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Showing posts with label Simon Pirani. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Simon Pirani. Show all posts
People And Nature ☭ Written by Simon Pirani.

7-September-2026

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

Reflecting on the first four years since the invasion, Oleksandr Kyselov, a Ukrainian socialist based in Sweden, wrote in February that Ukrainians found themselves “trying to safeguard our future free from foreign dictates, and simultaneously sacrificing any chances to actually have one”.

Subjected to polarising propaganda, exposed to the attacks by Russian ‘liberators’ on our homes and core infrastructure, watching arrogant sticky-fingered moralising elites surprisingly exempt from ‘common duty’, learning about a striking dependence of our ability to fight back on the political expediencies abroad, we may find out that a fragile ‘least unjust peace’ is the best we can get.

And still, even seeing all of this, too many of the European left are busy stretching familiar old frameworks over a changed world. As if continuing to hope that, should they just deny, condemn, and denounce loudly enough, selectively pontificating about internationalism while reinforcing the borders of their national units, they will be spared the new reality of the world.

This reinforced my scepticism about “the left” as a category. Its historic failure to consider, or draw lessons from, the tragedy of the Syrian revolution, emptied the term of much meaning. That’s how I saw it nine years ago, anyway – and Ukraine has made things worse.

Demonstrators outside a court in Moscow, where Lidia Moniava, founder of a children’s hospice,
was on trial for social media posts about the war. Photo from Bereg

This, in turn, raises another question. What about those sections of the “left” claiming to be Marxists? Can we seriously use the term “Marxist” to describe people who, during the largest military conflict of our lifetimes in Europe, have – as Kyselov puts it – kept denying, condemning and denouncing, in the hope of being “spared the new reality”?

I do not have a comprehensive answer to that. But here’s a contribution: comments on a lengthy article about “geopolitical fractures and the Marxist critique of imperialism” by Alex Callinicos, a well-known Marxist writer. I read it, hoping to find the theoretical underpinnings of the political stance of the Socialist Workers Party, of which Callinicos is a member, on the war. The SWP recognises Ukrainians’ right to resist the Russian invasion in words, but opposes it in practice (see Feature 5 below); since 2022, it has called for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine, but did not do so during the eight years (2014-22) that they propped up the tinpot Donbass dictatorships.

Callinicos deals with imperialism as a global phenomenon, referring as examples to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine. My comments focus only on Ukraine, and what that tells us about imperialism generally. Five features of his analysis stood out for me.

Feature 1. Callinicos dissolves the particular in to the general.

Callinicos writes:

February 2022 [i.e. the all-out invasion of Ukraine] marked another, more threatening step-change in this conflict [between the western powers on one side and China-Russia on the other], with the outbreak of a major war on the European continent and the polarisation of the state system resulting from the mobilisation of [‘liberal internationalist’ scholar G. John] Ikenberry’s ‘global West’ behind Ukraine and China’s support for Russia. Rather than treat this fracturing of the international system as a series of discrete events, it is better to understand it as a developing global process of confrontation among the main imperialist powers. (My emphasis, SP.)

This is important, methodologically, in my view.

Surely the “global process of confrontation” is actually made up of “a series of discrete events”. Surely, our understanding of any global process has to be rooted in a convincing analysis of its parts. Instead of this, Callinicos proceeds from his understanding of the global process – a clash of imperialist camps – and, where the parts don’t fit, presents a flawed and inaccurate view of them.

Feature 2. Callinicos imagines an “expansion of Russian power” that does not accord with reality.

Callinicos sees Russia not as a declining empire, or as a subimperialist power with aspects of dependence on global capital, but as a would-be great power. He approvingly quotes Sergey Radchenko, who writes that “even though the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight, its successor, Russia, still eyed a position of prominence in the global order”, and goes on to claim that Putin:

[…] used Russia’s position in the global economy as one of the main energy producers to rebuild its military power and geopolitical influence externally.

Callinicos then surveys the activities of the Russian armed forces and the Wagner group in the Middle East and Africa, and asks, “What made possible this expansion of Russian power into MENA and beyond?” Answer: two “interconnected determinants”: (1) Russia exploited a gap left by the Obama administration’s efforts, after defeat in Iraq, to reduce US involvement in the Middle East; (2) regional powers based in the Middle East (Israel, Saudi Arabia and others) have become more self-assertive “with the emergence of new centres of capital accumulation in the region”; “global energy production adds a further dimension to these interstate manoeuvres”; and “Russia figures as an important partner to Saudi Arabia in the OPEC+ cartel”.

This creates the impression that over the past two decades Russian imperialism has become stronger. In reality, the opposite is true.

First: Russia’s position as a big energy producer is in many respects a source of weakness, not strength. In the early 2000s, Russia consolidated its position in the global economy as a highly dependent exporter of oil, gas and metals. Low oil prices in the 1990s exacerbated the post-Soviet economic crisis; in 2000-08, Russian capitalism strengthened as those prices rose, but the 2008 crash, and falling prices, exposed its extreme vulnerability.

Azerbaijan and its oil had been lost to Russia in the 1990s; in the 2000s it was replaced as the economically dominant power in central Asia by China and the western powers. And it was losing ground to the European powers in Belarus, the Baltic states, and of course Ukraine. The Russian elite was well aware of this and obsessed throughout the 2000s about the dangers of dependence on oil revenues and the need to diversify the economy. That did not happen.

It could be argued that Russia’s dependence on commodities revenues was a key factor that eroded its “great power” status. To suggest, as Callinicos does, that its status as an energy producer enhanced that status is mistaken.

Second: as for Russia’s military adventures in the Middle East and Africa, look how they ended. Bashar al-Assad’s regime was toppled in Syria, in large part because Russia was unable and/or unwilling to provide the military support needed to protect him.

Putin faced the Maidan uprising in Ukraine in 2014 as the leader not of a power gaining in economic or political strength, but of a weakening power that had to compensate for its subordinate position in the global economy, and the fragility of its social base at home, by ramping up nationalist rhetoric and shifting towards a more authoritarian method of rule.

It is noteworthy that Rob Ferguson, another writer in SWP publications, does not share Callinicos’s eccentric view of Russian power. In 2022, he concluded, in an analytical article – with a measure of understatement, but still – that “Russia’s energy and raw material base was still insufficient to overcome the vast disparity in economic and military power with NATO – as well as China”. This, Ferguson argued, “intensified the pressure on the Russian state to demarcate its regional hegemony, putting the question of the states along the Eurasian faultline at the fore of Russia’s concerns”.[1]

Feature 3. Callinicos imagines western military support for Ukraine as a cause, not an effect.

Proceeding from the general (“global process of confrontation”) to the particular (“a discrete series of events”), Callinicos presents a version of one aspect of these events – western military support for Ukraine – that does not bear serious scrutiny. Referring to the all-out invasion of 2022, he writes:

The war itself thus represented a radicalisation of the global struggle that was already developing between Washington, Beijing and Moscow.

He then qualifies that statement, in three sentences that I deal with below (Feature 4), where he acknowledges that “traditional Great Russian nationalism” may have played a part in causing the war, but hastily insisting that it is “no simple struggle for self-determination”. And then he writes:

The US and other Western powers were heavily involved in training and supporting the Ukrainian military from 2014-15 onwards.

