Batch Cooking

At Alton Towers, did The World of David Walliams feature Sebastian Love? If not, why not? Whatever Thomas Markle or Russell Brand may have done, neither of them handpicked the enormous 2024 Labour intake of MPs, nor did either of them conduct the 2025 Ministerial reshuffle as the de facto Deputy Prime Minister for the third time. On the man who did both of those, Kate Whannel writes:

The government is preparing to publish more documents about the appointment of Lord Mandelson as US ambassador. Batches of papers were published in March and June - but others were withheld because they were part of a Metropolitan Police investigation. The Cabinet Office has now said a number of extra documents will be published, likely before Christmas. Some will still be withheld at the request of the Met. Cat Little, permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office, said that some of the documents could "now be published without prejudicing their investigation".

The Met Police had launched an investigation over allegations that, while he was serving as a government minister, Lord Mandelson had passed on market-sensitive government information to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Writing to the chair of Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee, Little said: "The Cabinet Office is now beginning the process to prepare these documents so that they may be laid before the House in response to the humble address motion as soon as possible." She said the documents would be reviewed and in some instances may need to be redacted "for the purposes of avoiding prejudice to national security or international relations". 

The process is expected to be completed before Parliament rises for the Christmas recess on 17 December. Lord Mandelson was arrested on 23 February on suspicion of misconduct in public office. He has repeatedly let it be known that he believes he has not acted criminally, did not act for personal gain and is cooperating with the police. "Our investigation into alleged misconduct in public office is ongoing," the Met Police said in a statement.

The lifelong Labour politician became the British ambassador to the US in February 2025, but was sacked in September after Downing Street said new information about the extent of his relationship with Epstein had emerged. After his sacking, the government - then led by Sir Keir Starmer - was heavily criticised for giving Lord Mandelson the job and in February MPs voted to force the government to publish papers relating to his appointment. Mike Wood, shadow Cabinet Office minister, said: "We still haven't got to the bottom of the Mandelson scandal. "Labour did their utmost to hold this information back and it was only released because of the Conservatives' humble address."

While Connor Stringer and Benedict Smith write:

Democrats will try to force the department of justice to hand over the unredacted Epstein files needed by Scotland Yard to prosecute Lord Mandelson, The Telegraph can reveal. The party plans to use its forthcoming control of Congress to compel the Trump administration to release the documents that may help bring a charge. There have been calls to charge Lord Mandelson with misconduct in public office. Democrats also want to make a “renewed push” to hear evidence from the peer after he declined invitations to speak to Congress as part of their investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, sources said. The move could be a lifeline for the Met’s case against the peer, which has stalled because the department of justice has delayed handing over the unredacted files.

A senior source on the House oversight committee, which has been investigating Epstein’s links to the rich and powerful, said it might also provide the London force with never-before-seen documents from the late paedophile’s estate. “We would be pushing the DoJ to be at least cooperative to the UK law agencies as a minimum,” the source said. Lord Mandelson was sacked as Britain’s ambassador to the US last year over his relationship with Epstein. He was later placed under criminal investigation for misconduct in public office after the files appeared to show that he passed market-sensitive documents to Epstein during the 2008 financial crisis. He has always denied any wrongdoing.

The original files are considered crucial for any prosecution case because Lord Mandelson’s lawyers could argue that the partially redacted emails published online lack context and do not tell the full story. Neither the DoJ nor the FBI has responded to the Metropolitan Police’s request for the documents, which was initially made under an informal agreement to share information between the law-enforcement agencies. The Met escalated the request through the formal mutual legal assistance process, but this could take years. It is widely believed that the impasse has come about, in part, because the US administration is reluctant to release files that may embroil Donald Trump further in the Epstein saga and set a precedent for other cases that could reignite the scandal.

