Comment Central

At 2:41pm on September 25th the highly respected football journalist David Ornstein tweeted that Manchester City Football Club had been found guilty by an independent commission of 114 of 115 charges relating to financial transactions. That tweet has now been viewed over 100 million times. The football world seized upon this and tens of thousands of words of moralising and outrage have been in print and on the airwaves ever since.

From pineapple express events to heat domes, flash flooding to wildfire evacuations, extreme weather patterns increasingly reveal how a dramatically changing climate is as much personal as it is political. The weather is not simply archived numbers that record temperature.

In early October, General Dhiraj Seth, India’s new Chief of Army Staff, delivered his first public address at a defence conclave in New Delhi. He outlined a clear vision for the Indian Army in an era of ongoing “millennium wars.” Notably, however, two of his observations regarding the factors shaping the character of modern war highlighted a critical but often overlooked one: climate change.

At these timescales, molecular energy stores become important. That could mean natural gas, renewable gases such as biomethane, or hydrogen produced when renewable generation is abundant and stored until it’s needed. Unlike batteries, these can store very large quantities of energy economically over long periods. There’s a great opportunity for innovators to come up with effective ways to deliver this long-duration storage. That leaves policymakers with three problems. The first is uncertainty.

Obviously, migration is another issue of enormous consequence. Now, Libya is a major departure point for people attempting the central Mediterranean crossing to Europe. A stable government, with effective authority over its borders and coastline, would be better placed to reduce irregular migration flows, especially if it could partner with European agencies and authorities.

And yet, it isn’t just Beijing. There is also a problematic Russia exposure in Britain’s defence supply chain. Njord Partners, a London-based “special situations” investor, has been reported to have significant exposure to the Russian economy and sanctioned Russian entities. Since 2017, Njord has been an institutional shareholder of and investor in RETN, a Eurasia-focused network service provider, investing as much as 20 million EUR to fund RETN’s international expansion.

September has been a defining month for Reform UK and perhaps an awakening call as to how Britain’s financial services infrastructure does not just launder money for kleptocrats abroad, but builds the pathways that channel dodgy money into its own politics.

35 states have joined the Board of Peace, chaired by President Donald Trump and charged with supervising the temporary governance of Gaza as the "most consequential international body in history.” Not one Palestinian sits on the board. A century ago, another international body was used to the same end: to lend a dominant power's presence in Palestine a legitimacy it did not, in law, possess.

At the same time, the US government has sought to undermine the authority of the International Criminal Court when its investigations implicate American or Israeli nationals. Such exceptionalism matters because international law cannot function as a rules-based order if its application depends upon geopolitical hierarchy and military power.

We need redistribution between people and between regions. The working class did not cause the current crises. It wasn't the person struggling to pay their bills responsible for a system that rewards wealth extraction over productive investment. For me, our answer has to be more ambitious than simply managing the status quo. The revival of our communities requires proper socialist economics.