Then he quotes newspaper articles detailing cooperation between the Ukrainian intelligence services and the CIA in gathering intelligence on Russia. And then:

The massive surge in weapons supplies to Ukraine by the NATO powers and closely aligned states such as Australia must be seen in this context. From the Western side, the Ukraine conflict has been a proxy war waged to weaken and drain a potential challenger, an inter-imperialist conflict in the kind of terms that Lenin and Luxemburg characterised in the first world war.

This is playing ducks and drakes with reality. Its inclusion in a theoretical article shows how shaky its foundations are.


For a start, the intelligence operations referred to are only one part of a larger picture. From 2014 Ukraine was fighting a war, the prosecution of which required not just intelligence but heavy weapons. It received utterly negligible supplies of these from the western powers until 2022. As the chart shows, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute registered US arms exports to Ukraine as zero until 2015. Note that the chart, sourced from SIPRI’s database, measures exports with the institute’s standard method, the trend-indicator value (TIV).[2] In 2015 US arms supplies to Ukraine were 4 TIVs, compared e.g. with 92 TIVs to Greece and 112 TIVs to Norway. In 2021, when all those CIA agents referred to were well aware of the Russian troop build-up on Ukraine’s border, US arms exports to Ukraine remained negligible: 20 TIVs compared with 39 TIVs to Canada and 139 TIVs to Singapore.

The graph shows US arms exports to Ukraine, with those to Saudi Arabia, Israel and Singapore included for comparison. The table shows the top 20 recipients of US arms exports in 1993-2025; even including three years of war (2022-25), Ukraine only gets to 16th place.


The negligible level of western arms supply to Ukraine between 2014 and 2021, when it was fighting a defensive war against a larger aggressor, was preceded by more than two decades during which (1) in 1994 the US helped to convince Ukraine to give up its nuclear arsenal, (2) NATO accepted eastern European countries into membership, and (3) NATO forces in Europe were substantially reduced from cold war levels (the number of US tanks in Germany fell from 5000 in 1990 to zero in 2013).

Callinicos says the US and UK are “training and supporting the Ukrainian military”, without saying that this “support” included starving Ukraine of weapons supplies. He refers to a “massive surge in weapons supplies”, but omits that this was a reaction to the 2022 invasion. Cause and effect are reversed. Such game-playing does not deserve to be taken seriously.

Feature 4. Callinicos refers only once, and in passing, to the social dynamics in Ukraine, and in Russia, during the period under discussion.

Having stated that the 2022 invasion was a “radicalisation of the global struggle”, the next three sentences read:

Pace the [“realist” scholars John] Mearsheimer and [Sebastian] Rosato, the Russian invasion seems [“seems”!] not to have been simply an instrumentally rational response to NATO expansion and Ukraine’s increasingly close alignment with the US, but arises also from an ideological investment, certainly on Putin’s part, in traditional Great Russian nationalism that denies Ukraine a distinct identity. The assertion of that identity informed the Ukrainian national mobilisation that helped to block and push back the initial advance on Kyiv. But this war is no simple struggle for self-determination.

This is the only reference to the Kremlin’s nationalism, and the only reference to Ukrainian society, in the entire article of 12,500+ words.

Callinicos does not even discuss the idea that the social turbulence reflected in the Maidan – from socially progressive, to pro-European, to outright reactionary – needs examining. Nor the social dynamics in Russia that have pushed the elite towards an authoritarian, near-fascist style of rule, and – in the view of many Marxist writers – towards all-out war.

Callinicos acknowledges that Ukraine’s assertion of “a distinct identity” “informed the national mobilisation”, but does not comment on what the significance of that might be, either historically or in the twenty-first century. He writes that the war is “no simple struggle for self-determination” (not many wars are “simple”), but only to return to his erroneous portrayal of the extent of western involvement.

This is where dissolving the particular into the general (see Feature 1 above) becomes a problem.

Would you look at Brexit as part of the “developing global process of confrontation among the main imperialist powers”, without also considering the social dynamics in the UK – the advance of neo-liberalism, the surge of right-wing populism, the travails of the labour movement, the effects of de-industrialisation and dependence on financial and service industries?

Would you look at the Malvinas war as part of the “developing global process of confrontation among the main imperialist powers”, without also considering the class struggles in Thatcher’s Britain and Galtieri’s Argentina?

What, then, is the credibility of an “analysis” of the Russian war on Ukraine that starts from a preconception about the “global process of confrontation”, and fails to mention the class struggle and other forms of social change in either Russia or Ukraine?

This approach says something about the development of Marxism, in my view. The stated aim of Callinicos’s article is to show how the Marxist critique of imperialism “can encompass empirically aspects of the present conjuncture that liberalism and realism are unable to account for”. He does not explain why the social forces at work in Ukraine, and in Russia, should not be treated as one of these aspects.

This not only holes his argument below the water-line in the ways I have mentioned. It also misses an important opportunity to engage with the body of serious Marxist scholarship – by Ilya Matveev (Russia), Daria Saburova (Ukraine), Yassin al-Haj Saleh (Syria), Kavita Krishnan and Rohini Hensman (India)[3] and many others – who see these social forces, and the Kremlin’s reaction to them, as central to the causes of the Russian war.

It would be a cheap shot to criticise Callinicos or anyone else for something they have not written, and that is not my point. Rather, that the reluctance to engage with other Marxists can only obstruct the development of Marxism as a living body of ideas.

Feature 5. Callinicos separates analysis from politics.

Of course many Marxists working in universities have in recent decades increasingly detached analysis of politically urgent issues from political commentary that might inform the labour movement and social movements. So this is a much wider problem that one for Callinicos alone. But in his article, published by a non-academic socialist journal, he takes this to an extreme.

The SWP, of which Callinicos is a member, (i) between 2014 and 2022, made no call for the withdrawal of Russian troops, and raised no challenge to those “lefts” who vigorously supported the Russian-backed tinpot dictatorships in the Donbas,[4] (ii) condemned the Russian invasion of 2022, but, along with post-Stalinists, portrayed NATO expansion as its primary cause, (iii) acknowledged the right of Ukrainians to defend themselves from invasion in words, but opposed it in practice, and (iv) supported calls in the UK labour movement to end arms supplies to Ukraine.

A drone workshop. Photo from Solidarity Collectives

It is worth considering what the SWP actually means by the Ukrainian people’s “right to resist the invasion”, as a statement by the international network they belong to put it, since this is combined with a demand on western governments for “no arms shipments to Ukraine!”

How are people to resist an invasion, without arms from western governments? Some people favour arms provided by civil society (inevitably a tiny supply compared to what the state provides). And so Ukrainians living abroad, and civil society groups, have raised millions of euros to support civil defence (drone factories, medical supplies, etc). Trade unionists and e.g. anarchist groups participate – but the SWP does not.[5]

For some SWP members, the “right to resist the invasion” does not even extend as far as the right to ask for weapons, let alone to receive them.

For example, SWP members worked hard but unsuccessfully to defeat a resolution passed by the National Education Union conference in April last year, supporting not the export of arms to Ukraine by the UK government but “the right of Ukraine to self-defence and to resist Putin’s occupation, including the right to seek arms to defend itself”.

Similarly, when the Universities and Colleges Union conference decided in 2024 to endorse an appeal by the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine to western governments to send military aid, SWP members sought through conference procedure to block that call from being heard.[6]

Of what does the “right to resist the invasion” consist, if not of the right to ask for weapons, be it from western governments, Ukrainians abroad, or anyone else? This is not just about politics, but about socialist morality.

