-party system, which until recently had been put on a Do Not Resuscitate notice.

For some of us, this is a familiar pattern, observed over decades, of redemption and renewal, of false dawns and impostors. But this isn’t a glitch, it’s a feature, as they say. The cyclical nature of Labour reformers emerging out of the political landscape only to fail and disappoint isn’t about personalities; it’s about structural power.

As Sir Keir wept big crocodile tears onto the lectern, the self-pity was matched only by the lack of self-reflection, and lies. Starmer’s valedictory speech bore all of the hallmarks of his reign, short, misleading and semi-delusional:

“Six years ago, I inherited a Labour Party that was politically, financially and morally bankrupt. I was told, time and time again, that my party was finished. That we were consigned to history, that a majority at the general election, let alone a landslide majority, was impossible. But we proved those people wrong because we changed our party. Ripping out the poison of antisemitism, restoring trust on the economy, defence, and national security.”

“And becoming a party that, once again, stood proudly with, not against, our national flag. The hard work of change was with a singular purpose. Not power for power’s sake but to change Britain for the better.”

There’s a lot to unpack here. Almost all of it is completely untrue.

As Jeremy Corbyn retorted: “Keir Starmer could have ended child poverty, homelessness and the grotesque levels of inequality in this country. Instead, he abandoned those in need, destroyed our civil liberties and facilitated genocide in Gaza.
That is how this Prime Minister will be remembered - and that is the legacy of moral and political bankruptcy he leaves behind.”

It’s true that he wrapped himself in the Union Jack, did nothing to heal the broken Union, and pandered to the far-right, quoting Enoch Powell, referring to an ‘Island of Strangers’.

He presided over a period in office that would end with even the vanilla New Statesman declaring “The Labour Party is Dead and Starmer has killed it” and a situation where the offices of government in Scotland, Wales and Ireland are inhabited by nationalist parties dedicated to the break up of the UK [Celtic Alliances].

The magazine had been mulling this over for some time. Andrew Marr was also in pensive mood in December of last year. “The postwar British political establishment is collapsing” he mused [I thought Labour would fix everything. I was wrong. Britain has become ungovernable.]

The idea of ‘faith in the economy’ is ludicrous and insulting as people face desperate poverty and rising bills and the ongoing economic and cultural catastrophe of Brexit:

The Brexit fiasco, which Scotland voted overwhelmingly against, has cost Scotland £30 billion per year.

As Starmer lays claim to social equality, saying that he had sought: “To build a fairer country, with dignity and respect, where everyone is seen, everyone is valued. Wealth and opportunity for all, not just the privileged few” - it’s worth remembering that in the words of former MP John Nicholson: “Starmer claims his greatest legacy is on child poverty - lifting the two child benefit cap. A reminder: he was against lifting the cap. He punished Labour MPs who voted to lift it. They forced him to U turn.”

But, just as Blair will always be synonymous with the epic disaster of the Iraq War, Starmer will always be remembered for his role in the war on Gaza. As the journalist Idrees Ahmad has put it:

“He directed the most serious assault on civil liberties, fanned xenophobia and pandered to the far right, borrowing Enoch Powell’s language, accusing immigrants of turning Britain into an “Island of strangers”. His draconian immigration policies are destroying British universities. But all the media obituaries focus on his lack of charisma and his hatred of politics, confusing lack of imagination or empathy for an excess of technocratic zeal. The decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was political, the decision to prosecute non-violent climate and anti-genocide protestors as “terrorists” was political, so was his statement granting the “right” to Israel to besiege, starve, and deny medicine, water and electricity to Gaza. His disgraceful justifications for Israel’s genocide were entirely political. (It has been astonishing to watch the media completely ignore Gaza, when it has been the main factor in Labour voters defecting to Zack Polanski's Greens).”

But the media will studiously ignore Gaza because we know very well that Burnham’s attitude to Israel is exactly the same as Starmer’s.

The reality is that Starmer was elected on a platform of commitments he studiously abandoned, sabotaged a socialist project, and then, on his departure blamed everyone else for his disastrous time in office. However this has been a learning curve for a whole section of the electorate, despondent at Labour lies and grievous foreign policy failures. I suspect the media-sell of Burnham will have a hard time outside Middle England.

In Aberdeen, Douglas Lumsden won for the Conservatives with a 15% swing, giving the Tories a majority of 6,050 in a byelection prompted by Stephen Flynn’s departure for Holyrood. This was the first time the Conservatives had gained a Westminster seat at a by-election in Scotland since 1967. It was a horrific result for the SNP caught between endless triangulation on Oil, hopeless delivery of Just Transition and tactical voting of the far-right, which can now act as an electoral murmuration morphing and coalescing around common issues.

Speaking at a rally on Friday alongside Lumsden, Badenoch said: “What this means is that we have won that referendum on oil and gas. “Aberdeen has sent a message to the Labour government and to the SNP that we will not be ignored, Aberdeen will not be ignored, the centre will not be ignored.”

Kemi Badenoch is now ‘the centre’?

If Peter Mundell’s Aladdin’s Cave may have been a significant factor, this seems contradicted by the SNP’s victory at Arbroath and Broughty Ferry , where Lara Bird won in the contest triggered after former MP Stephen Gethins was elected to the Scottish Parliament for Dundee City East at last month’s Holyrood election.

Both the Makerfield and Aberdeen South election results are about the stories we are told and tell ourselves. In Aberdeen, the Conservatives and their friends and ex-colleagues in Reform UK tell us that climate change is a myth and that North Sea Oil is an investment that will create jobs and cheap energy. These are the same people who told you in 2014 that North Sea Oil was finished, now tell you it is Britain’s saviour.

Some of this is framed as ‘energy security’ in response to the war in Ukraine, but a lot of it is framed around a dodgy consensus that ‘Net Zero is the new Brexit’ (whatever that means) or that Scotland should not take steps to move away from Big Oil and fossil fuels because somehow we don’t matter on a world stage. Strangely, this is a position adopted by some in the independence movement.

So let’s go over it all again.

As Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL, and the author of Hothouse Earth: an Inhabitant’s Guide put it [Of course we shouldn’t drill for more oil in the North Sea – we cancelled further exploitation for a reason]:

“The usual suspects in Reform and the Tory party have used the war as an excuse to renew demands that the North Sea be sucked dry of its remaining oil and gas, in order – they say – to end reliance on fossil fuel imports and to guarantee energy security. More sensible heads have argued that the North Sea basin is a field that is way past peak production, and that has only limited amounts of oil and gas left, and that energy security can only be reached if we move further and faster on renewables. Extraordinarily, the real reason no further significant exploitation of North Sea oil and gas is planned seems to have been entirely forgotten, or at least set aside.”

“Fossil fuels are not being shut down in favour of renewables on a whim, or even to protect the country from the sort of shocks foreign wars bring, but because we are at the height of a climate emergency that demands every country slash its greenhouse gas discharges. The UK is already struggling to meet a 2030 emissions reduction target of 68% compared with 1990 levels, and is off track to achieve net zero emissions in 2050. Any renaissance of homegrown fossil fuel usage would blow a hole through these already shaky ambitions.”

“Just because all eyes are turned to the Gulf doesn’t mean the climate breakdown has gone away. Far from it. The reality is that our predicament is getting worse, almost by the day. The first three months of the year have seen record-breaking heat across much of the US, which would have been all but impossible in the absence of global heating. Meanwhile, floods have devastated Hawaii, northern Australia, and the Gulf states of Oman and the UAE. In England and Wales, February this year was the warmest on record, following on from record winter rainfall in many parts.”

“The long and the short of it is that we are at a critical point in the climate emergency, and cannot afford to be distracted by ill-informed calls for more domestic oil and gas. We are on course to smash through the 1.5C dangerous climate change guardrail within the next three years. This coincides with the best estimate temperature at which key climate tipping points will be crossed, most notably the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, which would ultimately mean a 10-metre sea-level rise.”

“While we continue to dither about the rights and wrongs of reopening the North Sea to further drilling, global heating shows no such tendency. The worst possible news was revealed in a Nature paper published just a week after the bombing of Iran started, which is that the rate of global heating has been supercharged since 2015, and is now almost double what it was in the 1970s. The current rate – of close to 0.35C a decade – means that without drastic action on emissions, we will see the 2C limit shattered as soon as the late 2030s, and no end in sight.”

The SNP are suffering because they have told themselves (and us) different stories over the years about the North Sea, which hangs over us as a shibboleth. There’s something desperate and sad about a nation and a society clinging on to Oil as a saviour when we know it’s the principal cause of climate destruction. What will future generations make of the slogan ‘It’s his Oil’ ‘It’s her Oil’ as we are consigned to climate catastrophe?

A Dignified Exit

Similarly, Down South, or Up North, depending on what Mindzone you’re in, the saviour of Labour, and us all has arrived. Andy Burnham. surrounded by many of the personnel and policies that were part of the Starmer entourage (hello Josh Simons), swept into victory, promising a swift coup d’etat. Like a real-world Jon Snow, Burnham arrives on the stage brimming with hype about Manchesterism and sustained by the constant mythology that personality matters more than policy that is the mainstay of a Westminster politics hollowed-out of any political meaning.

Burnham’s victory shows how fragile and precarious political life is. It seems just recently Starmer was elected on a ‘landslide’ and hailed as the great white hope of Labour, and the Union. Yet now he is in peril.

One MP told the press they believed there were about 200 Labour MPs prepared, if necessary, to sign Burnham’s nomination papers for a challenge, though his supporters are hoping for a ‘coronation’ under the threat of electoral, and economic chaos. Now. at least two ministers, including Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood, have suggested to Starmer that he should set out a timetable for his departure. Other ministers have pressed Starmer on whether fighting a leadership contest would be wise. One cabinet source was cited as saying: “Everyone thinks it is over and everyone wants it to be a dignified, orderly exit.”

