From ‘Revolution’ to the Dock: The Political and Social Demise of Russell Brand

 A verdict, and a political trajectory

On 5 November 2026, a jury at Southwark Crown Court convicted Russell Brand of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault. The jury of eight men and four women, required by Mr Justice Bennathan to reach unanimous verdicts, acquitted him on two further counts of rape and one of attempted indecent assault. The convictions relate to offences committed between 2004 and 2009. The rape conviction concerns a 21-year-old woman whom Brand met after a performance in west London in 2009.

Brand, 51, denied every charge and was remanded in custody following the verdict. On 9 November, Mr Justice Bennathan sentenced him to 10 years and six months’ imprisonment. Brand must serve at least two-thirds of the sentence before becoming eligible for release.

In his sentencing remarks, the judge told Brand that as he became famous he had also become a“sexual predator”, and said that the offences demonstrated a disregard for women’s right to refuse sexual contact. The judge also stressed that the sentence concerned only the offences of which the jury had convicted Brand and that he disregarded allegations on which the jury had returned not-guilty verdicts. The Metropolitan Police have said that further allegations concerning Brand remain under investigation. Those allegations are separate from the convictions for which he was sentenced and have not been determined by a court.

The victims are entitled to lifelong anonymity, and this article does not cover their testimony. What concerns us here is the social and political figure: the man who, little more than a decade ago, was hailed in liberal circles as the voice of a disaffected generation, and whose political evolution subsequently carried him into the orbit of Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk and the Trump movement.

Brand’s trajectory is not merely a story of personal collapse. It is a concentrated expression of the bankruptcy of celebrity “anti-politics”, of the media industry that manufactured and protected him, and of the decay of a petty-bourgeois radicalism that rejected the working class as the conscious agent of social change. That Brand could travel in scarcely a decade from calling for “revolution” on BBC Newsnight to sharing platforms with figures associated with the American right is itself a devastating commentary on the politics he represented.

An honest accounting must also be made of the proceedings against him. When the allegations first became public in September 2023, following a joint investigation by The Times, The Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches, the World Socialist Web Site warned against trial by media and insisted upon the presumption of innocence. That principle did not entail declaring Brand innocent. It meant insisting that criminal guilt could be determined only through established judicial procedures in which allegations could be tested, and the accused could mount a defence.

That process has now taken place. Brand was charged, represented by senior counsel, tried before a jury over several weeks, convicted on some counts and acquitted on others. Each charge had to be determined according to the evidence relating to it. Whatever criticisms socialists must make of the capitalist state and judicial system, the proceedings themselves refute the crude contention circulated by Brand’s right-wing defenders that a fair trial was simply impossible in Britain.

The celebrity revolutionary, 2013–2015

Brand’s emergence as a political celebrity was facilitated by the very institutions that he professed to oppose. In October 2013, he guest-edited the New Statesman and, days later, sat opposite Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight. Brand said he had never voted, denounced a political establishment subordinated to corporations, and spoke in favour of a “socialist egalitarian” society.

The interview was watched millions of times. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, years of austerity and the Liberal Democrats’ repudiation of their promises over university tuition fees, Brand’s denunciations struck a chord with many young people who saw nothing in the official political establishment that represented their interests.

Sections of the liberal media responded in an instructive way. Rather than seriously interrogating what Brand meant by revolution, parts of the press transformed him into a political phenomenon. Prospect included him among its “World Thinkers” in 2015. His book Revolution, published in 2014, became a bestseller. His YouTube series The Trews attracted a large audience, while his involvement in the struggle of tenants at the New Era estate in Hoxton against eviction by a US investment fund seemed to connect his rhetoric to genuine social opposition.

Yet the political content of Brand’s “revolution” was always profoundly confused. It combined elements of anarchism, Eastern mysticism, self-help and twelve-step recovery culture with hostility towards organised politics itself. Instead of calling for the construction of an independent political movement of the working class, he counselled abstention from conventional politics and elevated personal transformation and local direct action into substitutes for political programme, organisation and historical perspective.

Capitalism consequently appeared not primarily as a definite system of property and class relations, founded upon private ownership of the means of production and production for profit, but as a kind of spiritual and psychological disorder. Alienation might therefore be overcome through consciousness, authenticity, community action and individual awakening. Class in the Marxist sense, as an objective social relationship and the foundation of political organisation, virtually disappeared.

This perspective's limitations were dramatically exposed within eighteen months. Days before the May 2015 general election, having previously encouraged his followers not to vote, Brand interviewed Labour leader Ed Miliband and urged support for Labour. The supposedly uncompromising rejection of establishment politics thus ended in an endorsement of the party of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the Iraq War and the deregulated City of London.