Callinicos does not comment on this in his article. Its function, rather, is to provide these damaging, and I would say immoral, politics, with a “theoretical” justification: the fragile, general assertions about the “global process of confrontation”, the false picture of Russian imperialism, the reversal of cause and effect, and the blank spot where society should be.

In my view, the development of Marxism as a meaningful approach to the problems that capitalism is throwing at us in the twenty-first century will mean rejecting this kind of imposition of political dogma on to analysis – what Kyselov calls “stretching familiar old frameworks over a changed world”. 7 September 2026

🔴 Thanks to Links journal for reposting this article.

References

[1] Robert Ferguson, “Imperialism, war and the Eurasian faultline”, International Socialism 175, June 2022

[2] SIPRI has over decades of research developed the TIV as a common unit, “based on the known unit production costs of a core set of weapons and intended to represent the transfer of military resources rather than the financial value of the transfer”. There is a full explanation here

[3] See, for example, Ilya Matveev, “The War in Ukraine and Russian Capital: from military-economic to full military imperialism” (Alameda Institute, 2023) and “Between Political and Economic Imperialism: Russia’s Shifting Global Strategy” (Journal of Labour and Society, 2021); Daria Saburova, Travailleuses de la résistance. Les classes populaires ukrainiennes face à la guerre (Autonomies, 2024); Yassin al-Haj Saleh, “Why Ukraine is a Syrian Cause” (Dawn, 2022); Kavita Krishnan, “Our indifference to Ukraine did harm to our struggle in India”, Commons, 2023; Rohini Hensman, Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism (Haymarket, 2018)

[4] In 2014, Eamonn McCann, for many years a leading figure in the SWP’s sister organisation in Ireland, argued that, with regard to Ukraine, “If we have to take sides […] Ireland should side with the Russians”. For the SWP’s newspaper, war crimes by Russia and its allies, e.g. the shooting down of the MH17 civilian aircraft, were to be blamed on “imperialist rivalry” (see also here and here).

[5] I expressed my own view of these difficult issues e.g. here

[6] For those interested in trade unions’ arcane conference procedures, see motion 29 (moved by pro-Ukrainian activists) and amendment 29A (moved by SWP members) here

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Russian Empire, Social Dynamics And Where Marxism Goes From Here

People And Nature ☭ Written by Simon Pirani. 
Republished from the Ecologist, with thanks.


Skyrocketing charges for heating and hot water from council heat networks in Lambeth, south London, are to be challenged at a judicial review by two tenants.

Kirsty Oliveira’s heating charges rose four-fold in 2022-23, and Aida Haile’s more than doubled.

Lambeth Tenants Heat Campaign Fuel Poverty Action and the London Tenants Federation are supporting Kirsty and Aida. Jeremy Ogilvie-Harris, a barrister at the Public Interest Law Centre, will represent them at the hearing on 1-2 December.

Fuel Poverty Action’s banner on a “tax the rich” demo, June 2025. Photo: FPA

When Richard Clayton KC, sitting as a deputy high court judge in June, gave the go-ahead for the judicial review, he said the claim raises “wider issues and points of law of general public importance”.

The case highlights the scandal of extortionate charges, poor customer service, waste, inefficiency and breakdowns faced by up to 900,000 British households that rely on heat networks.

Buildings served by the networks have heat and/or hot water piped to them from a centralised boiler, and no gas boiler of their own. Such networks commonly serve whole neighbourhoods, and even whole cities, across Europe.

Heat networks have big potential for helping to tackle climate change. They can take in heat from underground, from rivers or disused coal mines, or heat that is currently dumped into the atmosphere, e.g. from power stations or industrial processes. They can be integrated with large-scale heat storage, and adapted to switch to cooling in hot weather.

As part of its Warm Homes Plan, the government wants to more than double heat network annual output, from 12.4 terawatts (TWh) to 27 TWh, by 2035.

But poor service and underinvestment has to be tackled, campaigners say, otherwise expanding heat networks will multiply problems, not solve them.

The first step must be to ensure that existing networks deliver a service no more expensive, and no less reliable, than gas boilers and electricity, consumer advocates argue.

Kirsty and Aida’s case against Lambeth highlights the lack of choice for council tenants on heat networks. They are obliged to buy hot water and heating, whatever the price – which is unregulated, unlike gas and electricity prices – and can not install their own boiler or heat pump, or switch providers.

Neither Kirsty or Aida, nor thousands of others, have meters for heating and hot water. Government rules requiring that they are installed have not been followed. Using less, or even no, heat makes no difference to the bill.

Kirsty and Aida are both secure tenants, who have been allocated social housing through the council’s duties regarding homelessness. So they had little choice about where to live. But, because welfare benefits do not cover heating and hot water, after the 2023 price hike Kirsty faced a monthly shortfall of about £350. For Aida it was about £300.

Both women face a risk of eviction, and are unable to leave their homes as they would then be declared “intentionally homeless”.

They are asking the judicial review to rule that their tenancy agreements are “unfair and unenforceable”, and that Lambeth council pay damages.

Kirsty Oliveira said in an interview: “Lambeth as whole, both elected councillors and officials, have been a big disappointment.

“We went to councillors’ surgeries, sent them letters and emails, and arranged meetings with them. They told us ‘no-one will get evicted’, but refused our requests to put that in writing.

“We have asked why the heat charges are bundled in with the rent. This is unfair, and it’s not transparent. We don’t have a choice: we can not even save money by turning it off.”

Sam Tippet of the Public Interest Law Centre said: “This case is vital for social housing tenants on heat networks across the country. Without proper price protection, working class tenants are being burdened with exorbitant costs and pushed into unmanageable debts.”

Why things are so bad

The problems Kirsty and Aida have faced – steep price increases, lack of flexibility, and poor service – are all too common. Until January this year, heat networks were exempt from oversight by Ofgem, the government’s energy regulator, and that made matters worse.

Ofgem can hold electricity suppliers and generators to legal standards, and has since 2018 imposed price caps on gas and electricity – but not on network heat.

Finally, after years of pressure from Citizens Advice, the Competitions and Markets Authority and others, the government empowered Ofgem to monitor heat networks, starting in January this year. But consumer advocates say Ofgem does not have the teeth needed to do the job.

Stephen Knight of Heat Trust said in an interview: “Heat networks are the obvious way to decarbonise urban heating at scale. But we have to change the existing consumer experience. It is not good enough, and not reliable enough.”

The first priority should be technical standards, Knight argues. These exist in draft form, but will not come into force until next year, with the slowdown due in part to “heavy lobbying” by the heat network industry.

Second, Ofgem “doesn’t have the tools in its toolbox to control prices”, Knight warned. Heat networks are typically operated by landlords, who buy fuel on the wholesale market, unprotected by energy price caps, and pass on the costs to consumers. Others along the supply chain, such as companies doing maintenance, procurement, or metering and billing services, profit.

Heat networks that don’t heat

Tenants on the Wyndham, Brandon 2 and Brandon 3 estates in Southwark, the borough next door to Lambeth – served by a heat network – know all about the need for technical standards.

Fury over constant heating and hot water outages, damp, mould, overheating and delayed or cancelled repairs brought 60 of them together at a recent public meeting to launch the Wyndham Heat Network Action Group. They are calling on Southwark council to work with a resident-led board to oversee repairs and monitor progress.

The group works with the health charity Medact, and is building links with other community bodies, and collecting and coordinating information about impacts on residents.

At the public meeting, Dr Laura-Jane Smith, a respiratory consultant at King’s College Hospital, said homes had been “severely neglected” by landlords, housing associations and councils.