Both Aberdeen and Makerfield speak to myths we are still holding dear. The first is that jobs defy physics or that oil can be sustainable, the second is that there’s a saviour coming that will swoop down and save Labour from its destiny just by dint of being marginally more likeable than Keir Starmer. Neither is remotely credible and both are the result of a politics of lies whereby we, as a society operate in collective denial.

The SNP could have told Aberdeen and the North East, and wider Scotland, a different story. But it would have required looking to the future and making difficult choices rather than clinging to the past. As Commonweal ‘s Craig Dalzell has written recently:

“A new report from the CBI this week has revealed that the number of jobs in Scotland’s renewable energy sector has now exceeded the number of jobs in the oil and gas sector. 105,000 people are now employed in and around renewables compared to 83,000 in oil and gas. This also means that renewable energy jobs don’t just exceed oil and gas job numbers this year, but are higher than the latter number was as far back as 2018.

This is now an irreversible trend. The Green Transition is happening and has passed its tipping point. Oil and Gas will never be as significant to the Scottish economy as renewables now will be in precisely the same way that those fluid fossil fuels supplanted the coal industry just a few decades ago.”

We face the alternative of facing hard truths, about our social and political problems, and our ecological catastrophe. We can pretend that Kemi Badenoch’s opportunism is the way forward and deny climate realities to save votes in the North East, or we can look to a salvageable future. We can close our eyes and pretend we haven’t seen all of this before and make like swapping Burnham for Starmer will wipe away Labour’s political problems. Both seem unlikely and dangerous myths to believe in.

From Israel’s atrocities in Palestine, and Lebanon and Yemen and Syria to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to America’s assault on Venezuela and Iran, we live in the age of the bully. Perhaps it was ever thus.

But today, America and Russia, and perhaps to a lesser extent Israel, look shaken and undermined.

French President Emmanuel Macron pulled off what could be the greatest diplomatic trolling of all time by getting Trump to sign the "$300 Billion US Surrender to Iran" deal in... Versailles… a location synonymous with disastrous political settlements. Blinded by bling, Trump walked into a PR nightmare.

Macron would do so safe in the knowledge that the ignoramus Trump would have no idea whatsoever of the historical significance of the location. It was in this very palace in 1919 that the President of Germany Gustav Bauer signed the treaty of surrender and agreed to pay restitution to the Allies.

Trump is clueless as to what just happened. The rest of the world is not.

The US writer Kenneth Roth is scathing [Trump’s war accomplished nothing – the Iran deal is proof]:

“Trump announced that the strait will be “permanently toll free”. But the published deal doesn’t say that. And Iranian officials have maintained the right to impose fees for unspecified services, which might mean no more than the “service” of not firing on boats passing through. Trump’s war has left global commerce worse off.

The deal is noteworthy for what it does not include. There is nothing on Iran’s ballistic missile program, nothing on Iran’s military support for regional allies such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, nothing on regime change in Tehran. These were all reasons cited by Trump for going to war. In these areas, his bombing accomplished nothing.

Indeed, in lieu of regime change, he obtained regime hardening, as US and Israeli bombers killed off Iranian clerical leaders and left Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officials in charge.

Meanwhile, the Iranian government can trumpet its own victories. The deal requires that Israel end its attacks in Lebanon.

That does give Benjamin Netanyahu the opportunity to play spoiler, given his quest for ongoing war with Iran. But Netanyahu may not dare. Trump has become overt in his anger at the Israeli prime minister, calling him “fucking crazy” and “a very difficult guy”, and explicitly criticizing his tendency to attack entire apartment buildings using the pretext of attacking a single Hezbollah member (although the same criticism can be made of Israel’s disproportionate attacks in Gaza, which Trump aided and abetted).

As soon as the accord is signed, Trump commits to issue ”waivers” for all sanctions on Iranian petroleum exports. That is a reward for simply returning to the status quo that existed in February before Trump opted for bombing over negotiation.

Then, according to the “progress of negotiations” toward a final agreement, Trump agrees to release frozen Iranian assets. Once a final accord is reached, Trump commits to lifting all sanctions on the country. In addition, the deal includes a $300bn private fund for “rehabilitation and economic development of Iran”.

Humiliation

Make no mistake, this is a complete failure and humiliation for America. Trump and Hegseth’s hubris and ignorance led them into a shambolic war they couldn’t escape despite all of the bombast and testosterone. Even Senate Republicans have sharply criticised the agreement Donald Trump reached with Iran, accusing the administration of committing “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades”.

On the same day, Moscow is in flames after a huge drone attack from Ukraine.

Moscow's instantly-iconic exploding fuel storage tank is resulting in a flood of memes.

Russia boasted it would take Ukraine in a matter of days. For years, supporters of Russia (from the left and the right) have argued about how Russian victory was inevitable and a foregone conclusion.

The BBC tells us: “Moscow has come under the largest Ukrainian attack since the start of the full-scale war, with close to 200 drones hitting targets around the Russian capital and setting columns of thick smoke billowing high into the sky.

Seventeen people were wounded in the Moscow region, according to local governor Andrei Vorobyov.

Almost 1,000 drones and four Ukrainian cruise missiles were intercepted and destroyed across the country in 24 hours, Russia’s defence ministry was quoted as saying. An oil depot was struck in the southern Rostov region, where one person was killed.”

Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv had once again hit the Moscow region with “long-range sanctions” - a euphemism for Ukrainian long-distance strikes on Russia.

“It’s time to end this war, and Russia must take the necessary steps in diplomacy,” he added.

"We don't want this war and have never wanted it," Zelensky said. "But if Ukraine burns, your Moscow will burn too."

Of course, Trump and Putin are brutal ruthless and heavily armed. Putin may retaliate against the attack on Moscow, even if it was more performative than lethal. Trump may wake up and be angry when he reads all of the scathing accounts of his ‘deal’ and watches his popularity tanking. But his default setting is to rage against the media and deny reality, so he’ll probably just kid himself that he’s a genius.

Bu those studying Marco Rubio’s face as he stood behind the president at the G7 taking questions about the latest Treaty of Versailles know the truth.

America is a damaged, perhaps terminally damaged place under Trump, whose own ill-health seems to be mirroring the country’s decline in human form.

As if creating memes is a full-time job, and grasping for a way to truly symbolise this state of decline, this week saw officials pouring peroxide bleach into the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in a desperate effort to douse the algae bloom they had created. After spending $14 million its now turned swamp-green.

No More Wars promised Trump before taking the US into his most humiliating military defeat in the post-war era. Drain the Swamp he bellowed before creating a metaphorical one and now a real one, turning the Reflecting Pool into something you can’t see your reflection in.

Rebekah McCabe/Ríobcha Ní Cába takes this full-on [Legitimate Concerns]:

“Let’s name it honestly. The leader of the SDLP called it a race-based pogrom. The First Minister called it thuggery and cowardice. Language matters because a great deal of the commentary, most loudly from people who have no idea how this city works, is already busy mistranslating it into something that belongs to another place.”

Others have pushed-back against the use of the word ‘pogrom’. Others have reiterated the bizarre nonsense far-right talking point that there is a ‘two-tier policing’ that discriminates against white people. This is Muskian drivel.

One article, by Sara Morrison, The Hurl, attempts to give some context to the riots. She writes: “I’ve lived in Belfast most of my life; I’m writing this listening to helicopters overhead for a second day. I know these streets, and I know these communities, and I know, looking at the footage from Tuesday night, exactly what I’m looking at - and it isn’t race hatred.”

I mean, it is. And this sort of framing is immediately problematic. She goes on:

“So let’s talk about the men and boys on the Newtownards Road and across greater Belfast. The ones actually there, with the bottles and the masks. Who are they and why are they so ready?

“They are the product of a peace process that was never finished. They grew up in communities where the peace walls never came down, because nobody could agree on what taking them down would mean and nobody wanted to spend the political capital finding out. They went to schools that were almost entirely segregated, lived in streets that were almost entirely segregated, and watched a political settlement get described as a success by people who didn’t live anywhere near them.”

“The peace dividend arrived unevenly. The Titanic Quarter got a makeover. Parts of north and east Belfast did not. The men on the streets Tuesday night are from some of the most deprived wards in the U.K and most of Western Europe, and they have watched that deprivation persist across their entire lives while being told the war is over and to be grateful.”

The contextualisation of poverty and political disconnect is fair and useful, but it draws in those who seek validation and sense it here. One commentator below the line says:

“A great article , I solely blame the treacherous politicians and media for making people resort to riots because they aren't listened to. It will spread and get much worse in the UK and the EU because the treacherous elite won't ever listen. We must depose these traitors in any way we can.”

The language is easily recognisable.

Rebekah McCabe/Ríobcha Ní Cába writes:

“Anger at that broken system is legitimate, and it is not racism: you can be furious at the Home Office and at Mears without wishing harm on a single refugee. But what was done on these streets was racism, full stop: a decision to burn people out for the colour of their skin is not misdirected economic anxiety. They do not want the system fixed. They want the people gone.”

She concludes: “A pogrom is not an argument, and you do not challenge it by agreeing with its premise. None of this was ever a debate, and the masked men were never making an argument. They were making a claim: that they decide who belongs here. Whether they are right is up to the rest of us.”

One writer who pushes back against the idea of both ‘legitimate concerns’ and the dogma of ‘two-tier policing’ is Richard Seymour, writing here in Jacobin [The British Establishment Fuels Anti-Migrant Pogroms]:

“In broad daylight, gangs of masked men marched down the streets. targetting homes they knew housed migrants, and began kicking doors in and breaking windows. On the Crumlin and Newtonards roads, which cut across the north of the city, migrants were burned out of their homes. Since the police were notably lax in their response, despite having been warned for months about a far-right hit list targeting the addresses that were burned, and despite the fact that the pogrom was so telegraphed that businesses shut down in preparation, it often fell to migrants to organise their own safety.”

Interestingly, Seymour agrees with Sara Morrison’s point that anti-migrant racism is ubiquitous. He notes: “Across all demographics in Northern Ireland, Catholic or Protestant, young or old, anti-migrant racism is pervasive.”

