In this week’s issue
- How a plan to force Indian factory workers to train their own robot replacements backfired
- Why Andy Burnham’s first vote as PM-in-waiting fuelled fears of a draconian new era for refugees
- As deadly heatwaves hit the UK, the government is suppressing an intelligence report warning of ecosystem collapse and food insecurity
- Britain is no longer a superpower – but that doesn’t mean it has to be a bystander
- A harrowing new investigation reveals the extent of femicide against older women in the UK
- How Belgian activists used a landmark court victory to block Israeli military supply lines
- Dr Julia Minson on defusing toxic arguments and how human contact completely upended her beliefs on gender transitions for minors
- In case you missed it: Inside Reform and George Cottrell’s world in Montenegro
Translators, sales assistants, mathematicians, web developers, journalists. If, like me, you’re in any of those professions, you might have seen yourself or colleagues losing work to AI in recent years.
Now, AI startups have a new target in their sights.
In our lead story this week, Anumeha Yadav speaks to tailors in Delhi who were told to wear head-mounted cameras at work. Their managers wouldn’t tell them why, but they figured it out: they were training their own robot replacements.
As Anumeha writes, AI hasn’t yet mastered dexterous tasks. One way to teach it? Film non-consenting and already-oppressed labourers. How to get factory owners on board? Use the same cameras to produce reports ranking employees’ productivity, detailing who checks their phone or chats to colleagues while on the clock.
All a bit dystopian, isn’t it? But before Elon Musk gets too excited by an army of robot labourers, the tailors in these garment factories fought back – and their actions could provide a template for workers elsewhere.
In the UK, Andy Burnham has finally been elected as Labour leader and will enter No 10 next week. He inherits mounting geopolitical tensions, a divided country, and a party whose popularity is in decline. Give it six weeks, and he might be hoping AI takes his job, too.
If the new PM is looking for pointers, we’ve got a trio of contributors offering advice. Amina Khanom argues that Burnham’s vote for this week’s Asylum and Immigration Bill is worrying; Danny Sriskandarajah calls for him to move the UK into a position of global leadership; and Paul Rogers urges him to release a government-suppressed report on the climate crisis.
Elsewhere, Sian Norris reports on a disturbing pattern of femicide against older women in the UK, and a peace activist tells us how they forced the Belgian government into a de facto arms embargo on Israel.
In case you missed it, we’re also resharing Sian’s investigation into Reform’s money men in Montenegro. We want to keep investigating the role of dark crypto money in UK politics, but to do so, we need to recruit at least 500 regular donors by December. If you don’t already, please consider supporting us. It’d help us to hold Farage and his cronies to account.
If you can’t donate but enjoy our work, we’d love it if you shared this newsletter with someone who might like it.
Have a great weekend!
Indra Warnes, Editor
The next election is only three years away, and we are determined to keep exposing Reform and prevent the rise of the far right. To do that, we want to recruit 500 paid subscribers by the end of 2026.
Will you be part of the movement to fight the far right, with a monthly donation today?
Anumeha Yadav
Amina Khanom
Paul Rogers
Danny Sriskandarajah
Sian Norris
Jo Dirix
The Depolarization Project
Sian Norris
Weekly Poll
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Reader Comments
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This week in history
The Spanish Social Revolution • 19 July 1936
On 19 July 1936, in direct response to General Francisco Franco's fascist military coup, Spanish workers and peasants rose up in arms. In regions like Catalonia and Aragon, this armed defense immediately blossomed into a profound social revolution. Anarcho-syndicalists, socialists, and Marxist workers took control of factories, public transportation, utilities, and established worker-run councils, instituting one of the most sweeping experiments in democratic socialism and direct self-governance in human history.
Though ultimately crushed by the combined weight of Franco's armies and internal sectarian betrayals, the summer of 1936 remains a rare, concrete example of workers and peasants successfully seizing the means of production on a mass scale.
This week's archive piece is a historical analysis of the international response to the Spanish Civil War. It highlights the tragedy of the "spontaneous social revolution, initiated by ordinary factory workers and peasants," and explores how this bottom-up emancipation was actively undermined by both Western non-intervention and Stalinist counter-revolutionary policies.
Tapani Lausti