People bring pictures of damp patches and black mould to Smith’s clinic, and “tell me about how it’s completely unbearably hot in summer, freezing in winter. They cough, they wheeze, they can’t breathe.”

One of the action group coordinators, Suzy Murray, said in an interview: “The network is old and we are dealing with the consequences of decades of neglect. Some tenants go for months without heating and hot water. Others suffer extreme overheating.

“Three or four years ago, I was not on a heat network, and I was paying £60 a month for electricity, hot water and heat. Now I am paying £150. Heat network users are not protected by Ofgem’s price caps, and the standard of service is shocking.”

Contractors employed by the council to do repairs are a particular problem, Murray said. They frequently botch repairs and fail to keep appointments.

In June the government completed a consultation on how to spend money from its Warm Homes Fund. The Heat Trust urged “investment in heat network remediation works, to address the shocking levels of heat loss, low efficiency and poor reliability on many existing networks”.

Copenhagen is served almost entirely by district heating. Photo: Energy Saving Trust

Stephen Knight of Heat Trust added that many heat networks, even recently built ones, are technically inefficient. Some energy content is inevitably lost in processing and transportation, but these losses are up to twice as high as they need be, so that little more than one third of the energy consumed reaches users as heat.

Prices and billing

Heat networks could and should provide heat and hot water, cheap or free, as a public service. But because the sector is in private hands, and regulation is toothless and late to arrive, they are a financial burden on users.

🔴Heat network prices are just too high. Heat Trust estimated last year that many network customers pay double the price at which households can produce heat from a gas boiler (15p/kWh versus 7.5p/kWh);

🔴More than one third of heat network customers – households with an estimated 350,000-plus people – have their heat bills “bundled” with rent and service charges, as Kirsty Oliveira and Aida Haile in Lambeth have. If they fall behind with payments to landlords or managing agents, they are vulnerable to eviction – and more than 1.2 million people in England and Wales could end up in this situation, if government plans to expand networks go ahead and the rules are not changed, Citizens Advice warns.

🔴 Deceptive and untransparent billing practices are rife. More than half of heat network users do not have their own meter, and, again like Kirsty and Aida, are charged a flat fee whether they use heating and hot water or not. The regulated system introduced this year provides for a transition to meters, but it is long and slow: retrofitting meters have “high costs” and unmetered customers will “wait a long time” to benefit, Citizens Advice says.

🔴 A host of other dodgy practices – retrospective tariff increases, unexplained charges, unaffordable repayment plans, awful customer service – can now be challenged via the regulator, but cynical providers retain the whip hand over vulnerable users, campaigners warn.

Ruth London of Fuel Poverty Action (FPA) said that people who move to homes supplied by heat networks are told it will save money, and be good for the climate. “Instead, too many find the costs are far more than other households pay, and they can’t even save by switching supplier.”

The injustice is “jaw-dropping”, and “made worse when the system is so inefficient that it isn’t really even ‘green’”, she said.

How things can change

The government’s plans to expand heat networks are part of a broader initiative, the Warm Homes Plan, that also provides for installing heat pumps, and retrofitting poorly insulated homes – and claims to right energy injustices and support decarbonisation.

But housing activists, energy researchers and others have warned that the proposals make little to no attempt to deal with the deep-going causes: decades of attacks on the public sector, the privatisation-driven housing crisis and the chronic condition of the construction sector.

It is not only heat network users who suffer “outrages at the hands of profiteering businesses and uncaring bureaucracies”, but also households with heat pumps or insulation retrofits, Ruth London pointed out. “Many more can’t afford the good quality tech that is cutting bills for the wealthy.”

The FPA has also challenged the proposals for “zoning” that are central to the government’s approach to heat networks – but that, if focused on handing the initiative to private companies, could make matters worse.

FPA’s Make Green Fair campaign aims to “ensure that everyone can access low carbon technologies that actually benefit their users”, Ruth London said.

A challenge for all campaigners is to take an integrated view of the problems: the broken housing market that underlies the misery of poor-quality accommodation for millions of people; the destruction of local government provision such as direct labour organisations; and the corporate stranglehold on electricity generation and supply.

The principles of public provision; of warmth and electricity as rights not consumer goods; and of measures to decarbonise that both help tackle climate change and make our lives better can unite powerful alliances to challenge the government’s policy that puts change in the hands of capital and thereby risks failure.

🔴 How to make our homes warmer and better, while tackling climate change, will be discussed at the Make Green Fair 2026 conference on Saturday 19 September, 10.0am to 5.0pm, in Manchester. Kirsty Oliveira will be among the speakers at the event, which is organised by Fuel Poverty Action.

The event will aim to answer the questions: “How do we fight for a clean energy system that’s fairer than the dirty fossil fueled one it replaces? How do we make sure home retrofits, insulation, heat pumps etc actually bring bills down and make our homes warm and healthy?”

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Judicial Review Challenge To Extortionate Heat Network Charges

People And Nature ☭ Written by Simon Pirani..

24-August-2026


 A Ukrainian court this month found Bohdan Syrotiuk, a Trotskyist, guilty of high treason and jailed him for 15 years – solely for words he wrote about the war.

This assault on free speech should be challenged, otherwise the decision could turn out to be the thin end of the wedge.

The court, in Pervomaisk, Mykolaiv region, south eastern Ukraine, convicted 27-year-old Syrotiuk on the basis of texts published on the World Socialist Web Site.

Bohdan Syrotiuk. Photo: Intent / social media

The judgement asserted, without foundation, that the texts supported the Russian war effort and subverted Ukrainian statehood.

The court’s conclusions are overwhelmingly political, stating that Syrotiuk’s articles:

delegitimised the political leadership of Ukraine and denied the democratic processes at work in Ukraine” and, with reference to the Bandera movement, “devalued national heroes, historical national figures of Ukraine, turning them into criminals.

While this judgement is especially severe, it is part of a broader repressive trend against which human rights advocates and others are speaking out.[1]

To clarify the dangerous nature of the judgement, I have summarised it below. Here are three points, by way of introduction.

First. The context for this judgement, and other human rights abuses, is a defensive war that Ukraine has been forced to wage by an imperialist aggressor, Russia – a war in which the deaths and injuries are counted in hundreds of thousands, and the destruction wrought overwhelmingly on Ukraine’s civilian population is incalculable.

The scale of the attacks in Ukraine on human rights, including the freedom of speech, can in no way be compared, quantitately or qualitatively, with the orgy of repression by the Russian state that has accompanied its offensive war. The Russian regime kills or jails all who make the slightest protest against the war. Russia’s tinpot dictatorships in the occupied areas of Ukraine, not far from Mykolaiv, are especially savage.[2]

In the bigger scheme of things, Syrotiuk could be seen as a victim of this war. But the war does not excuse, justify or minimise the blow against free speech struck by his conviction.

Second, calling for this conviction to be overturned does not mean endorsing Syrotiuk’s politics, his distorted view of the war’s causes, or the campism of the Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists, of which he is a member. (See citations from his articles below.) One does not have to accept his arguments to understand that they can not be characterised as treasonable.

Punishing these views with a prison sentence deters everyone’s freedom of speech, not just Syrotiuk’s.

Third, it is Syrotiuk’s misfortune that his case has been taken up by the WSWS, a divisive sect whose activities are often damaging to the labour movement and to internationalism.

The WSWS campaign in defence of Syrotiuk – directed more at providing their supporters with a martyr to pity than at building a case for his release – may not help him.