But the idea that social decay leads inevitably to race riots is a tricky one. Seymour writes: “If the cause is deprivation and state failure, why are we not witnessing violent riots against austerity, stagnant wages, rising bills and failed governments? Why is ethnic purification the answer to social malaise? Why support an ethnonationaliust project that is a conservative obstacle to the improvement of these material conditions?”

Beyond all of this lies the contested issue of ‘two-tier policing.’ I say ‘contested; as it’s really only contested in the mythology of the far-right. Any POC could tell you this from their lived-experience of living in Late Britain. But we now have the added absurdity of the gap between the ‘terrorists’ opposing genocide and the race-rioters.

Adam Bienkov writes [The Belfast Riots Have Exposed the Real ‘Two Tier’ Britain]:

“This week hundreds of masked men took to the streets of Belfast to burn down houses and terrorise the families of ethnic minorities and migrants.”

“The attacks were highly organised, with prominent public figures, including the richest man in the world, openly promoting and glorying in the violence online. Yet despite all this widespread criminality and terror, just 19 individuals have so far been arrested, with multiple politicians and commentators openly defending those who took to the streets.”

“By contrast a largely peaceful demonstration outside Woolwich Crown court on Friday, against the conviction of four Palestine Action protesters, led to a total of 107 arrests. In all cases those arrested had merely held up a placard, worn a t-shirt, or delivered a chant in support of the group.”

“They did not burn down a building, they did not throw a brick, they did not terrorise a family from their home. Yet all of these people have been arrested and branded as terrorists, with barely a whisper uttered in their defence. The contrast between how these two groups are now being treated is stark.”

If condemnation alone is not a credible response to far-right race riots, it is also necessary to name them for what they are and to resist getting drawn into framings and narratives that are entirely curated by those that are fomenting hate for their own political ends.

Progress is a funny thing. For years the communities around ExxonMobil’s ethylene plant at Mossmorran in Fife complained about the pollution, the flaring, the noise, the fumes. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) did nothing, and then, in February, ExxonMobil announced the end of production at the Mossmorran chemical works after the owner they said it was losing a million pounds a week. The decision came less than a week since the first meeting of a task force set up to support the 400 workers whose jobs have been put at risk. Now the site will be fully decommissioned with the process expected to be completed by early 2028, the company said.

There was no sign of any ‘Just Transition’.

See Mossmorrans Catastrophic Emissions and Flares Demand Urgent Motion.

In 2022. The Ferret investigate journalism group has revealed Scotland’s Top 20 Polluters. They told us that releases of potent greenhouse gas in Scotland trebled in a year; Carbon pollution from incinerators rises by 100,000 tonnes.; and Salmon farm pollution has risen 10 per cent.

The report tells us that:

“By far the biggest polluter was the petrochemical giant, Ineos. Five of the company’s plants at Grangemouth emitted over three million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2020, down eight per cent from 2019.

SSE’s gas-fired power station at Peterhead was the biggest single polluter in 2020, as it was in 2019 and 2018. The plant emitted 1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2020, 18 per cent less than in 2019 because of the pandemic.

Another major emitter was ExxonMobil’s ethylene plant at Mossmorran in Fife. Its emissions increased by a third to over 900,000 tonnes in 2020, though according to Sepa this was mainly due to the plant being closed for four months in 2019 for maintenance.”

Having closed down Mossmorran, after years of completely unregulated pollution at a cost to the health of the community we’ll probably never know now, now its been announced a new data centre called CATO is to be built in Auchtertool.

It’s just 2.9 miles from Mossmorran to Auchtertool.

Rachel Donald, from Planet Critical has written [One of the biggest data centres in the world is being planned on Scottish soil. The plans for it are so obviously bullshit the developers must think we're fools]:

“One of the biggest data centres in the world is being planned not ten miles from where I grew up, to the horror of local residents. The CATO data centre, named as such after a Roman statesman in an abysmal attempt to wash the project as an intelligent and thoughtful investment, proposes to take over agricultural land, woodland, and the ruins of a castle, next to the small, rural village of Auchtertool. The proposed site dwarfs the village, bumping right up against its boundary. The developers say the infrastructure will be in-keeping with the local surroundings but the plans submitted include a building longer than the length of the village stretching 35 metres into the air.”

The attempts to greenwash this is particularly egregious. Something called ReNews.Biz published this puff piece last week: “Green groups unveil data centre power plan” saying:

“Industry groups have launched a charter setting out five principles for the development of new data centres in Scotland.

The charter addresses renewable energy, energy efficiency, water consumption, district heat networks and community benefits, supporters said.

The initiative is backed by Prosper, the Renewable Energy Association, Ravenscraig Ltd, Heat Network Scotland and Apatura Energy, the organisations added.

The report highlights the role well-sited data centres can play in supporting the electricity system and examines the water requirements of modern facilities.

Supporters said a modern green data centre using a closed-loop cooling system would require an initial water fill equivalent to the annual consumption of 44 homes, with lower ongoing use thereafter.”

But a cursory glance at the ‘industry groups’ show how bogus this is. Apatura, one of the groups quoted, says in its Who We Are section: “We are enablers of the digital economy, partnering with hyperscalers and data centre operators to meet the growing demand for digital connectivity. Our heritage in land acquisition and infrastructure development ensures we deliver strategically located projects that power industries with clean, reliable energy.”

Rachel Donald writes:

“A particularly laughable claim is that the data centre will only use the equivalent of 239 residential homes’ annual water usage (around 2 million litres). Perhaps ILI Group have a secret technology that is unavailable to the rest of the market, because the average water use for these data centres is 11–19 million litres per day. Their ludicrous claims do not stop there. In their planning documents, they write that they will collect the water they need by “harvesting rainfall“. Scotland is indeed a wet country, but not that wet. How fortunate for the developers that they happened to choose a site right next to a loch which has been used to supply 12 million litres daily to the gas plant for decades—you know, just in case.

The ILI Group claims that the data centre will create thousands of local jobs but, as one tech insider said at last week’s public meeting, “data centres are built to run lean”. In the purest vision of Silicon Valley, these mammoth structures only require a handful of staff to run, and engineering problems are often outsourced to foreign experts. Almost every single part of the data centre’s construction and management will no doubt be supplied by foreign companies, from the hardware to the expertise. The only thing that will be required of Scotland is our arable land, freshwater, and political weakness.”

The forces aligned against the people of Fife, and Scotland include Big Tech and the Scottish Government, who are, at the moment, fully in tune with the plans. Fife Council is not even demanding an Environmental Impact Assessment for the enormous site.

At the weekend, Global Justice Now organised a series of workshops in Edinburgh to organise resistance, including Green MSP Ariane Burgess who is putting down a motion to the Scottish Parliament this week, Ben Parker, an Edinburgh councillor who helped block plans for a data centre at the Gyle, and America journalist Sarah Jaffe, who has written extensively abou the resistance to data centres in the US and on the consequences of AI for work: What's Really Artificial About AI is AI Itself - In These Times.

The resistance is at an early stages and will no doubt require huge resources and collaboration. Because, as The National reported, the plans for AI data centres in Scotland are huge: “Local communities in Auchtertool and Larbert have rallied against formal applications for data centres, while campaigns have launched to halt plans for centres in the Lammermuir Hills, Scottish Borders, and Blackdog, Aberdeen, among others.

According to environmental campaign group Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS) there are more than 25 sites across Scotland being eyed up by developers, with formal applications lodged with councils for South Gyle, Edinburgh, Auchtertool, Fife, and Larbert, Falkirk.”

If the regulation that surrounded Mossmorran (none) is repeated for the CATO data centre then history will just repeat itself: endless extraction, pollution and emissions, with catastrophic consequences for the local community and the planet.

Rachel Donald writes: “The people of Scotland deserve better than for history to ceaselessly repeat itself. We were locked out of our common wealth when the wealthy erected fences on our lands to keep us out. Every extractive innovation since has kept wealth flooding out of our communities: on coal trains, through pipelines, and now via The Cloud. And as that wealth flooded out, pollution flooded in—into our water, our lungs, and our local government.”

“Resisting this mammoth data centre is about so much more than protecting the village of Auchtertool. It is about resisting hundreds of years of colonial exploitation, and resisting the insidious implication that the future is out of our hands.”

She is 100% right. Challenging the actual physical production of these huge data centres is only one part of this huge challenge ahead. But the deeper challenge is to confront the very idea of the ‘inevitability’ of this future, predicated on endless growth, artificial intelligence and rule by the overlords of Big Tech. We know that we have the models for alternative economics and community wealth-building - rather than the disastrous exploitation that has brought us to the current crisis.

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

It’s mostly the chorus that you’re hearing but the full lyrics are here:

By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes
Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomond
Where me and my true love will never meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks o’ Loch Lomond

O ye’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low
And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye
For me and my true love will never meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks o’ Loch Lomond

‘Twas there that we parted in yon shady glen
On the steep, steep side o’ Ben Lomond
Where in the purple hue the Hieland hills we view
An’ the moon comin’ out in the gloamin’

O ye’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low
And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye
For me and my true love will never meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks o’ Loch Lomond

The wee birdies sing and the wild flowers spring
And in sunshine the waters are sleepin’
But the broken heart it kens nae second spring again
Tho’ the waefu’ may cease frae their greetin’

O ye’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low
And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye
For me and my true love will never meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks o’ Loch Lomond

It’s not a staple of the Tartan Army’s set list, and given that we’re in a liminal moment between Haiti and Morocco, so to speak, I thought I’d take a look at what it means.

"The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond" (or just "Loch Lomond") is a traditional Scottish folk song. Its origins are thought to date from the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.

