People and Nature

By Simon Pirani Britain’s largest community-owned solar project is fighting for its life, after the local grid company stopped it generating electricity for four months. Derril Water solar park in Pyworthy, north Devon, started supplying power to the grid again late last month, when some technical problems blamed for the shutdown were solved. But the […]

Friday 23 October is the 70th anniversary of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, when a nationwide rebellion by workers and students briefly overthrew a Soviet-backed Stalinist regime. Workers’ and students’ councils were set up as new forms of government, militia formed to confront the security services, political prisoners freed and armed, and police defending the […]

Review by Simon Pirani of Russia’s New Imperialism: Capital and Ideology, by Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev (Stanford University Press, 2026). Reposted with thanks from Links journal – In October 2022, just before the Ukrainian army retook the south-eastern city of Kherson, retreating Russian soldiers exhumed the remains of the 18th-century Prince, Grigory Potemkin, from […]

By Simon Pirani. Republished with thanks from Labour Hub The disastrous failure of the government’s ECO4 scheme – which was supposed to retrofit homes with insulation, heat pumps and solar panels – is “the next Post Office scandal”, Imogen Thomas of Fuel Poverty Action warned last week. “It’s that level of outrageous”, Imogen told the […]

Russia’s federal security service (FSB) is preparing a new case, for high treason, against Ruslan Siddiqi, the Russian-Italian anarchist serving a 29-year sentence for sabotaging a train carrying munitions to the Ukrainian front. Siddiqi was convicted in May last year, and the Military Court of Appeal upheld the sentence on 1 July this year. In […]

Experiments with free public transport, introduced in some of the world’s biggest cities to tackle the fuel price crisis, are proving successful. In Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam and Tehran, Iran – which both have around 10 million people, more than London – people are shifting, in numbers, from private vehicles to buses and the […]

By Simon Pirani What, really, have socialists learned from the Russian war on Ukraine? Has it changed our understanding of the way that imperialism works? Tell us we were right all along? Reflecting on the first four years since the invasion, Oleksandr Kyselov, a Ukrainian socialist based in Sweden, wrote in February that Ukrainians found […]

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 […]

A guest post by JOHN DAVIES The Serbian general and war criminal Ratko Mladić, the butcher of Srebrenica and too many other places to mention, died last week. It’s an opportunity for reflection, and I felt I couldn’t let it pass. Bosnia, of which I had previously barely heard, played a big part in my […]

The Russian political prisoner Andrei Trofimov has appeared on a video link to a court hearing on Thursday, after four months’ loss of contact. His supporters, who fear he was being mistreated in the notorious IK-9 prison in Petrozavodsk, Karelia, north-western Russia, are relieved – but he is not out of danger. The court heard […]