It began with an exaggerated denunciation of Ukraine as “fascistic”, which does indeed chime with Kremlin narratives, linked with a bizarre assertion that repression is more severe in Ukraine than in Russia.

Attention can be drawn to Syrotiuk’s case, and the implicit danger to free speech, without reference to, or involvement with, these political freeloaders.

The threat carried by the judgement is not to them, but in the first place to Ukrainian socialists, including the majority of socialists who recognise Ukraine’s war as just and, in many cases, participate actively in the war effort. For example, Maksym Shumakov, an organiser of the student union Priama Diia, currently faces the threat of prosecution under Ukraine’s “decommunisation” laws. (Details here in Ukrainian.)

But the threat goes wider than that: if unchallenged, the Pervomaisk court’s decision endangers the free speech of trade unionists, students and all in Ukrainian civil society who – even in difficult wartime conditions – insist on the right to question and challenge government decisions.

That right is central to the democracy for which so many Ukrainians believe they are fighting.

What Syrotiuk has been convicted of

The conviction is under Article 111.2 of the criminal code, high treason, defined as “an act wilfully committed by a citizen of Ukraine to the detriment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and inviolability, defence capability, and state, economic or information security of Ukraine: joining the enemy under martial law or armed conflict, espionage, assistance in subversive activities against Ukraine provided to a foreign state, a foreign organisation or their representatives”.[3] Paragraph 2 states that, under martial law, the sentence is 15 years to life, rather than 12-15 years as stated in paragraph 1.

The court judgement refers as proof of guilt only to articles published on the World Socialist Web Site, and Syrotiuk’s part in writing, translating, circulating them or being quoted in them.

Towards the end of the court decision, the court summarises. It says that four of the articles cited in evidence express “non-recognition of the presence in Ukraine of a legitimate and internationally recognised political leadership, based on the majority of the citizens of Ukraine”; the articles seek to “delegitimise the political leadership of Ukraine and deny the democratic processes at work in Ukraine, particularly since 2013” and “deny the existence of the state in internationally recognised borders, including retrospectively”. The articles also “deny the unilateral status of the Russian Federation as the aggressor state with respect to Ukraine” and claim this is “linked to the assertion of the absence of the Ukrainian state’s right to independent decision-making and the subordination of Ukrainian state power to foreign powers, especially the USA”. The articles “compare Ukrainian citizens with fascists and Nazis from the time of the second world war”, and they “devalue national heroes, historical national figures of Ukraine, turning them into criminals”.

The court then refers to the expertise brought before it, and concludes that the prosecution has proved its case, with the single exception of charges brought with respect to the article “The military is grabbing draft evaders everywhere”. It adds that there are no mitigating circumstances, and sentences Syrotiuk to 15 years’ imprisonment with confiscation of property.

The court decision

The court decision is published on a state repository of documents. The text describes the prosecution case, the defence case and the judges’ conclusions. It is the sole primary source of information about the hearing that I have been able to access.

Firefighters in Pervomaisk tackling damage from Russian bombing, August 2024.
Photo: Ukrainian National News

The prosecution case consists mainly of citations from Bohdan Syrotiuk’s articles (see below). In addition to these, the prosecution presented to the court a letter from the Centre for Countering Disinformation of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine that it claimed proved that the WSWS was an “information agency of communist orientation” that “circulated pro-Russian narratives, connected to Russian military aggresion against Ukraine”. The Centre found seven articles written or circulated by Syrotiuk that included “fragments, statements, assertions and phrases that indicated approval of” Russian military action, and thereby harmed Ukraine’s state and information security.

Both prosecution and defence presented linguistic expert analysis of the articles, that reached broadly opposite conclusions. The court then asked the Odessa Institute of Jurisprudential Scientific Research to examine the articles. The experts there found not only “fragments, statements, assertions and phrases that indicated approval of” Russian military action, but also “non-recognition of the presence of an elected leadership in Ukraine”; “contempt and ridicule” of Ukraine’s political leadership; “the transformation of heroes and historical figures into criminals”; denial of Ukraine’s democratic processes and of the Ukrainian population’s control over government; “negative evaluation” of the Ukrainian armed forces; and denial of the existence of the Ukrainian state.

The judgement repeatedly, when referring to Syrotiuk, adds the adjectival phrase “acting to implement the directions of representatives of a foreign organisation, realising his subversive intention and preliminary criminal agreement with other members of the organisation he leads, the Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists”.

The defence argument in court

The court judgement states that, at the hearing, Syrotiuk “denied his guilt of the crimes for which he is incriminated. He refused to make a statement or answer questions. When speaking in debate, he emphasised that he is a Ukrainian patriot and an opponent of the ‘Putin regime’. He said that he condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and denied any intent to betray the state. He denied having caused harm to the state and information security of Ukraine, and denied that he had given assistance to a foreign organisation in undertaking subversive activities against Ukraine. He stated that he is a socialist by conviction, and that the World Socialist Web Site, on which he had published articles, is published by the International Committee of the Fourth International, and its editorial activity is conducted not in Russia but in the USA.”

The court judgement recorded that the defence lawyer said that Syrotiuk was accused of treason, by means of giving help to a foreign organisation and its representatives in undertaking subversive activity against Ukraine. Under Article 17 of the Ukrainian criminal code, the burden of proof of the existence of such a foreign organisation, and its subversive intentions, lay on the prosecution – and there was no such proof in the case file. No evidence had been produced that a relevant structure lay behind the World Socialist Web Site; no evidence, either, of intention to undertake subversive activity. The case relied entirely on analysis of publications on the internet. The requirements of the criminal code Articles 84, 85 and 86 regarding proof had not been met; neither had the Article 62 of the Constitution, that states that criminal prosecution can not be based on presumption.

The defence lawyer (as reported in the court judgement) pointed out that, in the publications used in evidence, there were no calls to subvert national security, to liquidate Ukrainian statehood, to destroy Ukrainian identity, to undertake subversive activity, to overthrow the constitutional order or seize the state’s borders, or to seize the state’s borders by military aggression. There was no propaganda advocating war or the breaching of the foundations of Ukrainian national security in the information sphere. “The overwhelming majority of the court expert’s conclusions in the criminal case are evaluations of political, historical, ideological and other public statements, which are themselves protected by Article 10 of the Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms [commonly known as the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Ukraine is a signatory].”

The articles Syrotiuk wrote

Of the articles written by Syrotiuk under pseudonyms, or quoting him, on the WSWS web site, one that summarises his view of the war is a May Day greeting he gave to an on-line meeting in 2023. He said:

This war was unleashed by US imperialism, NATO, and the Putin regime. It is an imperialist war, waged not in the interests of the proletariat of Russia, Ukraine and America but in the interests of capital in these countries. This war is the result of capitalism, a system stricken with a deadly disease. In anticipation of its impending death and bristling with weapons of mass destruction, capitalism is digging a grave for all living things, to bury them before they bury it.
Is it true that all the people of Ukraine support this war? My answer is: No! The claim that all Ukrainians support this war is a brazen lie. The main prop for this war is not the proletariat and the Ukrainian population, whose situation is appalling. The main prop for this war are the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists and those they serve.
We, the orthodox Trotskyists of the Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists, do not support this war, either in Ukraine or in Russia.
Yes, there are those in Ukraine who sincerely believe that American imperialism can stop this war. They believe that the weapons supplied to the regime established by the 2014 coup d’état and now represented by Zelensky can lead Ukraine to victory and end this war.
But in fact, US imperialism is fuelling this war and inciting a third world imperialist war. The fomenting of this third imperialist war involves not only America, NATO countries and the Kyiv regime represented by Zelensky but also the bourgeois Ukrainian nationalists, who serve these regimes. These forces call themselves supporters and ideological followers of the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). They have unleashed terror against the people and national and political genocide on the territory of western Ukraine. They have sowed death, fear, grief and tears on Ukrainian soil. They have poured blood into peasant huts and filled wells with corpses.