The actual composer is unknown. According to Alfred Moffat in The Minstrelsy of Scotland: 200 Scottish songs adapted to their traditional airs (1920), one of the earliest sheet music printings of the song was in 1840 by Paterson and Sons in Edinburgh. It was titled "Bonnie Loch Loman" and credited to "a lady" with arrangements by Finlay Dunn. Lady John Scott was often cited as the composer of "Loch Lomond", but it’s alleged that she only transcribed the melody and lyrics after hearing it sung by a boy in the streets of Edinburgh.

Whatever its origins, the song is a lament of loss and longing. There are a few varying interpretations of its meaning. One has it that the lyrics tell the story of two captured Jacobite soldiers, one of whom is condemned to be executed, while the other is set free to return to Scotland. In Scottish mythology the ‘High Road’ is the physical route taken to walk home to the Highlands from Carlisle, where many Jacobite soldiers were imprisoned, while the ‘Low Road’ is a Sìthean (Faery) route for a soldier's soul to return home when killed abroad…

O ye’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low
And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye

In Vagabond Songs and Ballads of Scotland (1904) Robert Ford suggests that the chorus are the final words spoken by one of the Jacobite rebels prior to his execution, perhaps in Carlisle, where dozens of rebels were executed. He sees his lover at the gallows and tells her they will meet again in Scotland, albeit by different routes…

For me and my true love will never meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks o’ Loch Lomond

Whatever its origins, whatever its meanings, it’s a lament, a song of loss, redemption and homecoming, and therefore particularly appropriate for Scotland today, here and in the US of A.

It’s a song of some cultural significance, once consigned to being too kitsch, too saccharine, too kaleyard.

But this is to misunderstand everything. Not only did Runrig reprise the song in 2005, but Ferdinand Thieriot wrote a symphonic fantasy on the tune in 1868; Charles Ives quotes “Loch Lomond” in “The Alcotts” movement of his Concord Sonata; in 1921, Ralph Vaughan Williams arranged “Loch Lomond” for baritone solo and male choir.

But most importantly, the song was performed by the jazz singer Maxine Sullivan who recorded "Loch Lomond" on August 6, 1937. It was a career-defining song, and she recorded it 14 times in total.

Here she is performing it in 1939:

What’s going on?

So it’s a song that carries across centuries and continents and genres. I think what makes it hit-hard in stadia in Germany and America is that it’s not nationalistic. It’s a about a deeper feeling of loss and homecoming. I’ve heard another theory about why the Scotland fans singing (mostly Flower of Scotland) goes viral, and this is that its men singing en masse and that this has an emotional resonance, particularly in a time of toxic masculinity.

Of course, as Mustafa Farhat, has noticed, Flower of Scotland is referencing a battle far older than The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond Jacobite lament. It’s referencing Bannockburn, of 1314.

But what is going on here with the travelling Scotland supporters? Why are they having such a resonance with people in the USA?

There’s a few elements.

It’s an exodus and a diaspora and a bacchanalian overthrowing of Calvinism, with a little bit of football thrown in. The ultimate feel-good factor hits home in such dark times. No Scotland, No Party may be a stretch but the combination of goodwill, general inebriation, song, and not taking yourselves too seriously is infectious.

It’s also a way of bypassing the mainstream representation of Scotland, which has been spectatularly successful.

Too often, Anglo-British state or public broadcasters belittle or marginalise Scotland Scottish culture. This week ITV’s Good Morning Britain and GB News trotted out a series of semi-racist tropes about Scottish people to moan about us having a Bank Holiday this Monday [On the World Stage]. Earlier, Richard Madeley can’t get over the fact that someone from Glasgow is articulate [Richard Madeley can’t believe Scottish man is articulate].

This sort of contempt is pretty routine. So the idea of just bypassing it all and going straight to to the world is beautiful.

This is Soft Power.

As Kara notes, this is huge: “Breaking: NBA, basketball, and American football fans in the USA are in disbelief at how massive football is.

The viewing numbers for this World Cup are absolutely JAW-DROPPING. The opening match was reportedly watched by 1.2 BILLION viewers worldwide, with 18 million watching on Fox sports and Telemundo in across the USA According to reports, this World Cup could break the record for the highest attendance ever.”

Andrew Fletcher famously said, “Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.”

Belfast MP and leader of the SDLP Claire Hanna called the Far Right riot in Belfast last night nothing less than “a race-based pogrom”. The mob hunted down non-whites and set fire to their homes.

St. Peter's Immaculata Youth Centre Belfast, issued a statement saying:

“We stand with our Black and Brown communities. We hold you in compassion, care, and empathy. You deserve safety, dignity, and respect in every space across this city. these people do not represent us.

What happened was not random. It reflects a deeper supremacist agenda that seeks to divide communities and normalise hate. This agenda works by influencing young minds early. It feeds fear. It distorts truth. It attempts to recruit our children and young people into cycles of anger and violence that will damage them and wider society.”

If Tommy Robinson was directing the riots in Belfast, last week Nigel Farage was stoking the disturbances after Henry Nowack's murder in Southampton. They are a continuum of the same putrid movement.

But there are two elements or objectives of this movement. The first is physical intimidation and violence, the second is shifting the political discourse for when they come to power.

As Phil Burton-Cartledge writes [All That Is Solid ... Right Riot]:

“There have been two phases to the riotous assembly Nigel Farage stoked following the investigation into the police handling of Henry Nowack's murder. There was the confrontation in Southampton itself. This was no grassroots anger bubbling over, but a flashpoint that saw the far right across London and southern England mobilise for a fight. All the fascist faces were there - Tommy Robinson, Laurence Fox, Paul Golding, Posey Parker, all dragged their knuckles from their fetid swamps to whip the bovva boys up into a frenzy. And they duly obliged, rampaging through inner city residential streets and attacking the police. No doubt many of them can look forward to a spell in pokey courtesy of the footage shared by their grifting mates.”

”Yet the political objective was achieved. Having spent the last two years stirring the pot, the far right have had their first summer riot. Another step toward how things used to be, when the National Front routinely took to the streets in the 1960s and 70s. But the second phase of this right riot has proven more successful then any of them could have dreamed. Paper after paper, news outlet after news outlet, have surged across and trampled on the cordon sanitaire and hurled the bricks and wheelie bins of far-right talking points into mainstream public discourse. For example, Sky News asked if the police are indeed "anti-white", forcing the gibberish about two-tier policing onto television screens. They were joined in this by The Mail, a "debate" on Good Morning Britain, and The Sun "just asking questions". On top of this Chris Mason, the BBC's chief politics gossip-monger ran cover for Farage as he was criticised by the other party leaders in the Commons one Wednesday. Aha! said Mason, they were being political about Henry Nowack's death too! You've got to ask it's only a matter of time before the great replacement theory gets an airing, all in the interests of debate. What happened in Southampton gave right wing papers and their little helpers in broadcast journalism an excuse to treat far right rubbish, which they themselves know not to be true, as if it was based in fact and was a valid viewpoint. This is where their riot has proven particularly successful.”

Several points stem from the escalating situation.

First, Burton-Cartledge is right to call to our attention the role of the media in this grotesque situation. Ross Greer, the Green MSP, did well to call out the BBC’s ridiculous framing of this.

“I mean yeah we could get into the semantics of that…” splutters Martin Geissler.

Geissler himself had famously interviewed Malcolm Offord, the leader of Reform in Scotland, in the run-up to the Holyrood elections and asked him such penetrating questions as “Why do you like Yachts?”

This policy of appeasement and normalisation by the mainstream media, has been, and is, disgraceful, but it becomes more so as the violence intensifies and the chummy chat now collides with the reality of full-blown street fascism.

Second, while it’s being downplayed and bypassed, the role of the Loyalist community in both Belfast and Glasgow is clearer than ever in the rising tide of far-right and fascist violence.

In a guest blog on Adam Ramsay’s Abolish Westminster substack, an anonymous poster from Northern Ireland [What we're not being told about the racist riots in the North of Ireland] wrote:

“The racist riots that took place in the north of Ireland on 9 June, 2026, were exclusively in Loyalist areas. No legacy media outlet in the UK is stating this, but it is obvious to anyone who knows the make-up of the communities where the violence took place.

Modern Ulster Unionism is now deeply entwined in the global far right, and the Anglo-nationalism of Reform, Restore and the right wing of the UK Conservative Party. Partitionist Unionism is essentially a supremacist, apartheid project. Its very logic – a special jurisdiction where privilege is bestowed based on identity – is supremacist.

When I heard the news yesterday morning that an isolated act of public violence had been allegedly perpetrated by a refugee from Africa (at that point his nationality was not confirmed) I knew that pogromist riots would erupt before midnight, and that these riots would be confined to Protestant-majority neighbourhoods.”

As the violence and intimidation escalates, the same questions will have to be asked of Glasgow, and why or how it’s not possible to police or contain the Loyalist mobs. If it was any other community in Scottish society they’d have been rounded up by now.

Why is that?

Third, this is intensifying and escalating.

The asylum and refugee campaigner Alison Phipps has called the place we’re in now “the foothills of genocide”.

The cesspit that is Anglo-British far-right politics includes elements of Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain and Tommy Robinson’s mob. As the Anti-Capitalist Musing’s site lays out here

Anti-Capitalist Musings

What Restore Britain Actually Is

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2 months ago · 18 likes · 4 comments · Anti-Capitalist Musings

Restore Britain now includes people from the white nationalist group Patriotic Alternative.

We are a lomg way from ‘legitimte concerns’.

As the authors of the Post-Internet Far Right note: “We want to make clear that the far right is both a) massively diverse and b) almost completely contiguous (that is it’s possible to get from one part of it to another with relative ease).”

In this sense the semantic distinctions between these different elements that have brought us to the present horrors is largely irrelevant.

What is clear is that the mainstream media’s policy of normalising and appeasing these people will have disastrous consequences.

Scotland is experiencing yet another revolution it didn’t ask for, as vast hyperscale data centres for AI are planned across the country. The phenomenon follows historical patterns of colonialism and extractivism that are well-worn, but with an entirely new dimension and in an entirely different historical context of: climate catastrophe, Late Capitalism and the Anthropocene.

