In this week's issue
- Land grabs linked to East African Crude Oil Pipeline result in violent evictions
- How digital tools and AI are reshaping sexual violence against children
- Paul Rogers: Netanyahu’s regional conflicts risk spiralling beyond control
- Adam Ramsay: Election results mark the end of Westminster’s political system
- As the war against Iran puts oil at the centre of global concerns, a new intergovernmental coalition is seeking to accelerate the energy transition outside the COP system
Our publishing schedule means the results of the elections in England, Scotland and Wales are still trickling in as I type, but it is clear that Keir Starmer’s government remains deeply popular. The prime minister has insisted that he is not going away, but that hasn’t stopped MPs from his own party calling for his resignation. We’ll have more detailed analyses for you in the coming days, but personally, I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between vision and plans, between leadership and management.
It is hard to escape the feeling that Labour has an abundance of managers with plans and an absence of visionary leadership. Pundits are reading the successes of Reform and the Greens as a sign of the death of the two-party system but, having lived through the political churn of Indian politics, I would only say that party systems and loyalties are far more robust than political observers assume. Maybe Starmer should step down, but whoever comes next had better have a compelling vision for an increasingly sceptical electorate.
For openDemocracy alumnus Adam Ramsay, though, the results – including the pro-independence wins in Scotland and Wales – reveal not just a headache for Starmer, but a constitutional omnicrisis for the UK. He’s written for us this week about why he believes Westminster’s political system is finished.
Meanwhile, as Starmer has learnt, the world doesn’t just stop when you need a break.
As the US-Iran war continues to drive up fossil fuel prices, our cover story this week reveals how the hunger for new sources of oil has resulted in a brutal land-grab in Uganda. Our months-long investigation, which uncovered a network of private developers working in cahoots with politicians and military elites to violently evict villagers from their ancestral lands, was so sensitive that we are withholding the name of the reporter for safety reasons.
Meanwhile, representatives of 57 countries, who account for almost half of global GDP, met last week in the Colombian coastal city of Santa Marta for the First Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels. To little surprise, the US, China, India and Russia were not at the conference. But as the representative from Panama, Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, told openDemocracy, “When you make a plan, you first call your closest friends, and then you send the invitation to the rest.”
Still on the subject of Iran, oil and war, openDemocracy’s defence columnist Paul Rogers notes that Israel’s continued attacks on Palestinians and neighbouring countries have created an “insecurity trap” for itself. While the world fixes its attention on Iran, Israel continues to kill and maim Palestinians from Gaza to the West Bank.
Finally, take a moment to read openDemocracy journalist Angelina de los Santos’s explosive report on how sexual predators are using ChatGPT to groom and manipulate children online. Angelina spoke to police investigators, public prosecutors and experts to dig into the disturbing case study of a supermarket security guard who used the AI chatbot to prepare scripts to win the confidence of hundreds of teenage boys across Latin America.
Thank you, as ever, for reading openDemocracy. In a world of hot takes and speculative theories, there are vanishingly few publications that still invest in original reporting and rigorous expert analysis as we do. So if you like our reporting, do consider making a contribution.
Aman Sethi, Editor-in-Chief
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Angelina de los Santos
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Weekly Poll
This week in history
The founding of the NHS — 5 July 1948 Placed in May as a health and social rights week. Aneurin Bevan launched the National Health Service on 5 July 1948 — the most significant act of social solidarity in British history. Founded on the principle that illness should not be a financial catastrophe, it was bitterly opposed by the British Medical Association but has since become the institution Britons value most. This week remembers the political will and working-class movement that made it possible.
Michael Chessum
What we're reading
The lack of light, Nino Haratischwili, trans by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin
I read a lot of novels and this was hands down the best novel I read in 2025. It tells the story of 1980s and 1990s Georgia (in Europe, not the US) through the friendships of four young women, and the photographs of one of the four. It’s a novel about the collapse of the Soviet Union, about war, gangs, poverty and how a country rebuilds. It is also a story about being a girl, a young woman, about female friendship, male violence and patriarchy. I don’t think I have stopped thinking about it since I read it in November and constantly want to read it again. Her previous novel, The Eighth Life, is also worth your attention: a wonderful story about 20th century Georgia, told through the lives of eight generations of women. Best read while eating honey cake and sipping Georgian wine!
Sian Norris, senior investigations reporter
