What Burnham is up against

🔴 Paul Marshall’s other project...

As Britain and much of Europe swelters under extreme heat, hardline conservatives have gathered in London this week with a clear message: don’t worry about rising temperatures; instead, let’s all drill for more fossil fuels.

The gathering is called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference. Created under a benign name (as is the playbook), ARC is actually another project founded by the owners of GB News: hedge fund baron Paul Marshall, and the Dubai-based investment group Legatum.

The conference brings its flock to London every year, this June amassing 4,000 people – from business leaders to government officials – in Kensington to discuss how to promote radical right-wing politics across the globe.

Alongside Greenpeace’s investigations unit Unearthed, we’ve been digging up various interesting new details about ARC over the last week – including the funders of the summit.

They include – surprise, surprise – a bunch of oil giants, Trump donors, and the billionaires bankrolling Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

The list features Reform donor and crypto billionaire Ben Delo, Tory and Reform backer Anthony Bamford (of JCB fame), major Trump funder Anthony Pratt, an American oil company that’s pushing to frack the east Midlands, and U.S. hedge fund boss Ken Griffin.

Meanwhile, watching the ARC livestream for the past few days, I have repeatedly heard people complain about “elites”, without even a hint of irony.

ARC’s speakers have included the bad and the ugly of politics at home and abroad – including Farage, Kemi Badenoch, Trump’s energy secretary Chris Wright, and House of Representatives speaker Mike Johnson.

Farage spouted his usual drivel about the need to “reindustrialise” Britain by ramping up fossil fuel production, kick out the Muslims, and reintroduce the moral virtues that our grandparents “cherished”.

He was preaching to the converted. As we revealed last week, after obtaining the list of ARC’s attendees, the conference has opened its doors to a grim assortment of U.S. anti-abortion activists, far-right politicians, and oil barons. Farage’s natural constituency.

Badenoch and her shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho took a different line of attack – directing their arsenal at Ed Miliband, widely rumoured to be on the shortlist to be Andy Burnham’s chancellor.

Both mocked the idea, with Badenoch claiming that Miliband has “made the country poorer” due to his clean energy policies, and “should not be let anywhere near the levers of power”.

For context, the cost to the UK of a single fossil fuel price shock – two of which we have experienced in the past five years – is the same as the total cost of reaching net zero emissions by 2050.

Their vitriol forms part of a concerted lobbying campaign from the press, so-called “moderate” Labour MPs, and right-wing politicians to block Miliband’s path to the Treasury.

Why? Because he would be a reformer who would reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and challenge corporate power.

As ARC demonstrates, these forces have vast resources at their disposal. They will lobby and harangue politicians to ensure their version of the world remains ascendant – a world in which billionaires loot and immigrants take the blame.

If he wants to succeed, Burnham mustn’t bow to these merchants of neoliberal decay. Indeed, if the Labour Party believes Ed Miliband is too radical to be chancellor, wait until Farage and Jenrick make it into Downing Street.

That bleak future awaits in just a few years (or even a few months) if Labour doesn’t reform Britain with the haste it demands. Labour has too often stood on the same side as its opponents since the last general election. And Burnham shouldn’t kowtow to a cult begging for his imminent demise.

And with that…

I’m going on holiday!

I’ll be away in Greece for the next 10 days, which is mercifully and ludicrously cooler than the UK currently.

I’ll be back in your inboxes the week beginning 6 July. I’m sure nothing major will happen in Westminster during my absence… will it? 🫣