Communities across Scotland, and the world, are organising to resist. The objections include ecological/climate issues, social and economic consequences around mass job losses and cultural questions around copyright, harvesting human creativity and slop. But there’s a fourth objection at play which is political: AI feeds-into all of the contemporary fears about the power of the Broligarchy and the surveillance state and how it interacts with the political elite.

Democracy for Sale has noted that Oracle founder Larry Ellison has donated and pledged at least £257 million ($330 million) to the Tony Blair Institute, fueling a massive expansion of the think tank into a global powerhouse with over 900 staff. The Tony Blair Institute frequently publishes policy papers championing the integration of AI, digital IDs, and unified electronic health records. Critics and investigations highlight that these recommendations heavily intersect with Oracle’s commercial objectives, with some insiders referring to TBI’s technology policy arm as being “inseparable” from Oracle.

See Blair and the Billionaire – Lighthouse Reports.

But, if a lot of the public focus is on companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Palantir, SpaceX (which gobbled up AI startup xAI creating a combined entity worth $1.25 trillion) and Windsurf, the market for AI is actually much more diverse than the high-profile companies.

However, if the eye-watering sums of money being invested in AI and the terrifying existential questions it raises can be overwhelming, the backlash against the technology and its consequences is very real.

The People v AI

In February Time magazine ran a front cover on The People v AI: behind the growing backlash, stating: “In a deeply divided nation, a new coalition is forming around one belief: AI is moving too fast. Inside the stories of nine Americans, across ideologies and professions, determined to slow down the technology reshaping daily life.” The article cites evidence from activist website Data Centre Watch that shows “From Virginia to Indiana to Arizona, activists stalled $98 billion in data-center projects in the second quarter of 2025 alone.” The cover story claims that “a growing cross section of the public, from MAGA loyalists to Democratic socialists, pastors to policymakers, nurses to filmmakers” are now part of a non-partisan movement to stop or slow down AI data centres, and they are standing together to oppose politicians who are pushing for data centre expansion.

The resistance is interesting because, despite the appearance of a technological juggernaut that must not be resisted, which assumes a sort of inevitability, AI is actually quite vulnerable.

As the award-winning author Ewan Morrison has noted: “The biggest weakness that AI companies (Open AI, Anthropic, XAi) and tech companies who have committed to AI (Google, Microsoft) have, is their dependence on the vast expansion of data centres so as to prove the foundational belief that the AI explosion has been built on.”

Morrison wrote for Bella in February, arguing that the AI industry, or phenomenon, is a capitalist fantasy, one with terrible consequences but a fantasy nevertheless. He wrote:

“Data centres are not just a waste of resources; they are a vast folly, a disaster waiting to happen.”

“This adds insult to injury for all of our communities, because those huge data centres the companies want to build on our local land are not going to deliver on what the overhyped sector needs to make a return on its investment. We can and should get angry about the fact that a data centre built in our country will push the prices of electricity up and contaminate fresh water supplies, and it will all be for nothing. Or rather, it will all be for the mass delusion that America has spawned, that it could create a universal superintelligence by boosting chatbots through a speculative venture capital investment race into the trillions.

In truth there is no AI industry, there is no such thing as AGI or ASI research or ASI safety, there is only the recurrence here of something that American capitalism can’t stop itself from doing again and again in history – creating thin air money out of simplistic, hyped ideas and greed fuelled optimism, creating another economic bubble of vast proportions, bigger than the dot com bubble, maybe bigger than the 2008 crash.

“And this bubble too, when it bursts, will bring down banks who invested in it and pension funds that got dragged into it. It will bankrupt governments like our own, in Scotland and the UK with their vast investments in AI infrastructure. The UK has the AI Research Resource (AIRR) through which the government is investing over £2 billion into the “AI ecosystem”, “including £1 billion to boost sovereign compute capacity, aiming for a twenty-fold expansion by 2030.” Then there is Scotland with its government plans for 17 new hyperscale data centres. This included the £15 billion “Stoics network”, which aims to build three of the largest global data centre clusters, although it refers to them as part of a Green data network in a fine example of greenwashing what is becoming the most anti-ecological industry in the world. Proposed sites for Scotland’s new data centres include four in North Lanarkshire (including a major AI growth zone at Ravenscraig), two in the Borders, two in Edinburgh, and two in East Ayrshire.”

Morrison was prescient, but already this mapping is out of date. The impact is vast.

Scottish countryside charity APRS has published this interactive map showing the real scale of the process. From a 1000MW hyperscale data centre (scaling to 2000MW) at Killean on the Dunoon Peninsula, to Chapelcross in Dumfries, to 600MW data centre proposed on farmland by the village of Auchtertool, between Kircaldy and Cowdenbeath, to the proposal for a 220MW data centre on farmland and moorland near Duns in the Scottish Borders the map shows over twenty sites.

APRS say: “Click on the map to find out information on the capacity, stage of planning, developer. And each proposed site has a dedicated webpage with more information including maps and plans, links to planning documents, and contact details of local campaign groups.”

“Hyperscale data centres are some of the biggest buildings in the world and this is why we are seeing them being proposed mainly on greenbelt and greenfield sites,” said Kat Jones of APRS. “Their main requirements are large quantities of land and ­access to huge amounts of electricity and ­water. These buildings are huge but the amount of energy they use is ­absolutely off the scale.”

“This is an inconceivable amount of energy that Scotland is being asked to divert to the use of hyperscale AI data centres, which will enrich a few billionaires in Silicon valley at the expense of the Scottish consumer,” said Jones.

APRS has a petition to …

Call on Scottish Government to demand Environmental Impact Assessments on Data Centres

They write: “Data centres use huge amounts of energy and water – a recent proposal for a data centre in Edinburgh is reported to require power equivalent to that used by more than half a million homes, the population of Glasgow and Edinburgh combined.”

“The developers of this data centre will not be required to draw up an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) as part of the planning process. This is because it has been screened out as unnecessary by the Local Authority. Environmental Impact Assessments are required of major infrastructure and lay out all the environmental impacts in one place so that decision makers can make an informed decision. However we are seeing applications for data centres and large battery storage installations being screened out of requiring EIAs. This is extremely concerning because the scale of energy requirements for data centres mean that they have a disproportionately high impact on the environment.”

You can sign the petition here: Call on Scottish Government to demand Environmental Impact Assessments on Data Centres

This is another industrial revolution that has arrived in our lives and our communities without any consultation or public discussion. As the green researcher David Powell has written:

“Across Wales, Scotland, and England, the largest peacetime infrastructure seizure of community land and energy in modern British history is accelerating, and the vast majority of people living in its path do not know it is happening.”

But we do know now, or we’re beginning to. And where communities realise the extent and consequences of the plans they are outraged, as in Auchtertool in Fife – Auchtertool villagers rally against 600MW Fife AI data centre plan | The Herald – and at Duns, between the villages of Longformacus and Westruther on the Lammermuir Hills – Locals bid to block ‘monster’ AI data centre in Borders | The National.

The problem, and the community-response, mirrors what we have seen as Scotland’s onshore renewables revolution has been rolled out across the Scottish Highlands and Islands. The model is communities vastly affected by technologies from which they derive little benefit and industries that they don’t own.

The Green Myth

Much of the support for AI in Scotland, and subsequent data centre development, is based on a couple of comforting myths. The first is that Scotland’s beautiful clean energy will fuel such centres, rather than bad grubby energy elsewhere. The second is that this is technology we NEED and will bring us huge benefits (often vaguely referred to).

Kat Jones from APRS has said: “Scotland’s “green data centre” policy framework is in open collapse. More than a dozen Scottish data centre projects in planning, including the £8.2 billion Lanarkshire AIGZ, would collectively draw roughly 6.2 gigawatts, equivalent to one-and-a-half times Scotland’s entire winter peak demand. Scotland’s National Planning Framework 4, the document theoretically governing these decisions, was last analysed in 2022 before ChatGPT existed. Its underlying modelling assumed data centre emissions would be offset by reduced commuting. AI-scale workloads were never modelled. The “green” designation being applied to these projects has no enforceable emissions standard. It is a label, not a standard.”

AI Data Centres are, despite the hype, greenwashing and ignorance, inherently anti-ecological [The Data Centre Land Grab: How Britain Is Being Carved Up for Big Tech — Without Your Consent]

Kat Jones again:

“Data centres require power continuously, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Renewable energy, wind and solar, is intermittent by nature. Data centres are not well-suited to being powered by renewables because they need constant power 24/7. Many data centres are building batteries on-site to provide backup, but these are generally designed to store energy for a maximum of four hours; most have just two hours of storage. That could bridge the times of day when prices peak, but it will not cover energy requirements for the hours and days when there is a lack of wind. That needs long-duration storage, pumped hydro, hydrogen and such like, which is expensive to build.”

This is the real reason why we’re told over and over again, Labour politicians told us: “Scotland needs Nuclear Power.”

A Nuclear Renaissance for Scotland? – Bella Caledonia

That AI data centres are an environmental disaster zone isn’t disputed. This report, Environmental Cost of Artificial Intelligence: Carbon, Water and Land Footprints, by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, examines one of the most underexplored consequences of AI’s rapid expansion: the environmental footprints of the energy required to power it. The new report – it was only issued on 3 June 2026 – explains the scale of the crisis:

“By 2030, the global data centres powering artificial intelligence are projected to consume 945 terawatt-hours of electricity. This is nearly triple the combined annual electricity use of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria—countries collectively home to more than 650 million people. Their associated water footprint will equal the basic annual domestic water needs of all 1.3 billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa, and their land footprint will exceed 14,500 square kilometers, roughly twice the Jakarta metropolitan area, home to more than 32 million people.”

Read the press release here: ‘Rising Emissions, Depleting Water and Vanishing Land—UN Scientists: AI Is Threatening Natural Resources for Billions’, or the full report here.

