This post is based on a talk I gave at the Ecosocialism conference in London on Saturday 30 May, about the Fare Free London campaign, in which I participate, and the wider movements of which it is part. I was on a panel on “Organising the climate movement” with Tyrone Scott of War on Want and Sophia Brown of Greens Organise - Simon Pirani.
For social movements, and the labour movement, to take on the challenges presented by global heating and other ecological crises, the most important thing is to integrate this with broader struggles against social injustice – that is, the struggle to resist, and supercede, the tyranny of capital.
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| A “make them pay” demonstration in London, September 2025. Photo by Steve Eason |
It is not enough to assert that averting ecological disasters is inseparable from fighting capitalism. We need to develop movements based on that inseparability.
In the UK, we are doing this at the end of a 40-plus-year neoliberal onslaught on working-class rights and working people’s living standards. During that time, traditional social democracy has collapsed and the traditional structures of the labour movement weakened.
In other words, we are doing this as part of rebuilding our movement against capitalism in new forms.
Here I will look at Fare Free London’s (so far very modest) contribution to doing this, and to the sort of alliances we hope to build.
I will also say something about how our movement engages with the state, and with institutions that mediate society’s relationship with the state, such as trade unions and political parties.
We need to consider what it means to demand that the state does things – whether providing free public transport, or anything else – and what it means to organise social forces that can challenge the state.
Fare Free London’s experience
Fare Free London is a small organising group of volunteers, with no staff and hardly any funds. We do street stalls, participate in meetings and demonstrations, speak at trade union and political meetings, and publish stuff on our web site.
We hope to organise at borough level; so far we have one active borough group and embryos of at least two more.
One priority is to form a national campaign and there are now Fare Free campaigns in Manchester and Yorkshire.
The next point is about failure. When confronting such an enormous threat as global heating, we are bound to experience failures, and Fare Free London was basically born from the failure of a previous campaign, to stop the Silvertown tunnel.
That campaign had been conducted by a small group of environmentalists since 2012. From 2018 it expanded thanks, basically, to the wave of activism around Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future.
Despite our mobilisation, and the level of public opposition to the tunnel project, the Greater London Authority, controlled by Labour, went ahead with it. And in 2023, with the tunnel almost built, we had to choose between simply winding up the campaign, or trying to build on what we had achieved – a strong alliance of community organisations, trade unions, environmentalists and academic researchers. This is where Fare Free London started.
And now a point about success. Where we have had success, it has been largely due to the political power of the demand for free public transport.
🔴It is visionary, and links immediate fights with a vision of the sort of cities we want to live in, which is essential to socialism as I understand it.
🔴 It cuts right through the reactionary claim that tackling climate change necessarily costs ordinary people money. It says: here is something that benefits you, now, and is a substantial step towards decarbonisation.
🔴 It challenges neoliberalism. It prompts the question, “how are you going to pay for it?”, providing an opportunity to question neoliberal narratives about the need for austerity.
Interaction with existing institutions
Politicians of all parties have introduced partial free public transport, mainly for specific age groups e.g. over 60s or under 11s, as a populist measure. Don’t forget, it was Boris Johnson, the ultimate populist politician, who brought in the Freedom Pass for older people in London.
Such populism has often gone hand in hand with the privatisation of bus and train services, the hiking of fares for those who pay them, and the appalling degradation of public transport services – buses in rural areas especially.
In our campaign we are still learning how to deal effectively with this populism. I think we should be pointing out, first, that it shows that the state can provide free public transport, if it wants to, and second that, without social pressure to make public transport a public good, a commons, the demand for free public transport can be gutted of its potential.
Populism exerts social control in many ways. In this instance, by presenting people with things they want, and making them appear as gifts from on high. We need to take agency back into the hands of social movements.
There are examples of such populism not only from politicians but from trade union leaders.
For example, last month Maryam Eslamdoust, general secretary of the Transport and Salaried Staff Association, called for universal free public transport to be introduced, in response to the fuel price crisis caused by the US-Israeli war on Iran. Her statement followed decisions by local authorities in Pakistan, Australia and elsewhere to make public transport free in response to soaring fuel prices.