The episode revealed something fundamental. Without a programme, historical analysis or class orientation, radical rhetoric could swing abruptly from denunciation of the parliamentary system to accommodation with one of its principal parties. The “revolution” had discovered the ballot box almost overnight.

From the ‘left’ to the far right

The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated Brand’s political evolution. His enormous online audience had originally been built through attacks on inequality, corporate power and the political establishment. Increasingly, however, these themes became entangled with scepticism concerning vaccination and public-health policies, alongside a growing preoccupation with vaguely defined “elites”, censorship and the “Deep State”. In 2022, his programme Stay Free with Russell Brand moved to Rumble, a video platform that became increasingly associated with conservative and right-wing online politics in the United States.

Some of Brand’s interventions still contained elements of genuine opposition to official policy, including criticism of the role of the United States and NATO in Ukraine. But these positions no longer fit within a coherent critique of imperialism or capitalism. Instead, opposition to war and corporate power increasingly coexisted with the themes and personalities of the American culture wars.

After the allegations against him emerged in 2023, Brand’s public political and personal identity shifted again. He converted publicly to Christianity, was baptised in 2024, and increasingly cultivated an audience among conservative Christians and supporters of the American right. He appeared with Tucker Carlson and became associated with political environments involving Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Turning Point USA.

The political distance travelled was considerable. A man once presented by sections of the British liberal establishment as the charismatic representative of anti-capitalist youth was now being welcomed by forces associated with Trump’s political movement. Yet this development should not simply be understood as a betrayal of a previously coherent socialist politics. No such politics existed to betray. Rather, Brand’s evolution exposed the inherent instability of his earlier outlook.

A politics that rejected the independent political mobilisation of the working class, interpreted complex social relations primarily through the actions of shadowy or corrupt elites, and elevated individual authenticity above programme and organisation possessed no reliable political compass. Its language of rebellion could therefore migrate remarkably easily between ostensibly left-wing and right-wing forms of populism. Under conditions of deepening social crisis, opposition to “the establishment” ceased to have any necessarily progressive content. Anti-politics became increasingly compatible with the politics of reaction.

The trial and the myth of the ‘political prisoner’

After the allegations became public, Brand increasingly portrayed himself as the victim of an establishment campaign directed against a dissident voice. Sections of the American right enthusiastically adopted this interpretation. Elon Musk publicly supported Brand after the allegations appeared in 2023. Tucker Carlson subsequently connected Brand’s predicament to his attacks on pharmaceutical companies, establishment institutions and Western policy towards Ukraine. After criminal charges were brought, Carlson presented the proceedings as politically motivated and questioned whether Brand could receive justice in Britain.

This campaign had little to do with a consistent defence of democratic rights. Brand had become a politically useful media figure, and his legal difficulties could therefore be incorporated into an existing narrative in which right-wing personalities and online influencers portrayed themselves as victims of an all-powerful liberal establishment. It was nevertheless necessary to reject the opposite position. Brand’s defenders' politically reactionary arguments could not justify declaring him guilty before trial. Democratic rights cannot be defended selectively according to whether one approves of the accused.

That is why opposition to trial by media in 2023 was correct. The principle involved is elementary: allegations, however grave, are not criminal convictions. Guilt must be established through evidence tested before a court in proceedings in which the accused has the right to defend himself. The subsequent trial did precisely what Brand’s political defenders claimed could not occur. He was represented by experienced counsel and permitted to contest the allegations against him. His barrister urged the jury to distinguish between behaviour they might find personally objectionable and conduct proved to be criminal. The resulting verdicts show that the jury distinguished between the charges, returning both acquittals and convictions.

The claim that Brand was simply a “political prisoner” therefore cannot be sustained merely by asserting that he had become an opponent of establishment politics. His political opinions neither proved guilt nor provided immunity from criminal prosecution. Brand’s highly visible turn towards Christianity also became part of his new public identity. His appearances carrying a Bible and his repeated references to his faith fit neatly into the wider narrative of spiritual rebirth he had developed for his international audience. Whatever Brand’s personal beliefs, the political significance of this transformation is unmistakable. The former advocate of loosely defined spiritual revolution had reconstructed himself as a Christian dissident confronting what he and his allies described as a corrupt establishment.

The industry that made him

Any serious assessment of Brand must also examine the entertainment industry that created the conditions for his extraordinary celebrity. He committed the offences for which he was convicted while rising rapidly through British television and radio before moving into Hollywood. Brand’s deliberately provocative sexual persona was not incidental to this ascent. It became part of the commodity being sold. Broadcasters constructed programmes around his personality and cultivated the image of the uncontrollable celebrity provocateur. The commercial imperative was obvious: outrage generated attention, attention generated audiences, and audiences generated revenue.