Displacement and the Unnecessariat

If AI is profoundly anti-ecological and by its nature profoundly anti-democratic, it is also profoundly anti-human, or certainly this incarnation of it is. As Cory Doctorow has written [Hell is other people – so billionaires are using AI to replace them] Bezos and Zuckerberg and Musk and Sam Altman (Open AI) have a vision of the future, you’re not in it:

“Jeff Bezos built the world’s most advanced automated warehouses, and the workers in those warehouses are seriously injured at 300% of the national rate. The automation and the injuries aren’t unrelated facts. The inhumane treatment is caused by the automation, because when you commit hundreds of billions to automation capex, you need to work those assets to recoup the investment. In a human/machine collaboration, humans will always be the bottlenecks.”

“Mark Zuckerberg would like to replace your on-platform friends with chatbots. Sure, your friends are the reason you’re stuck on his platforms, but your friends are stubborn and thus suboptimal. They unreasonably refuse to leave Facebook with you and follow you to another platform (this is bad for you, but good for Zuck), but they also refuse to organise their social media lives to “maximise your engagement” and thus the number of ads you see (which is bad for Zuck). By replacing your friends with chatbots, Zuck hopes to reinvent social media without the socialising.”

The vision, according to Doctorow, is grim:

“For these politicians, AI offers a way out of their double-bind. If migrants can be replaced with AI, then you can satisfy the racist sadism of your most ardent voters without shutting down the country for lack of workers. In feeding the fantasy of a world without people, AI serves the fantasy of a world without migrants. Unlike gastarbeiter, bracero fruit-pickers or Saudi quasi-slaves, AI makes no demands, requires no moral consideration, and does not attempt to germinate a culture, a cuisine, or a language in your sacred soil.

The wealthy have always dreamed of transforming the proletariat into the precariat: desperate workers who do as they’re told. But in the automation story of which AI is the latest chapter (and purportedly the climax), the precariat becomes the unnecessariat: workers who are surplus to requirements and can be vaporised or liquidated or warehoused or simply ignored.

“In the fantasy world of total automation, the owners of AI can make the world go around without any of us, which means that we will exist solely at their sufferance, and will therefore have to act like the non-player characters they half-believe we are already, organising everything we do around their priorities.”

None of this speaks to the cultural impact of AI. Living in an era of AI Slop is profoundly unnerving and disturbing, but it is not the real problem. The problem is not just the displacement of writers, poets, musicians and artists with slop, in terms of jobs and status – which tells us ‘you are replaceable, you have no value’ – the problem is what that tells us about ourselves. The message is to demean and degrade human creativity and flourishing. It is anti-art and anti-culture.

There’s ethics in aesthetics, or at least there should be.

Now, resistance is taking many forms (the QuitGPT movement), but one is to declare websites, publishing houses, galleries, record labels, and whole cultural sectors ‘AI Free’ – and the battlelines are being drawn on creating strict cultural demarcation.

As Gary Marcus has written: “Outside of coding (where there is clear value), and a handful of other domains (e.g. brainstorming), Generative AI has been a net negative for society.

GenAI has been undermining secondary and college education, opening up mass surveillance, increasing disinformation, delusions, impersonation, phishing, and other forms of cybercrime, nonconsensual deep fake porn, bias in employment and other domains, and economic disparity, drowning the world in slop and unwanted, over-leveraged environment-damaging data centers that risk causing a recession.

Simultaneously, it has empowered a bunch of people who want to privatize almost all the gains while leave all the downsides to society, taking almost zero responsibility.”

End Games

Any technology for which the benefits are vague, untouchable and over-hyped and the downsides are huge, visible and clandestine is in deep trouble.

If much of the AI experience feels like a high-speed hallucination in an already deeply disorienting world, it may become a focal point for a culmination of disaffection. AI is fast becoming the lightning rod for decades of immiseration, anger at tech-elites and deep-seated hatred for the world we’ve been forced to inhabit. In this sense, the overwhelming power and wealth of the Tech Class is a mirror of the illusion that AI can create enough ‘growth’ to solve social crisis, or the fantasy that you can create massive power surges in a climate crisis.

As Ewan Morrison writes: “We have more power than we realise. We are not just protesting a technology we dislike. We are standing across multiple political divides, against a financial scam that threatens all our livelihoods. The good news is that we don’t need to bring down the whole edifice at once. We just need to keep saying no. What’s needed isn’t heroism, it’s just turning up at council planning permission meetings armed with facts. We only need to stop them, again and again, location after location, until the clock runs out. Keep blocking. Keep organising. Until the thing collapses under the weight of its own impossibility.”

Photo by Steve A Johnson on Unsplash

This article was first published in Bella Caledonia.

As people around the world watch events unfold at Delaney Hall, with masked thugs and riot police on horseback, the awful spectacle of the Trump World Cup, a distillation of violence and commodification beckons.

The FIFA World Cup is the biggest and most-watched single-sporting event in the world, surpassing even the Olympic Games in global viewership with an estimated reach of 6 billion viewers around the world. It is therefore a perfect opportunity for sportswashing and sanewashing the Trump regime, but also an opportunity for dissent and live protest. All the world is watching.

As Eduard Holdis has written: “In just a few days, the World Cup will be heading to one of the most repressive countries on earth. A place where freedom of speech is curtailed for the citizens who criticise the regime and is used as an excuse for the elites spewing their propaganda, a place where citizens are summarily arrested and held without due process, and where they are shot at point-blank range if they resist their unlawful arrest.”

“Furthermore, the media of the country is increasingly pressured to align with the views of the ruling regime, and it feels like I’m writing the introduction to the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Except this time around, the supposed home of freedom and democracy is hosting a tournament where one of the countries that is taking part had its territory recently bombed by the hosts.”

As the climate crisis intensifies, summer sporting events become more and more difficult. But while Fifa has introduced water-breaks for players for the very first time, it has banned fans bringing water bottles to the games [‘A real health risk’: Fifa ban on reusable water bottles sparks anger among fans].

It may seem a small thing, but it comes in the context of a huge backlash against Fifa President, Gianni Infantino.

Yesterday saw the launch of the Reboot FIFA campaign - ‘Act now to stop abuse of power at FIFA’. “Reboot Fifa” is being led by the advocacy group FairSquare, which has pushed Fifa over its governance since before the 2022 Qatar World Cup. The campaign is “encouraging people to add their name to … what we hope will be the largest single complaint Fifa will ever have received about the conduct of its senior officials”.

The complaint will be submitted to Fifa’s ethics committee after the World Cup and will be an updated version of one sent to it at the end of last year.

In complaint, FairSquare claimed Infantino had on four occasions breached article 15 of the Fifa code of ethics, which requires staff to “remain politically neutral”. The complaint followed Infantino’s decision to attend a Summit for Peace held by Donald Trump and the subsequent award of the Fifa peace prize to the US president. Such awards are completely unprecedented. The behaviour of Infantino degrades the values of football and sullies the Beautiful Game.

“People are rightly angered and frustrated by a range of issues, from exorbitant World Cup ticket prices to Fifa’s offering of a peace prize to a man who then launched an illegal war on a World Cup participant,” said FairSquare’s director, Nick McGeehan. “This campaign is about harnessing that anger and redirecting it effectively to create the political pressure required to force meaningful change at Fifa.”

McGeehan added:

“This complaint is about a lot more than Infantino’s support for President Donald Trump’s political agenda. More broadly, this is about how FIFA’s absurd governance structure has allowed Gianni Infantino to openly flout the organisation’s rules and act in ways that are both dangerous and directly contrary to the interests of the world’s most popular sport.”

Trump’s regime is as despotic and violent as that of Brazil in 1970 or Argentina in 1978 or Russia in 2018. But perhaps there is an opportunity here to expose the Trump administration to the cold light of day.

As Beth Williamson has written: “People wondered why FIFA would allow the World Cup to go on under these circumstances, and why the 15 other countries would participate. Given the participation as normal from the competing nations, Amnesty International realised that urging people away from the World Cup may not work, so they instead launched a campaign that would teach journalists to write about the tournament with factual evidence about the cruelty and illegitimacy of the regime.”

“The slogan “Football yes, torture no” was coined and it was hoped that journalists would turn their eyes away from the matches and look at what was going on in society to educate their readers on the reality of life in Argentina. A boycott campaign was initiated in Paris, which then became a centre of solidarity for the victims of the dictatorship.”

“The striking nature of the logo of COBA that we can see on the poster proved to be very popular, as it was an adapted version of the official tournament logo incorporated into the barbed wire fence of a concentration camp. The text we can see at the top of poster translates to ‘Against the dictatorship in Argentina, boycott the World Cup 1978’ and the text below translates to ‘no football between the concentration camps’ which reiterates the “Football yes, torture no” slogan of Amnesty International.”

Perhaps by resurrecting the spirit and tactics of COBA and by getting behind the Reboot Fifa campaign fans can wrestle football back and at the same time expose and disrupt the brutality of the Sundowning Dystopia.

To my children’s endless derision, I still think in Fahrenheit. That must mean I’m old. But I know what 80 degrees feels like. I remember the heat in Connecticut and, Milan and Seville, when you had to be abroad to feel heat like this.

A former partner flies her family to southern Europe each year. She’s started searching, with the help of AI to find the areas that won’t be on fire in July and August.

The maps turning red already, but Europe isn’t really the problem. Uncomfortable, sure, but still lauded as ‘Phew what a scorcher’ by the tabloids, and thundering editorials against hosepipe bans down south.

No, the problem isn’t really Europe.

Large parts of the world are becoming uninhabitable.

As someone on X wrote: “Nearly 2 billion people live in the red area. It is becoming completely uninhabitable. What do the climate deniers, who also hate immigration, think is going to happen?”

Me, the Fahrenheit Dad, have watched a catastrophic failure of political leadership all my life. But now, this week, as the temperatures soar so high that people are forced to talk about it, albeit briefly, Tony Blair rises from some lucrative Middle-Eastern jolly to pronounce that we should "Abandon net zero and move closer to Trump".