Another article referred to prominently in the court decision, “The crimes of the Banderovites”, published in April 2023, stated:

The Nazi accomplices of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its paramilitary wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and their leaders were involved in many crimes, including against the Ukrainian people. Yet today, to many in Ukraine, their ominous names are not synonymous with criminals, but with the names of national heroes. Streets, stadiums and cafes are named after them, and monuments are erected in their honour throughout the country.

Syrotiuk then questioned the Ukrainian “bourgeois nationalist” assertion that the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was never a legitimate state. He referred to the civil war of the late 1940s and concluded:

Today, just as then, the crimes of those who call themselves the ideological successors and followers of Bandera are almost too numerous to count. Like then, they are a bloody pack of jackals in the service of capital, running from one capitalist to another. But in changing their paymasters, they do not change their essence. There is nothing but backwardness and animal hatred in their faces and minds. Their ideas are reactionary.
Yet these very ideas of Bandera are today promoted not only by the imperialists and the bourgeois Ukrainian nationalists who want to justify the crimes of OUN-UPA, but also by those who call themselves Ukrainian national-communists, who want to justify all these horrors, by claiming that all this was caused by the policy pursued by Stalin in Western Ukraine.

In my view, these two passages summarise the key political points expressed in other ways in Syrotiuk’s other articles; these include nothing more “pro Russian” than what is cited here.[4] Readers can check the World Socialist Web Site for themselves.

Some incidental points

🔴 The court judgement mentions that Syrotiuk was in contact with citizens of the Russian Federation, presumably members of a Trotskyist organisation there also linked to the WSWS. The judgement also mentions once, in passing, in the prosecution’s description of Syrotiuk’s contact with the WSWS, that he received a monthly payment for his work. Friends have asked whether this might indicate that Syrotiuk was, knowingly or unknowingly, being funded by Russia. My view is that:

The investigating officers were aware that Syrotiuk was paid. It beggars belief that they did not look into the source of these funds, and that the prosecutors did not attach significance to it, if they thought these payments might have come from Russia. The court has not found Syrotiuk guilty of being in the pay of any foreign organisation. It was not mentioned in the summing-up. The court was concerned solely with words spoken, written or circulated by Syrotiuk.

Whether we like it or not (I don’t), the world is full of so-called socialist organisations in rich countries who fund or partly fund activity by their fellow thinkers outside the rich world, for motives that I view as ranging from good to terrible. It beggars belief that the Russian state would be stupid enough to fund the WSWS, or that the WSWS would be stupid enough to accept that funding. In any case, Syrotiuk would have known nothing about such arrangements. Speculation about this can only take us away from the reality: Syrotiuk has been found guilty of treason solely for his words.

🔴 The officers investigating Syrotiuk’s case searched a basement in a Pervomaisk apartment block that they described as “non-residential”. They found a rucksack, a cigarette lighter, some sweatshirts, a jacket, epaulettes and shoulder patches – all bearing Russian state symbols, and a gas mask.

There was no mention of these things in the court’s summary of the proceedings. There is no indication that they belonged to Syrotiuk. They appear in the court record only in a list of items – presumably judged to be irrelevant – that the court ordered to be destroyed.

Intent magazine, in one of the few English-language articles published about the hearing, described this stuff as “military equipment”, which is stretching a point. Uninformed speculation by social media users inevitably followed. But these items played no part in the court proceedings. Again, speculation about them takes us away from the reality: Syrotiuk has been found guilty of treason solely for his words.

Note. For those who don’t know me, and want to know my view of the war, I gave it e.g. in 2014 (here and here) and 2022 (here and here).

Note, 25 August 2026. This article has been corrected to clarify that the court is in Pervomaisk, Mykolaiv region (not Mykolaiv city).

References

[1] Human rights groups in Ukraine warn of arbitrary punishment of people accused of collaboration with Russia, illegally enforced conscription, victimisation of anti-corruption campaigners and censorious application of “decommunisation” laws

[2] Reports giving overviews of political repression in Russia are published regularly by OVD-Info and Memorial: Support Political Prisoners. See also Chapter 14 of Voices Against Putin’s War

[3] The Ukrainian parliament’s web site displays the criminal code and an English translation

[4] The Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists was set up in February 2018, defining itself as fighting for “the truth about Lev Davidovich Trotsky”, against Stalinism, and “various forms of petty bourgeois nationalist and anti-Marxist politics”. Syrotiuk shifted towards Trotskyism from Stalinism. He became politically active as a teenager in 2014-15, in the youth organisation of the Communist Party of Ukraine. In May 2015 Syrotiuk, then 16 years old, in a speech at a school lesson, blamed “the USA and our home-made oligarchs” for the armed conflict that began in 2014, earning praise from the CPU – which was banned, in the same year, for supporting the armed assault on Ukraine by the Russian-backed separatists

🔴 On Tuesday 29 September, at 7.0pm, Fare Free London is holding an event on “How to Make Public Transport Free”, at the Golden Lane community centre, London EC1Y 0SA. We will hear from councillor Julie Frêche of the Montpellier metropolitan area in France, where public transport has been free since 2023, and hold our annual meeting. All welcome! See details and register here.

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Jail Sentence For Ukrainian Trotskyist Is An Assault On Free Speech

People And Nature ☭ Written by Simon Pirani.. Reposted from the Fare Free London web site.

20-August-2026

The government could make all bus journeys in the UK free, at a cost of about £5.6 billion per year, a report by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) shows.

That £5.6 billion is less than one-eighth of the £50 billion that tax justice campaigners say could be raised each year by taxing wealth more effectively.

Fare Free London joined a picket of the department of energy last month, organised by
Fuel Poverty Action, demanding action on energy bills and the cost of living

The NEF report, Getting Moving on the Cost of Living, shows that bus and rail fares have risen faster than the rate of inflation over the last 25 years, and “a high, and growing, level of car dependency has resulted”.

That leaves households “exposed to the high costs of car ownership, particularly when fuel prices spike”. And so transport is the largest expense, excluding mortgage payments, for rural households, and the second largest for urban households.

“Universal public transport provision can be one of the most foundational and transformative approaches to addressing inequality”, authors Paula Castro Rodriguez and Alex Chapman argue. It is “also key to a fast green transition”.

The report’s authors looked at three policy options aimed at cutting the cost of bus travel: free bus travel for all, a £1 fare cap, and free bus travel for under-25s. They also checked on the cost of a £1 fare cap plus free travel for under-25s.

They argue that a big expansion of bus services would be needed, reversing the drastic cuts of the last few decades.

Their projections assumed that abolishing fares would produce 884 million new journeys in the first year, and more than double that in the long term; that more than 15,000 new buses would be put on the road; and that bus users of all ages would save £110 per year on average; young people’s savings would be greater, at least £150 per year.

Such a scheme would cost the government an estimated £4.3 billion in the first year and £5.6 billion per year after that, the report says.