Democrats swept to control of Congress in the midterms on Tuesday, giving them expansive legal powers through control of the committee system, including the powerful house oversight committee. The party concedes that its power to force cooperation between the DoJ and the Crown Prosecution Service is limited, as the decision ultimately lies at the discretion of Todd Blanche, the US attorney general. While they can push for the files to be handed over, they do not have any guarantee of success. They could, however, hold hearings into why the DoJ had limited its cooperation with British police, subpoena communications between the US and Britain, and demand explanations from top officials. 

Democrats are also hoping for cooperation with other foreign police forces once they take control of Congress from January, as they intend to scrutinise Epstein’s inner circle and connections with Mr Trump’s allies. “We would want people to cooperate with us ... if we needed documents from the UK, France or the Virgin Islands,” the senior official added. Lord Mandelson declined the request to appear before the House oversight committee last year. His lawyer responded to politicians, saying it was impossible while he was under police investigation in Britain. He cannot be legally compelled to testify before Congress because he is not an American citizen.

Lord Mandelson resigned from the Labour Party and quit the House of Lords in February after the files appeared to show he leaked information to Epstein while a minister under Gordon Brown. His arrest followed a tip-off shared by Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons, suggesting that Lord Mandelson planned to fly to the British Virgin Islands. Lord Mandelson’s lawyers dismissed the claim as baseless. He has never been charged, and denies any wrongdoing.

We Do Not Want Or Need A British FBI

The Morning Star editorialises:

Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley’s demands for an FBI-style National Police Service are in line with plans set out by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood in January. Like the fact Mahmood remains in office, this reflects a worrying continuity with the repressive agenda of the Starmer government — and even a failure of imagination. Some fresh thinking is required if Andy Burnham’s government is to attempt the reshaping of the British state and economy he promised. Like Mahmood before him, Rowley presents centralisation as a necessary modernisation, citing rapidly developing cross-border-organised and cyber crime. Yet the Met already wields a range of national powers to tackle such crimes — and it is not obvious that further centralisation is the best defence against them.

Last month’s cyber attack on supermarket freezers across 11 European countries, seeing their temperature controls overridden remotely and spoiling tons of food, was only possible because food retail is too centralised — corporate supermarkets outsourcing control of in-store functions to large third-party providers to cut labour costs and increase profit margins. That’s outwith the scope of policing powers, but like Rowley’s complaint that police resources are diverted to tackle mental health problems, it illustrates the need to approach the question of security — which does include resilience of food and energy supplies disrupted by climate change and war — with a wider eye to increasingly urgent social and economic reform. Our government cannot think beyond military and policing “solutions.” 

For policing that solution is no neutral response to technological change (even if the application of new technologies were neutral, which it isn’t) but political. Mahmood’s January white paper tied the proposed national police service to “the largest-ever rollout of facial recognition” technology and increased use of AI, despite privacy, accuracy and race-bias concerns. Advocates of greater surveillance and repressive power for state agencies seek support from popular exasperation at neighbourhood crime and anti-social behaviour, though the causes lie less in an underpowered police than a hollowed-out public realm: the lack of conductors and guards on public transport, the reduction of staffing in retail and public services, remove barriers to problematic behaviour itself rooted in the Thatcherite destruction of community.

Nor should we ignore the records of those advocating major restructuring of the British police when considering their motivation. Rowley has been a very political Met Commissioner, imposing unprecedented restrictions on the mass mobilisations for Palestine — regularly obstructing planned routes, for example — on the basis of lies, such as the claim that organisers sought to march past synagogues. He also consulted pro-Israel lobby groups on the policing of such protests while refusing to meet the Palestine Coalition that organises them. And the connections of US surveillance-tech firm Palantir to violent racist repression in the United States through its use by the Ice agency in mass arrests and deportations, and to war crimes by the Israeli military, did not deter him from contracting it to help police British citizens — until blocked by the mayor of London, something likely impossible in a national police service set-up.