Yes, our former Prime Minister has looked across the Atlantic at Trump’s America, and thought ‘we should get closer to that.’ In a series of media rounds to support his bizarre intervention, Tony Blair tells ‘Times Radio’: Keir Starmer should rip up Ed Miliband’s “unnecessary” net zero agenda. “It’s not that I'm a climate denier, but it's just coming to terms with this reality.”

He tells the BBC: "If we carry on like this... we're going to create a situation where economically we're not able to grow."

Sir Tony Blair says the current welfare and pension triple-lock policies are 'not affordable', and argues for change in the NHS.

It’s like being lectured by the Undead about healthcare and the careful planning of collective suicide.

The level of disconnect about the cult of growth and the climate crisis is mesmerising, as is the idea that someone once through to occupy the hallowed (and now absent) ‘centre-ground’ should so easily pick up the talking-points of the far-right. But here we are.

“It’s not that I’m a climate denier, but it’s just coming to terms with this reality.”

What reality is this?

But at some level it does make sense.

As Diane Abbott has written: “Blair has no coherent plan for the country. His policy framework is support every US war, cut welfare and pensions, deregulate and privatise, continue anti-migrant policies. A hopeless, failed project.”

She’s quite right, but this is where Blair’s thinking makes sense. He has exposed a complete inability to make sense of either the challenge we face as a species - or the concept of Net Zero and decarbonification. But this is wholly consistent with his social policy outlook, in that it is completely devoid of solidarity or a concept of the collective good.

It’s entirely consistent with his ruthless exploitation of the genocide in Palestine. As Yanis Varoufakis writes:

“Tony Blair is the living embodiment of what happens when political office becomes a down payment on future plunder. Ejected in 2007 by his own MPs as a massive liability, he bequeathed Britain a wild casino economy primed for the 2008 crash. And when the British economy crashed and burned, Mr Blair kept quiet while honing his skills at securing power by other means.

His first job, after his ejection from 10 Downing Street, was as the West’s Middle East envoy, with a supposed emphasis on Gaza. It took six painful years for Mr Blair’s tenure to prove a failure so profound it amounted to active complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing, in Palestinian erasure, and in paving the ground for the ongoing genocide.

Soon after, the Chilcot Inquiry demolished Blair’s Iraq lies, exposing him as a liar, a chancer and a war criminal responsible for countless corpses of Iraqis, but also of British soldiers.

Then came Blair’s real innovation: the financialisation of the ex-premiership itself. The Tony Blair Institute, fuelled by £130 million from Oracle's Larry Ellison—coincidentally, the largest individual donor to the Friends of the IDF—became a shadow state, brokering governance contracts for autocrats and companies like Palantir that weaponise AI to produce mega-death abroad and full-on surveillance of Western populations.

Now, in May 2026, this corporate fixer issues a 5700 word tantrum demanding that Labour embrace Trump even more than Starmer already has, denounce what is left of Labour’s betrayed Green New Deal, and trash the remnants of workers' rights. This is not the wisdom of an aging statesman. It is the frantic squirming of a man fearing his grip on oligarchic power might soon wane and whose entire post-10 Downing Street existence depends on preventing the many from ever reclaiming what the few have plundered.”

Now, as your body experiences the reality your mind denies, orphaned centrists and confused journalists huddle around Blair’s intervention as if he brings wisdom instead of death.

The Green New Deal?

I’d forgotten about that.

Can anyone remember the last time a political figure showed any leadership on the climate crisis? Anyone at all?

Blair is the personification of everything that is and was wrong with British politics, an unwanted revenant, a harbinger of a cancelled future. That he is lauded as a man of common sense - the dreaded adults back in the room - is just a sign of how broken we are.

The briefing, backstabbing and careerism looks the same whether the protagonists have red or blue rosettes. The current soap opera involves the power seeping out of the Starmer project and leaching into a new variant, the revived Andy Burnham, the erstwhile King of the North (insert favourite cliche here). Or so we’re told.

Labour Together, Again

But the idea of Burnham as an unimpeachable popular left candidate who will smash Reform is questionable.

How so?

Well, the candidate who is selflessly standing aside to make room for Burnham is Josh Simon, former Director of Labour Together. He resigned from Starmer’s government in February over his role in Labour Together’s commissioning of the public affairs agency APCO to investigate journalists’ reporting on the thinktank.

The Guardian tells us: “… his past at Labour Together, which had at one point been a vehicle to organise against Jeremy Corbyn, is not likely to be welcome by many on the left of the party if he becomes a core part of Burnham’s operation. He is also seen by many colleagues as being close to the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who is more on the Blue Labour right of the party than Burnham, who has become the darling of the soft left.”

This colour palette, of red white and blue Labour seems to have got a bit blurry.

Democracy for Sale tells us:

Democracy for Sale

Labour Together PR firm tried to destroy crucial evidence

A senior executive at the PR firm previously hired by Labour Together to investigate journalists told a freelance contractor who had worked on the project at APCO to destroy evidence of its campaign against journalists…

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3 months ago · 128 likes · 3 comments · Peter Geoghegan

“A senior executive at the PR firm previously hired by Labour Together to investigate journalists told a freelance contractor who had worked on the project at APCO to destroy evidence of its campaign against journalists.

The contractor subsequently made a whistleblowing disclosure about that instruction to the Serious Fraud Office, which investigates serious fraud and corruption.

The instruction to delete material came from Tom Harper, who ran the Labour Together project for APCO, after Democracy for Sale revealed that the Starmerite think tank had paid APCO to investigate journalists reporting on more than £700,000 in undeclared funding used to power Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership win.

Josh Simons, who had succeeded Morgan McSweeney as Labour Together boss, resigned as a minister in Starmer’s government in February, in the wake of the revelations about APCO’s work for the think tank.”

The continuity between McSweeney, Simons and Burnham does not bode well for the idea of anything more than a superficial change at the top of Labour, if that is indeed what pans out.

One problem with this idea of Burnham as Saviour and leading from the Left is the ties with Josh Simon and the consequences for Labour’s foreign policy.

Jody McIntyre has noted: “Labour Together relaunched this week with a new name, “Think Labour”, but the same company number. Companies House reveals that Labour Together Ltd continues to operate. Directors include Jonathan Kestenbaum, the ex-IDF soldier who donated to Starmer’s 2020 leadership campaign.”

As Zarah Sultana has pointed out: “Andy Burnham voted for the Iraq War. As Health Secretary, he helped drive NHS privatisation. He joined Labour Friends of Israel, opposed BDS as “spiteful”, praised Israel as a “democracy”, and called the Balfour Declaration “British values in action”.

The idea that he would be a fresh start, or a break, is ridiculous.

But this phenomenon of shallow incoherent centrism and an obsession with personality politics is everywhere in our post-ideological landscape. Wes Streeting is described as a ‘working-class extrovert’, Angela Rayner’s lifestyle is explored relentlessly and all in place of any actual politics.

The same is true in Scotland, where the ridiculous Alexander/Baillie/Sarwar election campaign seems to have crashed and burned without, amazingly, any consequences whatsoever. It may be that the Labour Party, north and south, is just so hollowed out that these Blairite shadows of politicians is all that is left. ‘Success’ is no longer measured by elections or ideas but solely by connections.

A prime example of this ‘failing upwards’ is the Labour leader Anas Sarwar. As the ever-faithful Daily Record explained: “Labour collapsed to their worst Holyrood election result last week after slumping to a fifth defeat to the SNP …Despite the defeat, Sarwar has said he intends to stay on as leader for an undefined period.”

As Anas Sarwar was sworn in to Holyrood, Alison Taylor, the Labour MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire North tweeted: “Next FM. He has served his country with all his heart till now and Scotland will just have to wait a little longer. Best things are worth waiting for.”

This sort of denial of reality may be a defining characteristic of the silos of the Labour Party (red white or blue) but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny when it’s exposed to the electorate of, say, Glasgow Cathcart and Pollok or, Makerfield.

The reality is that Wes Streeting, Anas Sarwar, Andy Burnham and Josh Simons are all part of the same political project, on the right of British Labour.

Wes Streeting’s recent remarks about a referendum in Scotland mark him out as an arch-Unionist, as do Andy Burnham who’s repeatedly expressed his hostility to Scottish independence ['We need to rewire Britain and avoid the rupture that independence would mean']. Josh Simons managed this classic line: ‘Why don't you put the smuggler gangs on the barge and ship it to Scotland for all I care?'

The problem is that we are now used to this soap opera as politics its hard to imagine anything different. This is what politics has become, and the mainstream media, the lobby, are so embedded in these narratives that they are scarcely aware of how ridiculous they are.

The ‘King in the North’ can jog on.

It’s difficult to convey to people who don’t live in Scotland the extent of the media hostility to, well, everything. The background thrum of negativity and rage against the SNP and the Scottish Green Party is remarkable and relentless. It’s an incessant daily outpouring.

Now, as the MSPs take their seats with the largest pro-independence majority ever at Holyrood, what’s become apparent is that the power of the press is hugely diminished. PMs and FMs have traditionally had to ingratiate themselves with the Murdoch Empire in order to ensure an easy passage from his media network. If the Scottish elections tell us one thing it’s that the Unionist & Conservative Media just doesn’t have the clout it used to.

Just before the election, a poll by Norstat showed support for Scottish independence at 55%.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Norstat / Sunday Times, 27th-30th April 2026)

Yes 55% (+3)

No 45% (-3)

This is astonishing given the uniform hostility to the idea that dominates our media and every single newspaper, bar one.

Equally astonishing was the election result which gave us 15 Scottish Green MSPs and 58 SNP MSPs (which is more than all of the 56 Unionist MSPs combined).

What we are seeing here is people acting and thinking independently.