Among those who would benefit most directly from free bus travel are young people, the NEF report says. They are “particularly exposed to the transport cost of living”, with the high cost of car ownership pushing it out of reach for many.

Young people need mobility to access work and education opportunities.

Schemes in Scotland, and around the world, show that free, or ultra-cheap, public transport can open up opportunities for young people and support them into good work.

We in Fare Free London believe that, if the government was committed to free public transport, it would find the money somehow.

It is not hard to raise it by taxing wealth, for example – and, given the gigantic leap forward that it would be for social justice and climate action, well worth it.

Think about the £5.6 billion a year that NEF reckons free buses would cost. That is less than one-eighth of the £50 billion per year that the government could raise by “closing unfair loopholes and implementing credible, achievable reforms”, identified in a recent report by Tax Justice UK and Patriotic Millionaires.

“The UK’s unequal tax system is stacked in favour of the super-rich”, the report says:

Unfair loopholes and far lower rates of tax on income from wealth than work mean the wealthiest in our society often pay proportionally lower taxes than the average person.

The two groups propose a 2% tax on assets over £10 million (to raise up to £24 billion a year); reforms to the Capital Gains Tax to close loopholes (£11.3 billion a year); extending National Insurance to non-dividend investment income and partnership income (£6.1 billion a year); and other measures.

Other tax campaign groups have come up with similar numbers. The Taxing Wealth Report showed how £90 billion could be raised each year from straightforward reforms to the existing tax system, focused only on those who earn money from investment or rents.

Just putting a charge analogous to national insurance on investment income would close a tax avoidance loophole and raise £18 billion, the report’s author Richard Murphy writes.

The research group Positive Money says £12.5 billion could have been raised this year, just by a windfall tax on the four largest banks.

And all the tax justice campaign groups say that money invested in reducing cross-border tax evasion would bring handsome results. The UK loses about £33.5 billion a year that way, the Tax Justice Network reckons.

🔴 On Tuesday 29 September, at 7.0pm, Fare Free London is holding an event on “How to Make Public Transport Free”, at the Golden Lane community centre, London EC1Y 0SA. We will hear from councillor Julie Frêche of the Montpellier metropolitan area in France, where public transport has been free since 2023, and hold our annual meeting. All welcome! See details and register here.

☭ People & Nature is now on mastodon, as well as twitter, whatsapp and telegram. Please follow! Or email peoplenature@protonmail.com, and we’ll add you to our circulation list (2-4 messages per month)

Effective Taxes On Wealth Could Fund Abolition Of Bus Fares

People And Nature ☭ Written by Simon Pirani. 


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

An obsessively centralised system of regulation, and the energy corporations’ power, are blocking change, some activists argue.

Even modest proposals to support community energy projects with a long-term, fixed price for their electricity fall on deaf ears.

A site visit preparing an area-based retrofit scheme in south Manchester.
Carbon Co-op works as an intermediary party on the scheme

And while the government says it wants to make it easy for community projects to supply local customers directly, it has shied away from scrapping the multiple obstacles to them doing so.

A deeper-going shake-up, to facilitate local microgrids, is at least being talked about – but is even further away from implementation.

Community energy representatives say that, if projects are stuck in years-long queues for a connection to the electricity grid, the government can wave goodbye to its commitment to expand community energy renewable generation capacity nearly 20-fold, to 8 gigawatts by 2030.

The House of Commons Energy Security and Net Zero (ESNZ) committee said last month [June] that the Local Power Plan “risks failing”. The MPs were “not convinced” the government would hit the 8GW by 2030 target.

It is best to assess the government’s actions in relation not only to its own targets, but to community energy’s potential both to combat social injustice and to make a substantial contribution to tackling climate change.

That potential could be realised most effectively by taking electricity networks into public, cooperative and municipal forms of ownership, and by prioritising decentralised renewables technologies and flexible throughput.

The Local Power Plan could be a battleground on which progress is made on both counts.

The gap between words and actions

The Local Power Plan, published in February, promises to “accelerate the build-out of clean power” in communities, through up to £1 billion of investment between now and 2030 in “grants, loans, advice, expert help and more”.

The government claims the funding – partly through a new state-owned company, GB Energy – will reduce electricity bills, “transform communities” and “create jobs”.

There are about 700 community energy projects in the UK with generation capacity of 440 megawatts (MW), or 0.44 gigawatts (GW). The government’s Clean Power Action Plan includes the target of 8GW of new renewable community electricity generation by 2030 – but no details about how to achieve it.

Community energy groups say this aim will be frustrated by the grid connection crisis, constraints on selling energy locally, the lack of a guaranteed price from the big market players, and other regulatory failures.

The biggest obstacle to new projects is the near-impossibility of getting a grid connection, without which electricity can not be generated. 379 MW of electricity generation capacity, that would almost double total output from community schemes, is “stalled by grid delays and outdated policy”, a coalition of 250 organisations complained in an open letter to the government.

The years-long queue for grid connections is a national scandal that also affects big commercially-operated renewables. The lack of transmission capacity, especially between Scotland and England, means that wind farms in Scotland are paid to stop working, while gas-fired power stations in England are ramped up, a damning report by Carbon Tracker showed.

It is a story of neoliberalism and underinvestment: in the decade 2014-2023, the deployment of solar and wind quadrupled, but investment in the transmission grid stayed flat, and after 2017 decreased.

In the financial year 2024-25, the National Energy System Operator (NESO), that runs the grid, paid £2.7 billion in balancing costs – mostly compensation for switching off wind farms. In 2024, Scotland’s largest wind farm, Seagreen, was paid £65 million to restrict output 71% of the time.

In December last year, NESO addressed a related scandal by reforming the grid connection queue to throw out speculative and “zombie” projects, for which companies requested a connection, but which might never go ahead.

A ship loading jackets for the Seagreen offshore windfarm at Nigg Energy Park.
Seagreen’s output was curtailed 71% of the time in 2024.
Photo by Glen Wallace / wikimedia

An infuriating irony of the reform was that for community energy projects in Scotland, it actually made matters worse. New regional grid capacity requirements were set, and all of Scotland’s capacity for wind, solar and battery projects was allocated, up to 2035.

“This means that new community-led projects, including some that volunteers have spent years working on, will be unable to get a connection”, Zoe Holliday, chief executive of Community Energy Scotland, said in an interview.

“The only opportunities now available will be in cases where projects that have received offers don’t go ahead.” Then, “the impact on communities should be recognised” in the decision-making process, she said.

Another barrier to community energy in Scotland is the expensive and time-consuming Transmission Impact Assessment (TIA) required for projects larger than 200 kilowatts (kW) capacity, or just 50 kW on most of the Scottish islands. In England and Wales, the threshold for this process was recently raised to 5MW: Community Energy Scotland and the energy research group Regen call for a similar revision north of the border.

Along with the grid connection queue, community energy projects have to battle market regulation that favours large-scale electricity generation from gas-fired power stations.

Guaranteed prices for electricity exported to the grid are essential to make projects “financially secure long term”, and to attract investment and borrow funds from banks, Zoe Holliday of Community Energy Scotland said. Until 2019, small-scale renewables – including community projects – were supported by the Feed-in Tariff (FiT), a subsidy that was scrapped by the Tory government.

There are “multiple mechanisms that would work” today, Holliday argues: a floor price (i.e. a minimum that small renewables generators would be paid, supported by state guarantee if necessary); something similar to Ireland’s Small Scale Renewable Electricity Support Scheme, which includes a community tariff; or a simplified Contract for Difference (a financial derivative used by the government to protect commercial renewables projects from price swings volatile markets).