Mahmood’s plans explicitly include giving the home secretary the power to sack chief constables — a further politicisation of policing by a minister who helped force the resignation of West Midlands Chief Constable Craig Guildford for entirely political reasons. His ban on fans of an Israeli football club with a history of violent disorder, Maccabi Tel Aviv, attending a match against Aston Villa could conveniently serve the government’s strategy of smearing Israel critics as antisemites, so Labour ministers led a character-assassinating witch-hunt. We do not want or need a British FBI. The rationale for one does not withstand scrutiny, and its advocates are demonstrably enemies of our civil rights. Nor does such centralisation tie in with Burnham’s stated ambition to devolve and localise power. He should face pressure to disown this Starmer-era scheme.

Camp of the Saints

Neither Russell Brand nor the other one has ever claimed to be gay, and straight queens are a thing in themselves.

But not everyone read Theology at Durham, so not everyone can tell the difference on sight.

A Chill of Apprehension

Peter Hitchens writes:

The power in my house died, with a faint groan, like the ghost of electricity trying to tell me something. Was it the boiler, the fridge, or the freezer that made that sad, alarming, desolate sound? Or was it the desktop computer, or the laptop? Or the kitchen fan? It was early morning and just about light, so at least we were not groping for a torch. But almost everything I rely on to live as I do – especially, nowadays, computers – depends utterly on a reliable power supply. I thought the moment I had long feared had arrived.

Britain’s power system trembles all the time on the edge of a disastrous blackout which could take days to repair and could send our economy stumbling over the precipice. Anybody who pays attention knows this. But here I was, like any fool, unable to work, facing who knew how long without the spark of energy which makes our world keep rolling. Soon, all the batteries would run down too. I cursed myself, as I often do, for ignoring my own fears for years.

In Baghdad and Mogadishu I had seen what happens to modern life when the power goes. I knew that the long-running Net Zero attack on what was once a solid and reliable National Grid had left us in danger of darkness and silence. But I still hadn’t done anything about installing a back-up. In Baghdad, war, neglect and looting had made the power hopelessly unreliable, but in my small hotel you could count on the generator snarling into life within seconds of the main system failing. If you were working on a computer you just had to keep saving your stuff over and over again to avoid losing your work. In Mogadishu, those in the darkened, nightmare city who had their own power were aristocrats amid the powerless poor – powerless in both senses of the word.

So what was this? I live in a 1930s suburb of Oxford and I suspect the cabling and substations must be getting a little tired. Perhaps they were just conking out. So I called my power suppliers, who are called something like Welsh and Eastern, though I am nowhere near Wales or the East, and cannot actually remember how I ended up buying my volts amps, watts and ohms from them. Aren’t these privatised utilities supposed to be more helpful than the old state ones? Miraculously, I got through. A voice demanded my postcode. I provided it. Then it demanded the first line of my address. I gave it. Then it wanted my name. Had they, I wondered, only cut off the power of people whose names began with ‘H’? I said I couldn’t see how that could help. I knew that if I asked the voice’s name, he would decline to give it to me under data protection rules.

But after a short pause, he weakened on the name issue and informed me: ‘You have a power cut.’ Well, there, you see – privatisation has definitely made the utility companies more user-friendly. I still don’t entirely know why the power failed. I pursued the matter later, and was told that somebody had cut into a mains cable. Was this just one of my neighbours, digging for potatoes, or perhaps for coal? Or was it one of those broadband cable companies who excavate the streets and pavements almost every day, chewing up the roots of mature trees as they go, providing yet more ways of welcoming trashy streaming channels into my home? I do not know.

As it turned out the power came back on a few hours later. And the closedown was wholly local. But at any time, the British grid is highly vulnerable, far more than it used to be. On June 23, there was definitely a crisis in power transmission in this country. Experts argue about how bad it was, but it was undoubtedly a warning. When a power grid trips and collapses, the effects are huge; when it doesn’t, nobody notices outside the control rooms.

On that date a major nuclear station, Sizewell B, was offline. The amazing ‘electric mountain’ at Dinorwig in Snowdonia – which can produce high power at high speed by pouring millions of gallons of stored water into hydro-electric generators – was partly offline for maintenance. A large chunk of the usually reliable gas generation was struggling because of the same hot weather which was causing high power demand. Some internal power lines were already too heavily loaded, so they could not be used to switch energy from Scotland to the south. Huge batteries, which astonishingly can now provide emergency electricity in large quantities, can supply it only for short periods.