The notorious 2008 BBC Radio 2 scandal involving obscene prank calls to the actor Andrew Sachs finally demonstrated that there were limits to what institutions could tolerate once controversy threatened the institution itself. But by then the mechanisms through which celebrity behaviour was indulged, normalised and monetised were already evident. Subsequent investigations into how concerns about Brand were handled raised broader questions about institutional culture and junior employees' capacity to challenge powerful performers. The essential issue therefore cannot be reduced to the moral character of one celebrity.

This is where a socialist analysis must distinguish itself from the approach associated with the more affluent sections of the #MeToo milieu. In 2023, parts of the liberal media collapsed the distinction between accusation and conviction, turning the individual celebrity into the exclusive explanation for an entire institutional culture. Such an approach simultaneously threatens fundamental democratic principles and obscures the social relations that make abuses of power possible.

The hierarchical organisation of the entertainment industry places enormous influence in the hands of celebrities, executives and owners. Junior researchers, production workers, runners and other often precariously employed workers can find themselves dependent upon precisely those above them for continued employment and advancement. Celebrity itself is a commodity. Once corporations have invested substantial amounts of money in a profitable personality, enormous commercial incentives arise to preserve that personality’s market value.

The phenomenon is therefore not reducible simply to “bad men”. It involves structures of wealth, employment, power and dependency embedded within the entertainment business itself.

Brand’s later political evolution also cannot be separated from the economics of alternative online media. Digital media has created a lucrative market in permanent outrage. The successful influencer must continually produce novelty, controversy and conflict to maintain engagement. Audiences are encouraged to regard conventional journalism as inherently dishonest, while the influencer's personality becomes the principal guarantee of truth. Grievance consequently becomes a business model.

Within this economy, every criticism can be framed as censorship, every institutional sanction as persecution, and every controversy as further confirmation that the dissident personality threatens powerful interests. Brand did not merely participate in this media economy. Increasingly, it shaped his public identity.

The lessons

The rise and fall of Brand contains political lessons extending far beyond one individual. The social anger he expressed in 2013 was genuine. Millions of young people had experienced the consequences of the financial crash, austerity, declining living standards, war and extreme concentrations of wealth. They confronted an official political culture seemingly incapable of articulating any alternative. That alienation has certainly not disappeared.

But Brand demonstrated precisely why such anger cannot be entrusted to celebrities, however charismatic, nor channelled through a politics that substitutes personality, lifestyle and authenticity for an understanding of class, history and political organisation. The extraordinary ease with which Brand travelled from the pages of the New Statesman to the political environment surrounding Tucker Carlson demonstrates the instability of celebrity anti-politics. A vague denunciation of corrupt “elites” does not constitute socialism.

Capitalism is not simply the rule of dishonest politicians, greedy bankers, pharmaceutical corporations, media executives or secretive bureaucracies. It is a historically developed social system based upon definite class relations and the private ownership of society’s productive forces. Without understanding this, opposition to capitalism can be redirected endlessly from one supposed enemy to another without ever confronting the social foundations of exploitation.

There is another lesson. It was correct in 2023 to oppose trial by media and insist upon the presumption of innocence. That principle does not disappear because a defendant subsequently proves unpopular, nor does it become retrospectively mistaken when a jury eventually returns guilty verdicts. The principle has now been tested through the judicial process. Brand faced criminal charges, contested those charges and was acquitted on some while being convicted on others. To continue to portray the verdict itself as sufficient proof of a political conspiracy is not a defence of democratic rights. It attempts to transform political sympathy for an individual into immunity from the ordinary requirements of criminal law.

Brand’s political career began with a genuine social phenomenon: mass disgust with inequality, official politics and the consequences of the capitalist crisis. But celebrity radicalism proved incapable of providing any way forward. The working class requires no prophets manufactured by the entertainment industry. It requires a political perspective grounded in the accumulated historical experience of the international workers’ movement and an organisation capable of uniting workers across national, racial and religious divisions against the capitalist system itself.

Brand once offered “revolution” without class, programme or party. What remained after the rhetoric had evaporated was the individual personality itself. That was always the fundamental weakness. And it was ultimately the political trajectory the project contained from the beginning.

Bibliography

Books and primary material

Brand, Russell (2014), Revolution. London: Century.

BBC Newsnight (2013), Jeremy Paxman interview with Russell Brand, broadcast 23 October 2013.

New Statesman (2013), issue guest-edited by Russell Brand, 24 October 2013.