We welcomed this call – but also talked to friends and comrades in that union who explained that in recent years internal union democracy has been trampled on, activists victimised and expelled and rank and file structures gutted.
So the call for free public transport has not been discussed in the union at all. So, in front of us is a campaign to win grass-roots support in the TSSA, and not allow free public transport to be owned opportunistically by bureaucrats.
Another relevant issue is the position of elected councillors.
Prior to the elections this month, together with our friends in Manchester and Yorkshire we convinced more than 200 councillors and candidates to sign a pledge to use their platforms to advocate the extension of free public transport.
The pledge specifies that “funding models would have to change”, that is, it recognises implicitly that most levels of local government have little or no control over the funding required, as a consequence of decades of neoliberalism.
How to support, and push, elected councillors working in the very limited framework will be an issue for all campaigns, not only ours.
It could help to look back at the lessons learned from left Labour councils’ fights against cuts in the 1980s.
(At Saturday’s conference, members of Greens Organise spoke of their own pledge, signed by a much larger number of Green council candidates, to resist government-imposed austerity, to organise communities to fight back and to press for democratic control of local resources. They are planning events later in the year to consider this.)
Alliances
Just as free public transport can address immediate threats to working-class household budgets, and help tackle climate change, so programmes of insulation and heat pump installation can address soaring fuel bills and simultaneously cut fossil fuel burning.
For this reason we have sought to work together with groups campaigning around energy costs, such as Fuel Poverty Action. There is much further to go.
A big challenge is coming up: the government’s Warm Homes Plan, under which funding is to be provided to retrofit homes with insulation, and install heat pumps and solar panels.
Such changes could simultaneously slash households’ soaring energy bills and make substantial reductions in the UK’s level of gas consumption, thus simultaneously and demonstratively tackling the assault on living standards and the threat of climate disasters.
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| A national march for housing rights, April 2026. Photo: Steve Eason |
But, done the way the government is planning to do it, they could fail all round.
Energy researchers and campaigners are warning of exactly such a failure. Previous schemes crashed, wasting billions, because construction work was poorly regulated – and that has not changed.
Moreover, the government’s plan will not undo much of the damage done by privatisation of electricity supply on one hand and the consequences of decades of neoliberalism in the housing market on the other.
At best, the plan will be a sticking plaster. At worst it will, on one hand, further undermine the position of tenants in the private rented sector, and, on the other, lead to heat pumps being fitted in houses that are not properly insulated, and don’t work properly.
This would provide the far right with another opportunity to rant about “net zero” being a fraud.
Campaign groups who deal with energy, housing and construction are actively engaged with this. A broad coalition has put together demands to “make green fair”. For a group like ours working on different but adjacent issues, strengthening our links with such groups is essential.
We need to think about how to bring housing issues to the centre of organising work .
Historically, the labour movement at its strongest has brought together workplace issues with housing issues, just as it has forged links with feminism and anti-racism, for example.
Here we should consider the alliances in practice that we need, in the world we live in now. This is a work in progress to which we can all contribute.
🔴 Participants in our session split up in to breakout groups, and at the end we heard reports from these about organising priorities. One group said it had discussed the rapid advance of renewable electricity generation in China, and saw this as an example to point to. I said that I do not agree.
It is true that there has been a very rapid, state-coordinated expansion of solar and wind power in China, and that it is the world’s number one producer both of its own renewable electricity and also of solar panels, batteries and other equipment. However China continues to burn coal at a planet-endangering rate: 4.8 billion tonnes last year, or about 25 times the level of UK coal production when at its highest.
Such issues deserve discussions of their own, which take time, and I hope that we collectively find ways to arrange these. I wrote about Chinese energy systems e.g. here, here and here.
🔴There was a thought-provoking session at the conference about “Ecocide and war”, with Hamza Hamouchene, co-author of Dismantling Green Colonialism and Kimia Talebi of Energy Embargo for Palestine. This article covers some of the issues that Hamza addressed.
🔴 Another session that I found worthwhile looked at “Big Tech, AI and the climate crisis”, with Dan McQuillan, author of Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence, Anne Alexander, a researcher at the University of Cambridge (see her substack here), and economist James Meadway.
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