It turned out to be easier, in the end, to avoid a meltdown by importing power under the Channel from France. Some of this was nuclear, thanks to that country’s long-ago decision to build a huge network of nuclear stations, and some of it from French equivalents of Dinorwig’s magic mountain. It worked. But we went nearly all the way through the multiple safeguards and back-ups. What if one more thing had gone wrong, or France had not been able to help? These conditions, or something like them, could happen again. It might not work out so well the next time.

My own view is that this risk is a direct result of dogma. Britain had – until recently – a reliable fleet of coal-fired power stations, much as China, India and America do now. Like nuclear, gas and hydro-power, coal-based generation provides what is called ‘inertia’, a steadiness in current which prevents the power system from tripping and failing when things go wrong. Wind and solar power do not provide this. On August 9, 2019, this problem almost certainly played a part in a serious blackout which cut off a million British customers and halted many trains.

But, driven by the anti-carbon dogma long ago adopted by this country, we have not just mothballed our coal-burning fleet in case we need them one day. We have totally closed and, in most cases, demolished 19 coal-fired power stations, capable of providing 40 per cent of the country’s electricity needs. Several, including Didcot A, not far from where I live, have actually been blown up with high explosives.

I heard the Didcot blast from ten miles away and felt a chill of apprehension which has not left me since. I thought then and think now that this was an act of dogmatic self-harm, meaningless when set against the vast and continuing expansion of coal-burning in China. I will never be surprised to hear that soft, sinister, ghostly groan as my electricity dies and I am shoved out of the modern world into a sort of apocalypse where everything we rely on has become a lifeless piece of plastic or metal. I really must do something about getting that generator.

Beginning with the full exploitation of the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields, let us harness the sovereign power of the State, to deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of clean coal technology, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State. There is always climate change, and any approach to it must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. We must be unequivocal about regretting the defeat of the miners in 1985. Is Kemi Badenoch? Is Nigel Farage? Is Ed Davey? Is Zack Polanski?

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet we have the gall to criticise their carbon emissions. And we expect to depend for energy on the Sun, the wind and the tides, precisely because it is beyond our power to stop them from doing what they do and we just have to live with it, yet we also expect to be able to stop climate change rather than finding ways of living with that. China manufactures most of the  world’s solar panels, which should be on buildings rather than on farmland and which we need to start making here, but let there be solar, wind and tidal energy in the mix. The base of that mix is nuclear and coal. The coal without which there can be no steel, and thus no wind turbines or tidal turbines, just as there could be no rigs, pipelines, or power stations. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the Miners’ Strike. Again, do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right. Does Andrew Rosindell, whose constituency office is called Margaret Thatcher House, say that? Does Robert Jenrick, who gave his daughter the middle name Thatcher? Not Margaret. Thatcher.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all the rest of it. Any economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics, and the “free” market cannot deal with climate change while defending and expanding our achievements. That is precisely why it is being promoted. But instead, we need the State, albeit a vastly more participatory and democratic State than has often existed. The energy sources to be preferred are those which provided high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs.

The standing charges on gas and electricity are 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they are supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. Thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, just abolish them. And thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, let there be an all-of-the-above transport policy based around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on the electricity that public ownership would also supply to charging points in every neighbourhood and village. Astonishingly, and yet not, the fewest charging points for electric vehicles are in the coalfield areas. Also, never forget that, when we can catch them, buses carry far more passengers than trains do, but those passengers tend not to be politicians or the “opinion-forming” sort of journalists. And so on. Let a thousand flowers bloom. In a garden well-tended and well-watered as an expression of democratic sovereignty.

Pro Bono Publico

After a 14-year-old boy was recently freed from one of them, Dr Valentina Molodaya exposed the network of torture chambers run by the Nazi Azov Brigade on behalf of what, since its constitutional term of office has long expired, can only be called the regime in Ukraine.