Russell Brand: Comedy, Celebrity, Politics (2016). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Socialist and political commentary

Scripps, Thomas (2023), “Media mob lynches comedian and actor Russell Brand over sexual assault allegations”, World Socialist Web Site, 21 September 2023.

McRedmond, Finn (2023), “We have lost Russell Brand”, New Statesman, 7 March 2023.

McRedmond, Finn (2025), “Russell Brand’s transatlantic trial”, New Statesman, 30 May 2025.

Prospect (2015), “World Thinkers 2015: Russell Brand”, 16 February 2015.

News reports: allegations, charges and right-wing response

Mediaite (2023), “‘I Support Russell Brand’: Elon Musk gives full-throated backing”.

Salon (2023), “Right-wing conspiracists flock to support Russell Brand”, 20 September 2023.

Mediaite (2025), “Tucker Carlson calls on Trump to ‘rescue’ Russell Brand”.

NPR (2025), “Russell Brand pleads not guilty to rape, sexual assault charges in U.K.”, 30 May 2025.

PBS NewsHour/AP (2025), “Russell Brand pleads not guilty to charges of rape and sexual assault”.

Variety (2026), “Russell Brand’s rape trial delayed to October”.

News reports: verdict and sentencing

CNN (2026), “Actor and comedian Russell Brand found guilty of rape and sexual assault”, 5 November 2026.

Al Jazeera (2026), “Russell Brand found guilty of rape and sexual assault by UK court”, 5 November 2026.

The Hollywood Reporter (2026), “Russell Brand found guilty of rape and sexual assault at London trial”, 5 November 2026.

NPR (2026), “From comedian to convicted rapist: What to know about Russell Brand”, 5 November 2026.

CNN (2026), “Hiding in plain sight? Russell Brand’s conviction poses tough questions for UK entertainment industry”, 8 November 2026.

NPR (2026), “Russell Brand to learn sentence after being found guilty of rape and sexual assault”, 8 November 2026.

NBC News (2026), “Russell Brand awaits sentencing as he faces ‘significant’ prison time”, 9 November 2026.

 

Old Trafford’s 4–4: The Death Throes of a Giant Club

Sunday’s eight-goal draw between Manchester United and Aston Villa was billed as a classic. It was better understood as a symptom. A club that generates more than half a billion pounds a year now sits in the relegation zone, while its supporters protest against the owners who have bled it for more than two decades.

Manchester United, 20-time champions of England, went into the November international break in 18th place after drawing 4–4 with Aston Villa at Old Trafford on Sunday afternoon. The team has won once in ten league games and has gone eight league matches without a victory. It dropped into the bottom three on Saturday for the first time in 40 years, entering Sunday’s match in 19th place. The draw lifted United to 18th, with eight points from ten matches, its lowest position at that stage of a top-flight season since 1986–87, when the club stood 20th.

The match itself was a study in disintegration. Alysson scored for Villa after 59 seconds, and Nicolas Jackson added a second in the fourth minute. Bruno Fernandes converted a penalty in the 16th minute before Youri Tielemans equalised for United shortly before half-time. Within eight minutes of the restart, Villa led 4–2 after a John McGinn penalty and a goal from Leon Goretzka. Only stoppage-time goals from Joshua Zirkzee in the 92nd minute and Patrick Dorgu in the 96th rescued a point.

The sporting press has treated the comeback as a possible reprieve for manager Michael Carrick, who told reporters that he expected to remain in charge. In a testy exchange with a Sky Sports interviewer, he replied: “You’re telling me what you think, aren’t you?” Within weeks, however, he may become the latest in a long line of managers sacrificed to protect the people who actually own and run the club.

The real story was in the stands. Before kick-off, supporters released green-and-gold balloons, the colours associated with Newton Heath, the railway workers’ club from which United developed. They were answering a call from the supporters’ group The 1958 to protest against the Glazer family and minority co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe, and to boycott spending inside the stadium. A separate call had been made for a walkout in the 21st minute, marking 21 years of Glazer ownership, but the walkout did not materialise. The pre-match protest did. Supporters unfurled a banner declaring, “We don’t want a new stadium, we want the owners out,” and chanted against both the Glazers and Ratcliffe.

It was the second such protest in a week. At the Champions League match against Roma on Tuesday, fans threw green-and-gold balloons and tennis balls onto the pitch, briefly halting play, and police arrested three people. The owners can leave the ground. They cannot absent themselves from the crisis they have created.

A club turned into a financial instrument.

The decline of Manchester United cannot be explained by bad signings, a poor coach or a shortage of “winning mentality,” the explanations favoured by television pundits. It stems from the club's transformation, over the past three decades, into a vehicle for accumulating private wealth.