Community Energy England calls for a Community Energy Export Guarantee, with a minimum price guaranteed for 15-20 years. The MPs on the ESNZ committee backed that proposal, pointing to the lack of a secure pricing mechanism is “one of the biggest barriers” to the growth of community energy.

Community energy is also being stifled by market rules that all but force projects to sell via the wholesale market, advocates say. The “big six” corporations that control 90% of electricity sales are in no hurry to change the system.

Big suppliers buy electricity from community energy projects and sell it back to local people, often at two or three times the price. An energy club, that negotiates a “match price”, paid by households directly to a local generator when it is working, can cut out the middleman, and Energy Local, a non-profit, supports dozens of these.

Jeff Hardy of Sustainable Energy Futures, who leads an energy transition research team at Imperial College, London, said in an interview:

At present, being a small supplier is a dangerous place to be. You need to be able to do supply, and to do flexibility.

Steve Shaw of Power for People, which lobbies for legislation to enable community energy projects to sell electricity directly to local customers, said:

In practice, to make it economic and practical to get a supply licence, you need to operate on a national scale, and have more than 250,000 customers. This has to change.

The MPs on the ESNZ committee agreed: the cost of setting up as a supplier, and getting a licence, is “prohibitive for small community projects”, and licence exemption rules are not fit for purpose, they argued.

Regulators are working on a rule change that supports the formation of local electricity markets, called “complex sites” (Elexon’s P441 modification). But the ESNZ committee has told the government it should go further, though, “to accommodate all types of local supply and require the participation of local suppliers”.

The tweaking of local trading rules might sound arcane – but without it, the potential of decentralised networks, an essential technical complement to small-scale renewables, will never be tapped.

A report commissioned in 2023 by the government’s own innovation agency, Innovate UK, on the potential of decentralised energy resources was scathing, declaring it “difficult, if not impossible, to trade and settle energy locally in local energy markets”. This constrains not only small-scale renewable generation, but also flexibility, i.e. the efficiencies achieved by adjusting electricity use to reduce the load on networks at busy times.

The rules for licencing energy suppliers, and the industry’s self-governance of codes and standards, “stifles decentralised energy from realising its potential”, the report stated. The rules set by Ofgem, the industry regulator, for licencing are “complex, prescriptive, rigid – and were not designed with a highly decentralised energy system in mind”.

Government has a responsibility to champion inclusive ownership models – and this is missing from the Local Power Plan – Alan Simpson, the former Labour MP and long-time community energy campaigner, said in an interview. “Many community energy organisations are investor co-ops, rather than co-ops in the traditional sense, and the danger of losing the community aspect is always present.

To become a real force for uniting communities, co-ops should be open to people who are not in a position to invest, but are in a position to benefit from sharing energy resources.

Solar panels installed by Glasgow Community Energy at Ashton secondary school in Easterhouse

The weakness of local government structures, and a complex web of planning rules, further frustrate community energy, the House of Commons ESNZ committee heard from multiple witnesses.

The Energy Savings Trust told the MPs that there has been no long-term strategy to support community energy since 2014; many local authorities “do not have sufficient resources or knowledge” to give effective backing; and the competitive bidding processes through which they have to access funding are a “postcode lottery”.

Planning rules need to be revised and guidance be given by something better than GB Energy’s proposed advice service, the MPs concluded.

Alan Simpson, the former Labour MP, put the issue in political context in his evidence: the core problem with the Local Power Plan is that it has “few statutory powers to override existing constraints”.

He pointed to the Mozes community energy co-op in Nottingham, that spent several years applying for permissions to develop a local energy grid. “Detailed schemes were submitted, with university and energy technology partners, but blocked by the Distribution Network Operator, Ofgem or existing energy suppliers.

Current approaches are largely tokenistic and designed to be non-disruptive of the existing UK energy cartel.

Since it lacks teeth, what is the Local Power Plan likely to achieve, without additional pressure from civil society? Some campaigners fear that, given the finite budget and finite time-scale, cash support for shared ownership schemes – under which community organisations take shares in commercial renewable projects – is likely to be prioritised.

The danger looms of a gigantic failure to enhance social change and climate action.

Realising the potential of microgrids

A striking feature of the Local Power Plan is its lack of ambition for microgrids – proven technologies that cut carbon emissions and rationalise electricity use, and that community energy organisations would be well-placed to manage.

Microgrids are semi-autonomous from electricity networks, and share electricity produced locally. In the US, microgrid capacity, strongly supported by government, was expected to reach 10GW last year. Microgrids are mushrooming around industrial parks in China and are widely used in the global south to supply geographically distant communities.

US microgrid development is largely corporate-led, partly in response to soaring electricity demand from data centres. But it does not have to be. June Sekera of Boston University last year published a blueprint for community-run local power networks, envisaged as “a ‘back-to-the-future’ model – a return to decentralised, locally-controlled, non-corporate generation and supply of electricity: self-generation for self consumption”.

In the UK, things are slower. The Local Power Plan includes only a vague, timeless commitment that GB Energy “will explore, with stakeholders and expertise, the future potential of generating and sharing power locally” – even though the plan’s evidence annex lists ways in which microgrids can benefit the electricity grid.

Small-scale electricity generation “has the potential to defer network reinforcement, by lessening the growth in power flows that drive constraints on network assets”, the annex states. By making full use of flexibility, battery storage and rooftop solar, Smart Local Energy Systems (i.e. microgrids) could save £1.7 billion a year.

The combination of decentralising networks and flexibility “delivers multi-billion-pound annual systems savings”, the annex continues.

Were community-owned and -managed microgrids to develop at any scale, they would pose a massive headache to the big energy corporations, who make money by buying electricity and selling it to consumers.

Such microgrids would give communities greater control over the economics of electricity generation and use, and manifold opportunities to cut costs for households. They could also open up potential for energy efficiency, which has been “systematically underfunded” and tends to be implemented patchily by suppliers because it “jars with their business model to sell more commodities”, as the Innovate UK report argued; “it is hard to get paid for not demanding energy, even though it carries system benefits”.

Ultimately, community-managed microgrids could help to challenge the decades-old neoliberal assumption that electricity is best supplied as a commodity, instead of being provided as an essential service. Against this, radical engineering researchers have long ago shown how networks could treat electricity as a commons.

Tackling social injustice and global heating together

For all of us who seek to unite the struggles for social justice and climate action, community energy projects are a great inspiration. Where I live, South East London Community Energy has for years supported low-income households against fuel poverty and campaigned against energy system injustices. Volunteers up and down the country do the same.

What would it take to build on such action, to generate and use renewable electricity outside of the control of the big corporates and the markets they serve? Far more than is offered in the Local Power Plan, that’s for sure.

First, we need to try to find ways to restore the principle of electricity provision as a service that meets a need, not as a commodity. In my view, local supply rights that community energy advocates are demanding could be a step towards this. Then national market regulation needs to be prised out of the big corporates’ hands.

Second, the battle for public, community and collective forms of ownership is vital. The importance of inclusive co-operatives, open to all no matter their ability to contribute, can not be overestimated.

Third, we need to find ways for communities to access, and use, the technologies that allow decentralised renewables to realise their potential. Semi-autonomous microgrids with renewable generation and batteries are widespread: we need them here in the UK, free of corporate control.

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The Local Power Plan Risks Blocking Community Energy Potential

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