She was immediately placed on the obscenely misnamed Myrotvorets list. In 2015, the writer Oles Buzina and the former MP Oleg Kalashnikov were murdered as soon as that website had published their home addresses. And now, Dr Molodaya has been arrested.

George Galloway has just joined Substack.

A Sticking Plaster On The Sewage Pipe

Water privatisation has indisputably failed, and the shares in the companies are monetarily worthless (what would you pay for them?), so bring on lock, stock and barrel renationalisation, leading to the National Grid that was promised by Labour in 1979. Just do it. Now. The Parliament of the United Kingdom may legislate over and above any devolved body, and the people of Scotland and Wales would love this arrangement once they had it. Nothing has weakened the Union, and democratic national and parliamentary sovereignty, more than privatisation. While there are grey areas, if something would obviously have to be rescued by the State rather than allowed to go bust, then it belongs in public ownership, just as if something obviously would not, then it does not. Corner shops? Obviously not. But water? Obviously. As Paul Knaggs writes:

Thursday morning on Times Radio, Stig Abell asked Angela Eagle the question every bill-payer in England wanted answered. What new powers would her eight regional water councils have to hold the water companies to account? The councils, she said, would “hold to account water companies for their prioritisation and their investment decisions.” Abell asked whether they could fine a company or sack a chief executive. “Well, there’ll be a whole range of other issues as well,” she replied, “which will hold companies to account and come up with other ways of holding them to account for their performance as well.” He asked what they were. “I think you’ll have to wait to see the Water Bill when we publish it.” When he pressed again, she said: “I’m not publishing the Water Bill this morning.” This was the government’s main announcement of the day, and the minister fronting it could not describe a single thing it would let anyone do.

The clip that went round afterwards was a different one. Abell asked whether closer alignment with the EU might mean banning smoky bacon crisps. Eagle said: “Oh Stig, I mean really we’ve had EU straight bananas and now we’re talking about banning smoky bacon crisps. I think you should get a life.” His co-presenter Kate McCann wrote that she had never heard an interview like it. The crisps question was less silly than it sounded: Britain is negotiating to follow EU food law as Brussels writes it, and Brussels has banned eight smoke flavourings. A Europhile that has no idea about the EU is common practice, but the real damage had been done ten minutes earlier, when a cabinet minister with a press release in front of her could not explain it.

Eight Councils, Fifteen People, No Legal Basis 

The government’s own words don’t help her. The eight councils will bring together up to fifteen people each, from mayors and council leaders to farmers, customers and business, to “set the priorities for their region” and draw up a plan. Local leaders have until the end of the year to propose how the councils should even be run. There is no opening date and no legal basis. The only powers mentioned are new powers for mayors, not for the councils, and those are promised in a Water Bill nobody has seen. Richard Benwell of Wildlife and Countryside Link, one of the scheme’s supporters, still warned that the councils “must have the powers and funding to deliver.” Even its friends are asking where the teeth are. So the public is being offered a body that can set priorities for companies with no obligation to meet them. “On Thursday, the councils’ strongest power was the right to draw up a plan.”

Eagle Admits Privatisation Failed. Then Offers a Committee 

What makes this worse is that the government understands exactly what has gone wrong. Between the evasions, Eagle said so herself: “People are angry because water companies and the whole privatised system has failed them. And it’s failed our rivers as well.” Under privatisation, she said, customers had “no influence whatsoever” and were “just seen as people to pay bills.” That is a cabinet minister confirming, thirty-seven years on, what this paper and millions of households have known for a long time. Margaret Thatcher sold the regional water authorities in 1989, cleared their debts and threw in a cash “green dowry” from the public purse to tempt the City in. What followed is still flowing into the rivers.

Andy Burnham’s explanation in the press release is that “decisions about their local areas are taken miles away.” It’s an odd complaint from a government that is negotiating to take Britain’s food law from Brussels, where no British voter has a say. On water, though, the government’s own examples point the other way. The sewage damaging Windermere is not discharged because someone in Whitehall cannot find the Lake District on a map. It is discharged by a company run for its shareholders, which has had every chance to spend the money and chose not to. The problem is not that decisions are too far from home. It is that they are made by the wrong people, for the wrong reasons. A committee in Kendal won’t change that, any more than a committee in London did.