In 2005, the Florida-based Glazer family bought United in a takeover valuing the club at approximately £790 million. The acquisition was structured as a leveraged buyout, with approximately £525 million of acquisition debt ultimately loaded onto the club. In effect, United was made responsible for financing its own purchase. Money that could otherwise have been invested in the team, stadium, workforce, or community was instead consumed by interest payments, financing costs, and shareholder dividends. 

When the Glazers looked for outside investment, they did not sell the club. In February 2024, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the petrochemicals billionaire behind INEOS, completed a deal worth about £1.3 billion for an initial 25 per cent stake and gained control of football operations. Additional investment later increased INEOS's stake to nearly 29 per cent. The Glazer family nevertheless remained the majority owner. Ratcliffe, a prominent Brexit supporter who moved his tax residence to Monaco in 2020, was portrayed in much of the media as a Mancunian saviour who would restore the club to its proper place. 

The opposite has happened. Ratcliffe’s arrival did not end Glazer ownership. It shored it up. The family retains majority control, while the INEOS administration has subjected United to sweeping cost reductions: jobs have been eliminated, staff benefits withdrawn and ticket prices increased. Even sections of the organised support that initially viewed Ratcliffe as a possible alternative to the Glazers are now protesting against both ownership factions.

Workers and supporters pay the bill.

The club’s accounts for the year ending 30 June 2026 tell the story. United reported record revenue of £677.6 million and an operating profit of £22.6 million. Yet it still recorded a net loss of £43 million, compared with a £33 million loss the previous year. This was the club’s seventh consecutive annual loss.

United’s broader debt burden, when historic borrowing, revolving credit and outstanding transfer payments are combined, has been reported at approximately £1.15 billion. This comprises around £578 million in historic debt, £200 million drawn on its revolving credit facility and approximately £375 million owed in outstanding transfer fees. The club borrowed a net additional £90 million after the end of the financial year while financing its summer recruitment programme. The £1.15 billion figure must therefore be understood as a composite debt total, rather than £1.15 billion in conventional bank loans.

The cost of balancing these books has fallen heavily on the club’s employees. Over the two years to 30 June 2026, United’s permanent workforce fell from 1,127 to 805, a reduction of 322 jobs, or 28.6 per cent. Staffing in the club’s media department fell by about 45 per cent, and in its commercial department by about 44 per cent. Administrative and related departments, including ticketing, lost 161 positions, while football operations, including scouting and academy coaching, lost another 60.

Earlier rounds of cuts closed the employee canteen at Old Trafford and ended free hot lunches for ordinary staff, replacing them with fruit at the stadium. At Carrington, non-playing staff were offered reduced soup and bread, while first-team players continued to receive full meals. Executives described such measures as necessary to restore financial stability. For cleaners, administrators, ticket-office staff, media workers, and other affected employees, they meant diminished conditions or lost livelihoods.

Supporters, many of them working people from Manchester and the surrounding towns, have been hit by repeated ticket-price increases. Meanwhile, United spent £191.7 million on summer player acquisitions, including agents’ fees and Premier League levies. The club also incurred compensation costs tied to managerial changes, including the departure of Ruben Amorim, contributing to its ongoing losses.

On top of this comes the plan to replace Old Trafford, home to the club since 1910, with a proposed 100,000-seat stadium nearby. Designed by Foster + Partners, the project has been presented as the centrepiece of a wider regeneration scheme. Its initial estimated construction cost is about £2 billion, although the final cost and financing arrangements remain unsettled. The club has already spent £63.5 million acquiring a 25-acre parcel of land for the development. 

The commercial purpose is clear: to increase revenue per match through greater capacity, premium seating, hospitality, sponsorship, naming rights and associated development. Whatever the final financing structure, supporters and employees have every reason to expect that the costs will be recouped through higher prices, increased commercialisation and further demands for “efficiency.”

The protests and their limits

The anger in the stands is genuine and justified. The documented grievances advanced by the 1958 and associated supporter groups include the ownership structure, rising debt, the demolition or abandonment of Old Trafford, ticket policies, declining standards and what they regard as the erosion of traditional match-going culture.

But the perspective that guides these protests cannot resolve the crisis. The demand is that the Glazers sell up and, increasingly, that Ratcliffe go too. Sell to whom? In the world of the Premier League, the only buyers with the billions required are other financial oligarchs, private-equity organisations or sovereign wealth funds such as Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which controls Newcastle United. Each new owner is greeted as a potential liberator. Each has bought the club as an asset serving financial, commercial or geopolitical purposes.

