Writing
I am a researcher on arms conversion and international security, having written for peace organisations including CND and CAAT and for trade unions. My recent work is on the creation of a post-carbon and post-militarist economy based on anarchist and syndicalist principles of workers control.
Anarcho-Syndicalism and Working-Class Security – Fighting Capitalist Imperialism in an Era of Climate Catastrophe
In the 1940s, George Orwell wrote of a dystopian world dominated by three imperial powers. But this was not his fictional masterpiece ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ with its nightmare vision of human subjugation by the authoritarian elites of Oceania, East Asia and Eurasia..… READ MORE
Peaceful Alternatives to the Military-industrial Complex: Arms Conversion Beyond the Lucas Plan
In February, the UK Government unveiled its flagship Levelling Up plan to improve There has been a revival of interest in arms conversion, with calls for a new, national ‘Lucas Plan’, based on the original proposals of the Lucas trade unionists in the 1970s for socially-useful production to replace work on armaments at their company. Support for conversion is welcome but applying the Lucas model to what has become a group of specialised, military prime contractors seriously underestimates the industrial and technological barriers to factory-based conversion. READ MORE
Militarism or Arms Conversion? Labour’s Defence Review and Real Security
The Crisis of Global Imperialism: Security, it seems, can only be measured in ever-higher degrees of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) consumed by the Military-industrial Complex (MIC). The fact that global arms spending already stood at a record $2.4 trillion in 2023… READ MORE
From Progress to Purgatory – A Personal History of the Capitalocene
I was born in 1956, the eldest of four children in an extended family of home-makers, dockers and factory workers. I’m now 67 and, from those early days in Hull through to a working life around the UK, have been an active trade unionist. I care passionately about politics and, despite the obvious setbacks to the labour movement . . . READ MORE
Music
My songwriting has focused on a trilogy of albums – Subversion, 2018; Insurrection, 2021; The Commonwealth of Anarchy, 2023; that explore political and environmental themes from the crisis of globalised capitalism and militarism to the vision of an anarchist alternative. I have also written a ‘lockdown’ album of Luddite songs – Underliffe Echoes that was released in 2022.