Two things are happening. The first is that since 2014, trust in the Scottish media has completely collapsed. People who still support the idea of self-determination simply aren’t using the legacy media anymore. The second thing that’s happening is that the mainstream media simply doesn’t have an impact on younger voters who are living in a parallel media universe. This leaves the Unionist Media - which is overwhelmingly white, male and of a certain vintage - talking to themselves. This is an interesting situation going forward, in which angrily preaching to the converted will have diminishing returns.

This phenomenon can now be observed playing out as the stream of columns and editorials churn out raging against the result, the people, and the future. Daily Mail hack Stephen Daisley has led from the front, now openly talking about dismantling devolution. He wrote: “You can either have a United Kingdom or you can have a rolling constitutional nervous breakdown in which the British state is constantly under attack from its own devolved branches. The Union will never be secure as long as devolution exists.”

Anas Sarwar and Russell Findlay, who both led their respective parties to their worst-ever Holyrood results, are, apparently, staying in post as if nothing happened at all. Hubris, denial, or lack of credible alternatives? Probably all three, but remarkable to watch. As Rory Scothorne has pointed out: “In fifth place, Toryism has been reduced to a few rural fiefdoms in the south and north-east.” But, instead of taking some time for some quiet reflection, Russell Findlay has charged into action to attack Dr Q Manivannan, a trans Indian person who was elected as a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for JK Rowling's constituency. In lieu of electoral success, Findlay and the media throng have swung into action, raging against the very presence of Dr Manivannan. In fact, most of the coverage of the election of Scotland’s first two trans MSPs has been reduced to attacking them for just being at all.

The problem for Scottish politics is whether it can avoid being dominated for the next five years with the culture war talking points of the far-right of the Conservatives and Reform, neither of which have much in policy terms to contribute to the public debate.

If the Scottish Tories election disaster was entirely predictable - they have just been replaced wholesale by Reform - Scottish Labour’s results came as more of a surprise, certainly to Sarwar who was confidently predicting success up until the very election day.

Sarwar may at least get his wish of the removal of his leader, although even that doesn’t seem to be going too smoothly.

Starmer’s leadership, or lack thereof, is cited as the major reason why Labour lost its heartland in Wales, and was further reduced in Scotland. But the problem is not one of personnel, as the media circus pretends, but rather of substance, or essence. As Ben Witham (author, 'Global Politics', Bloomsbury 2023) has written:

“The thing about Starmerism, such as it is (Labour Togetherism might be more accurate), is that unlike even Blairism - which was underpinned by neoliberal Third Way ideology - it is based on the idea you can have policies without politics. It’s devoid of all principles and therefore of coherence.”

“This is why the current government cannot climb out of the hole it’s in - its “big brains” cannot conjure up a backbone or a coherent, progressive moral and political platform to stand on. And their endless triangulation with the far right has already crossed too many red lines for too many voters.”

The problem of the endless collapse of the very idea of a Labour alternative has been long predicted. Way back in 2020, the late great David Graeber laid it out:

“The Labour Party under Keir Starmer will abandon its core idealism and principles and won’t even gain tactical advantage. It will be a party which gives no one a reason to vote for it, and no one will, in fact, vote for it.”

While its demise does render an element of schadenfreude it also creates a jeopardy for the rise of Farage into office. The idea that the answer to the question of Labour’s deep unpopularity is ‘Wes Streeting’ or bringing Gordon Brown back into government is so barren and empty you realise the deep crisis that the Labour party are in.

The problem for the Union is that the alternatives: a progressive Britain, or a reformed and reforming Britain seem even more unlikely as every day passes. This week we saw Britain as a Parody Nation with the King announcing from his throne:

"My ministers will also proceed with the introduction of Digital ID"

… a beautiful blend of the feudal relic of the monarchy and contemporary authoritarianism. If that is genuinely the Union's offer, it is doomed.

We are told that the languages spoken during their Holyrood oaths today included
Arabic, Scots, Doric, Gaelic, Shona, Mandarin, French, Dutch, Shaetlan, Orcadian, Polish, and Hindi. As the MSPs are sworn-in in Gaelic, Scots and using Polish, Dutch and sign language, and individuals like the Taiwan born, Belgium-raised Yi-Pei Chou Turvey take their place, the clash between the raging right and their hatred of multicultural Scotland and the reality of contemporary Scotland will become more acute.

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."
- Sinclair Lewis

The grotesque allure of Reform UK in Scotland is made more sour by the apologists that surround it and have helped nurture it. Only a few days from the Holyrood election and it seems certain that Scotland will have representatives of the most far-right party in its parliament’s short devolved history.

Fascism will arrive in Scotland surrounded by sycophancy and euphemism.

This is a party even the erstwhile editor of The Spectator, Fraser Nelson has noted: “Until about a year ago, Farage regarded mass deportation as an extreme and (most of all) unworkable policy. Now, Zia Yusuf talks about deporting up to 2m and sending them to places that didn't vote Reform.”

The Party is lurching further to the right, high on its own success and propelled by dark and crypto money - and the soft compliance of the mainstream media.

As the Green activist Philip Proudfoot puts it: “The media carries significant responsibility for allowing us to arrive at a place where Reform can announce that they will open concentration camps without mass shock and horror. We are on dark and uncharted territory; we must turn back the tide on fascism.”

Some have suggested that Reform's Yusuf's announcement about Deportation Camps, in any location but a Reform area, is highly illegal. It has been suggested that it should trigger an instant Judicial Review loss on Irrationality (The Unreasonableness Test): Procedurally Unfair: Based on Irrelevant Considerations, breaks Nolan Principles, and the Ministerial Code.

Whatever.

The Scotsman publishes the ex-pat Brian Monteith arguing ‘Why Reform UK's Malcolm Offord is the leader that Scotland desperately needs’.

Not to be undone, The Herald published this (then deleted it):

But, for the avoidance of any doubt, the Herald’s Political Editor Andrew Learmonth explained:

“Nigel Farage will override Holyrood if MSPs attempt to block legislation to allow the UK Government to build “migrant detention facilities” in Scotland, Reform UK has confirmed.”

Something called the ‘Daily Business Magazine’ interviewed Baron Offord and writes:

“He may once have worn the ermine appropriate for the second chamber but today Baron Offord of Garvel, as he is still officially titled, is attired in more casualwear. Skinny jeans, black slip-on shoes and a gilet tucked inside a blue jacket. He’s in the final laps of an exhausting election campaign and comfort is king. In any case, all that lord of the realm stuff is part of a past life.”

For raw undiluted sycophancy, it is unrivalled, except perhaps for Chris Deerin, who wrote in December [Admiring Malcom Offord’s Jaguar]:

“The last time I saw Lord Offord of Garvel in the flesh was a few months ago. We both attended a lunch for well-to-do business types, and as I left I was suitably impressed by the array of elite motors in the car park.”

“The best belonged to Malcolm Offord, though: a vintage, open-top Jaguar sports car, Bond-esque in its sleek lines and growling power. Offord, with his sunglasses and slicked-back, wealthy man’s hair, looked entirely fit for purpose in the driver’s seat as he roared off into the countryside.”

Somebody called Terry Murden is interviewing Offord at the ‘Daily Business Magazine’. We’re told that his own target is “to stop Scotland becoming a communist country”.

“If you thought the current government was anti-business you ain’t seen nothing yet,” he says, with the solemnity of a priest delivering the last rites.

Théâtre de Complicité

If you have watched the Holyrood election campaign you have witnessed the utter capitulation of the mainstream media to Offord’s Reform UK in Scotland. Everything has been talked about, from his love of Scotch Pies to his love of yachts. I have seen no interview in which Offord is really interrogated about his party’s policies for the forced deportation of two million people, the creation of a network of ‘detention camps’, nor what the security and enforcement infrastructure would look like to enable all this. Instead, we hear about his car, his many homes, his hair, his wealth.

What’s going on here?

The first thing that’s going on is the Scottish media is not very good. They’re not very political and just bumble along on a wave of lazy assumptions and cosy alliances. Holyrood Sources, a perpetual manel of dullards, is the top podcast, Kevin McKenna is the Feature Writer of the Year. BBC Scotland’s political output is dismal. The entire press corps, and all but one newspaper outlet, is institutionally wedded to Unionism and small ‘c’ conservatism. The same columnists repeat the same columns often two or three times a week. It is churnalism writ large. There’s very little thinking going on, and they wouldn’t recognise Fascism if it came along and bit them on the face. Instead, we are reduced to a hyper-banal lifestyle journalism. Hence the pies.

The second thing that’s going on is what we can call the ‘Davidson Effect’. For years Colonel Davidson operated a charmed life on the Scottish media circuit. Her entire political career was a stream of photo-shoots as she was lauded for her political skills by the Scottish press. She was allowed to completely disassociate herself from the political party of which she was a member, such was the nature of the relationship between her and her media, and such was the measure of hatred towards the Tory government we hadn’t elected. This bizarre disconnect was the blueprint for Offord’s free pass - and, in some senses - Anas Sarwar’s too. Sarwar and Offord just operate in the small pond of Scottish political media coverage. As such they are just bit players, a bit of local colour not really attached to the nasty stuff, and can operate with the complicity of the media as chummy fodder for interviews and puff pieces.

Thirdly, fascism has just been normalised over time. It’s not just the journalist’s fault. Over the past thirty year’s we have experienced a sort of water-bath of fascist ideas, a Sous Vide of rancid authoritarianism. The collapse of the social contract and faltering economic standards was followed closely by a grand narrative of scapegoating. The blame shifted effortlessly from the feckless poor and benefit scroungers; to the single mums; to the trade unions and the radical left (the Enemy Within) and on to the immigrants, the foreigners and the ethnic minorities. Such stories have poured out of the tabloid media for decades and contaminated public discourse. The last refuge of a saner dialogue - the broadcast media and the former ‘quality newspapers’ has been completely eroded as the entire media has undergone ‘tabloidisation’.

The entire coverage of the rise of Reform has been characterised by a deeply shameful sense of unseriousness, and if it has told us anything about what Scotland needs more than anything else, it is an entirely new set of media institutions.