The green and gold of Newton Heath has become a protest symbol, but its significance goes deeper than nostalgia. Workers associated with the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway founded the club in 1878. Like dozens of English clubs, it grew out of the working-class communities created by the industrial towns. Those roots have been progressively severed by the transformation of football, accelerated by the founding of the Premier League in 1992, into a global entertainment industry dependent upon television rights, corporate sponsorship and speculative capital.

Balloon releases and spending boycotts express that anger, but they leave the underlying property relations untouched. The task is not to find a better billionaire. It is to connect the struggle of supporters with that of the workers whose jobs and conditions are being destroyed at United and throughout the economy.

A sport owned by the few

United’s fall is not an aberration. It is the most visible expression of what the profit system does to everything it touches. A game created and sustained by working people has been turned into a commodity, its clubs into tradable assets, and its supporters into revenue streams to be priced, divided, and squeezed.

The same logic that closes the staff canteen at Old Trafford closes hospitals, schools and factories across Britain. The same financial oligarchy that buys football clubs dominates the economy and dictates policy to governments, Labour and Conservative alike.

Sunday’s chaotic draw may buy Michael Carrick a few more weeks. It will not save Manchester United from its owners. Football can be returned to those who play and watch it only as part of a broader struggle to place society’s resources under the democratic control of the working class, organised to meet human need rather than private profit.

Sources

1. ESPN match report and confirmed scoring chronology [espn.com]
2. Aston Villa official match report [avfc.co.uk]
3. Manchester United official match report [manutd.com]
4. Sky Sports: Carrick expects to remain in charge [skysports.com]
5. ESPN: ownership protest and failed 21st-minute walkout [espn.com]
6. The People’s Person: The 1958 protest call and Roma arrests [thepeoplesperson.com]
7. Manchester United official 2026 financial results [ir.manutd.com]
8. Manchester United 2026 annual-report page [ir.manutd.com]
9. Report on workforce reductions and combined debt [tvcnews.tv]
10. The Guardian: closure of the Old Trafford staff canteen [theguardian.com]
11. Place North West: £63.5 million stadium-land purchase [placenorthwest.co.uk]
12. The Independent: the Glazer leveraged buyout and United’s debt [independent.co.uk]
13. Sky Sports: Ratcliffe’s original minority investment [skysports.com]
14. AFP report: Ratcliffe’s stake increased to nearly 29 per cent [news18.com]

 

Usman Khawaja: “It was all of us” — Sandpaper gate and the scapegoating at the heart of Australian cricket

Eight years after the Cape Town ball-tampering scandal, former Australian Test opener Usman Khawaja says responsibility extended beyond the three players. His intervention further undermines the official account that reduced a systemic crisis in Australian cricket to the misconduct of three individuals.

The official mythology constructed around Australian cricket’s 2018 ball-tampering scandal is beginning to unravel. Eight years after television cameras caught Cameron Bancroft attempting to alter the condition of the ball with sandpaper at Newlands in Cape Town, former Australian Test opener Usman Khawaja has declared that knowledge and responsibility for what occurred belonged not merely to the three players subsequently punished by Cricket Australia (CA), but to the team collectively. [smh.com.au]

The assertion appears in Khawaja’s autobiography, Sabr, with extracts published ahead of the book’s release. His formulation could hardly be clearer: “It was all of us. Not the batters, not the bowlers, not the staff. All of us.” He insists he believed from the outset that the team should have accepted responsibility collectively, rather than concentrating it on Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft. [theguardian.com]

Even more damaging is Khawaja’s claim that Cape Town was not the beginning of the affair. According to his account, sandpaper had already been discussed and used during the preceding Test at St George’s Park in Port Elizabeth. He recalls open dressing-room discussion about finding a way to roughen the ball, identifying sandpaper as an effective method, and Bancroft volunteering to use it. He also recalls Smith indicating that he did not want to know what was being done.

These are Khawaja's allegations, not findings established by a new independent investigation. But if substantiated, they would be devastating to the account Cricket Australia has accepted and defended since 2018. CA’s investigation attributed prior knowledge of the Cape Town scheme to Smith, Warner and Bancroft. The first two received 12-month playing bans and Bancroft nine months. Warner also received an indefinite leadership ban, which was overturned in 2024.

Khawaja's question is therefore broader than who knew what and when during a cricket match. It concerns how sporting institutions respond when conduct generated within their own competitive culture threatens their legitimacy. Sandpapergate increasingly appears not merely as an episode of cheating but as a case study in the political economy of modern professional sport: the creation of relentless performance pressures from above, followed by the individualisation of responsibility when the consequences become publicly embarrassing.

 

The official story comes under renewed pressure.