This is the sticking plaster. The wound is private ownership of a natural monopoly. The plaster is a public meeting where angry residents can tell United Utilities what they want while United Utilities keeps the right to say no. Meanwhile, Ofwat, which this government has condemned and promised to abolish, carries on regulating until its replacement exists. Communities get a voice, the regulator is on its way out, and the companies keep every power that matters. 

Water Nationalisation: Permission Is Not Ownership 

In Liverpool in September, Burnham promised to repeal what he called “Margaret Thatcher’s ideological ban on public ownership of water companies”, the Water Act 1989’s limits on how many shares government can hold. Eagle told the same conference that “the priorities of people in our communities, not shareholders of water companies” would now decide where the investment goes. Five weeks later “decide” had become “a voice to begin with.”

Repealing the ban is worth doing. But it only gives the state permission; it doesn’t bring anything back into public hands. In June, as a by-election candidate in Makerfield, Burnham said public ownership of Thames Water “is what should be done.” Thames is still in its creditors’ hands, and the government already has the tool it needs. The special administration regime in the Water Industry Act 1991 lets the Secretary of State put a failing water company under public control. No new bill is needed to use it.

Water falls as rain on all of us, gathers in shared rivers and comes through every tap in the country. Nobody can switch supplier when their river is full of sewage. The same reasoning applies to the gas under the North Sea, the wind off our coasts and the grid that carries both. These are common resources and natural monopolies, and handing them to private owners means accepting that something everyone depends on will be run for somebody else’s profit. The working class has paid for that arrangement with every bill since 1989.

Thames Water Special Administration: What Should Happen Now

The demand on the Environment Secretary is simple. Put Thames Water into special administration and keep it in public hands, not as a waiting room before it is sold back to the market. Publish the Water Bill, and make public ownership the destination rather than a theoretical option. If the councils are to exist at all, give them powers in law: to block bonuses, to stop dividends while pollution targets are missed, and to require ministers to consider special administration for a failing company. Then answer, in Parliament, the question she could not answer on Thursday: what can these councils make a water company do? You don’t put a plaster on a burst sewer and call it repaired. You dig it up and replace it. Until this government is willing to take water back, its councils will be eight more places to complain about the smell.

Shifting More Than Vibes

It still feels too good to be true, but we may now dare to dream that both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party might nominate an anti-war candidate for President in 2028. Thomas Massie? Why not? And time was when a pretty boy Governor with unlimited ambitions and whose politics were in the centre of the Democratic Party had to become a supporter of the death penalty that he had previously opposed; he did indeed go on to be a two-term President. But now, Gavin Newsom has commuted all 548 outstanding death sentences in California. Well, if there are not going to be any executions in Texas. As Aditya Chakrabortty writes:

Remember the “vibe shift”? Just last year, columnists and corporate boardrooms alike declared that the second coming of Donald Trump meant the old rules of politics and even everyday civility were roadkill. “I feel liberated,” one top banker told the Financial Times. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.” Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be a billionaire was very heaven. Because in Trump, the tech bosses had a politician who could work magic by forging a forever alliance between them and blue-collar America.

This was the very core of Trumpism, the trick that wowed rightwingers around the world: how he could yoke together minimum-wage workers with the 1%; Latinos and black voters with those happy to dabble in a little light racism; the Epstein-haters with the Epstein class (who can forget Elon Musk’s email to Jeffrey: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”). And he did it by alchemising class antagonism into culture war. Forget about that pay rise – have you have heard about those Haitians eating dogs?

Silicon Valley, Wall Street and east coast media owners all saw Trumpism not as a political strategy but as a turn in the entire culture: a vibe shift to the right. They were wrong. Tuesday night was a comprehensive rejection of the president. Before the midterms, ultra-wealthy donors such as Musk poured billions into Trump’s proxies, but the working- and middle-class base were not having it. The relatively new coalition that put the orange man in the White House has been smashed apart by old-fashioned class politics.

