Ioannis Katsaroumpas

1 INTRODUCTION In May 2020, British company P&O Ferries (hereinafter P&O), a subsidiary of Dubai-owned DP World, made 1,100 seafarers redundant to ‘right-size’ its business. This was a fairly routine instance of capital-dictated ‘liposuction’ of labour disposed of as ‘waste’. Thus, it is hardly surprising that it remained mostly invisible in public discourse.

As workers react to the cost-of-living crisis caused by the cartel of oil and gas producers ramping up the price of energy in order to make billions of dollars of extra profit, the government has reacted. Not by nationalising, requisitioning or even taxing the corporations who inflict this outrageous extraction of wealth but by attacking the resistance of the working class. This year alone, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act criminalised political protest.