Khawaja’s intervention is particularly serious because he says that, despite being a member of the Australian side and sitting beside Bancroft during the Test, CA's investigator never interviewed him. That claim alone warrants an explanation. An investigation claiming to establish the boundaries of knowledge within a touring cricket team can hardly be considered exhaustive if it did not question team members who may have had relevant information. Yet Cricket Australia has responded by defending the integrity of the original process. After Khawaja’s revelations, the organisation said it remained comfortable with its investigation and its findings.

The issue is made still more significant by what had already entered the public record. In 2021, Bancroft, when asked whether the bowlers knew that the ball was being altered, responded that it was “self-explanatory”. Australia’s Cape Town bowling quartet of Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon subsequently issued a joint statement categorically denying prior knowledge that a foreign substance had been brought onto the field to alter the ball.

Those conflicting accounts cannot be reconciled by simply repeating the 2018 findings. Khawaja’s statement does not, by itself, prove the precise knowledge or conduct of every individual player, and it should not be used as a pretext for shifting the scapegoating operation from one group of cricketers to another. That would merely reproduce the essential logic of the original affair. The important question is not which additional individuals should now be publicly sacrificed. It is why the institutional and cultural circumstances that produced the scandal were reduced to the misconduct of three men.

Three men made to carry an institutional crisis.

The extraordinarily punitive treatment of Smith, Warner and Bancroft performed a definite function. By identifying three guilty individuals, Cricket Australia could present the scandal as an aberration from an otherwise healthy system rather than as the expression of that system. Khawaja now says that he argued in the dressing room that the team should accept what had happened collectively. His account is explicit: “We did this as a team. We knew what was going on, and we have to take it as a team.” Instead, as he puts it, the three punished players “got crucified”.

On Sunday, 8 November, Khawaja amplified this point, denying allegations that he had thrown former teammates “under the bus”. He described Smith, Warner and Bancroft as those who had taken the blame for everybody else and said that he continued to seek collective acceptance of responsibility. This goes to the heart of the affair. Scapegoating does not mean that the individuals concerned bear no responsibility. It means that their individual responsibility is isolated from the social or institutional circumstances in which their actions developed. The system survives by converting a systemic failure into an individual moral defect.

The mechanism is familiar throughout capitalist society. A bank caught engaging in misconduct discovers a “rogue trader”. A corporation confronted with illegality finds a handful of wayward employees. A government department confronted with a scandal promises disciplinary action against individual officials while preserving the policy and hierarchy that produced the disaster. Professional sport, increasingly organised according to the same commercial imperatives as every other major entertainment industry, operates no differently. The essential purpose is containment.

“Winning without counting the cost”

A striking contradiction sits at the centre of the Sandpapergate narrative. The supposedly aberrant behaviour of three Australian cricketers occurred within an organisation whose own subsequent cultural review identified serious problems concerning its fixation upon winning. The independent review Cricket Australia commissioned and The Ethics Centre conducted examined the organisation’s culture after Cape Town. Its central finding was that Australian cricket had developed what it termed a culture of “winning without counting the costs”. The review concluded that the emphasis placed upon winning had contributed to an erosion of organisational culture and that aspects of player management encouraged negative behaviour.

That wording is significant. CA emphasised that the review did not characterise the organisation as simply pursuing “win at all costs”, but rather as seeking to “win without counting the cost”. The distinction hardly exonerates the organisation. Instead, it identifies the institutional mechanism more precisely. The pursuit of victory had become separated from serious consideration of the methods used to obtain it and the consequences for players, opponents, and the game itself. The review did not confine itself to what occurred on the field. The Ethics Centre specifically framed winning as extending from on-field tactics to the formation of elite players and “the way in which the ‘business’ of cricket is undertaken”.

This was therefore never simply a story about sandpaper. It was about an institutional structure in which performance, commercial success, reputation and victory had become mutually reinforcing imperatives. Yet the public drama of 2018 transformed this broader organisational crisis into the personal disgrace of three players. The contradiction could scarcely be clearer. The cultural investigation acknowledged institutional conditions that encouraged harmful behaviour, while the disciplinary narrative kept responsibility for Sandpapergate tightly individualised.

 

 

The commodification of cricket

Cricket's transformation over recent decades provides the broader context. Elite cricket is no longer organised principally around the game's rhythms, traditions, or even competitive requirements. It exists within an expanding international entertainment market dominated by broadcast contracts, sponsorship, franchise competitions and the ceaseless production of commercially saleable sporting content.

This does not mean that highly paid international cricketers are equivalent to ordinary wage workers. Plainly they are not. A small layer of elite athletes can earn sums unavailable to the overwhelming majority of the population. But their privileged remuneration does not emancipate professional sport from capitalist social relations. It integrates the athletes far more completely into them. Their performances become commodities. Their personalities become brands. Their competitions become broadcast products. National identity itself becomes commercially exploitable material.