When election analysts observe that the struggle of ordinary Americans to afford the basics of life now “polls in a tier by itself”, that is class rearing its head. It is a response to the record petrol prices in a car-centred society, the huge swings in everything from eggs to mincemeat, the battle to meet the rent. The squeamish, including within the Democratic establishment, might euphemise these as “economic issues” or “affordability”, but remember that this time last year, the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani turned affordability from a meme into a platform for winning elections. In late 2026, and going into the next battle for the White House, the New York mayor now wields national influence. Among Mamdani’s achievements has been his reminder to ordinary voters that when they can’t afford the basics, it’s not just because prices are unreasonably high – it’s also because their pay is unfairly low. He has tied the cost of living to an argument about inequality, and rightly so.

Over decades – through Reagan and Clinton, Bush and Obama – Republicans and Democrats have changed the tax code to reward ownership rather than earning, so the richest 400 households now pay lower rates of tax than the bottom 50% of Americans. As the radical economists Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster show in their new book, Grand Theft Capital: What Workers Should Know About the Affordability Crisis, the share of national income going to ordinary workers has slumped from 30% in the 1960s to 20% today. This is the destruction of working-class lives and dreams in which Republicans and Democrats colluded. This is the American carnage that in 2016 helped propel Trump into the White House. But the most glaring feature of this era of Trumponomics has been its shameless inequality.

 The “hottest country in the world”, as the president calls it, relies on AI for growth. For the first half of 2025, the Harvard economist Jason Furman estimated that spending on AI infrastructure made up 92% of GDP growth. These supposedly national gains are getting raked off by a tiny number of people and funds, based overwhelmingly in one strip on the west coast. In October, the fund manager Apollo pointed out that, of the entire S&P index of America’s biggest 500 companies, only the so-called “magnificent seven” tech firms were flourishing. The other 493 were seeing flat revenues and flat profits. Torsten Slok, Apollo’s chief economist, wrote: “Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America.”

Billions for Sam Altman and Dario Amodei and Jensen Huang; a pittance for those outside Silicon Valley. No wonder the most reviled candidate on so many of this week’s ballots was the datacentre: the energy-sapping, water-sucking, community-destroying datacentre that merely aids the processing of humans into appendages to chatbots. Analysis for The Economist showed that Trump supporters with a datacentre on their doorstep were flipping in droves to the other side.

The politics of this played out most clearly in Texas, which on Tuesday night flipped from red to blue, despite a quarter of a billion dollars for the Republicans in the state from one man: Elon Musk. Texas is the AI overlord’s home and a vital base for his businesses. Over the next few years Texas is expected to become the US’s centre for datacentres. In just two years, it is expected to provide over a quarter of all new computing power to the AI industry.

James Talarico won on a squarely anti-datacentre agenda. As he said after his win: “The real fight in this country is not left versus right. It is top versus bottom … The people at the top divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, by culture, so we don’t notice that they are picking our pockets. But tonight, we sent a crystal clear message to the people at the top, we will not be conquered.”

The Democrats who caught the national and global imagination this autumn were those who most stridently put the case against the US’s grotesque, life-destroying unfairness and for a better politics – just as Mamdani did. Troy Jackson won Maine on a platform to abolish ICE. Abdul El-Sayed took Michigan (Michigan!) pledging Medicare for all. These results suggest a new future for the Dems: anti-corruption, anti-war and anti-billionaire.

In the days of Bill and Hillary, this would have been deemed impossibly leftwing. But mark my words: the Democrat who wants to get on the ticket in 2028 will sound more like Bernie Sanders. For now, rejoice that a corrupt self-dealing bully is heading into two years of ignominy, of being treated even while in power as a back number. And remember that when politicians and journalists claim there is nothing better on offer than the same old rightwing rubbish, they’re usually wrong. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Trump once said. “It’s, like, incredible.” And truly, it wasn’t credible.