What appears publicly as an almost religious obsession with Australian cricketing supremacy therefore coincides with thoroughly material interests. Victory attracts audiences. Audiences sustain broadcasters. Broadcast exposure attracts sponsors. Success enhances individual commercial value. Failure threatens contracts, careers, reputations and institutional revenues. The romantic mythology of representing the nation consequently coexists with a ruthless commercial structure.

Within such a system, exhortations to win are never abstract. They descend through administrators, selectors, coaches and players as concrete pressures. A sporting culture that measures almost everything according to competitive success inevitably produces individuals searching for marginal advantages. The boundary between permissible innovation, gamesmanship and outright violation becomes increasingly vulnerable when winning assumes overriding importance.

This does not excuse cheating. It explains why moral sermons about three defective personalities explain so little. Indeed, the post-Cape Town cultural review commissioned by CA itself reached beyond individual misconduct. The Ethics Centre interviewed administrators, current and former cricketers and sponsors, scrutinising policies, remuneration structures, ethical frameworks and codes of conduct. The resulting institutional critique sits uneasily beside the insistence that the decisive responsibility for Cape Town could nevertheless be neatly confined to three players.

National morality and the business of sport

Sandpapergate acquired its extraordinary emotional force because Australian cricket had long presented itself as something more than professional entertainment. The national team was invested with claims about Australian character: toughness, honesty, aggression, resilience and playing hard but supposedly within an identifiable moral boundary. The visual spectacle of Bancroft concealing the sandpaper therefore punctured something more commercially valuable than the surface of a cricket ball. It damaged a national brand. Once the affair became a crisis of legitimacy, punishment had to be demonstrative. That process also reveals the peculiar hypocrisy surrounding professional sport. The relentless pursuit of competitive advantage is celebrated until someone crosses a boundary that too clearly exposes the system's logic. At that point administrators suddenly rediscover morality.

The individual offender becomes useful precisely because he permits the institution to perform moral purification. Expulsion, suspension and public humiliation supposedly demonstrate the health of the organisation rather than raising questions about the environment that produced the offending action. Thus structural responsibility disappears precisely when it is most necessary to examine it.

Khawaja and collective responsibility

Khawaja’s most important contribution is therefore not simply his allegation concerning how many people knew about sandpaper. It is his insistence upon collective responsibility. That principle runs directly counter to the institutional logic through which Sandpapergate was resolved. If Khawaja’s account is accurate, the entire basis for the scandal's public containment becomes questionable. But even independently of his specific allegations, the cultural findings commissioned by CA after Cape Town had already demonstrated something broader: Australian cricket possessed institutional problems that could not rationally be explained through the moral character of three players.

Khawaja's eight-year delay in speaking publicly will inevitably be used against him. Critics can point out that the revelations accompany the publication of a commercially sold autobiography. That does not answer what he has alleged. Nor does the observation that memories differ after eight years resolve the conflict between his account and previous statements. The contradictions now require evidence, not insinuation.

 If CA is confident in the 2018 investigation, nothing should threaten reopening the factual record through a genuinely independent process capable of establishing who was questioned, what evidence was gathered, how conclusions were reached, and whether significant testimony was excluded. Anything less leaves the obvious question unanswered: why was Khawaja, a member of the team who now says he possessed directly relevant information, not interviewed?

The unresolved meaning of Sandpapergate

Nevertheless, there is a danger in treating another investigation merely as an exercise in finding additional guilty individuals. That would miss the larger lesson. Sandpaper gate’s significance lies in the relationship between individual action and institutional pressure. The objective should not be to replace three scapegoats with six, eight or eleven. It is to understand how a culture was created in which such conduct became conceivable and how, when that culture produced a public disaster, responsibility was concentrated upon the most convenient individuals.

Smith, Warner and Bancroft unquestionably carried responsibility for their own conduct as established in the disciplinary process. But personal responsibility and institutional responsibility are not mutually exclusive. Insisting that one abolishes the other is the ideological sleight of hand that scapegoating depends on. The cultural review Cricket Australia subsequently commissioned seriously undermined that simplistic explanation. It identified a cricketing organisation damaged by its approach to winning and by its failure to reckon adequately with the costs of pursuing success. Khawaja has now reopened the even more explosive question of whether the Sandpapergate investigation's narrow attribution of knowledge holds up.

Eight years later, Cricket Australia can no longer credibly respond simply by repeating its confidence in the original process. The deepest issue raised by Cape Town was never whether three Australian cricketers suddenly lost their moral compass. It was why a sporting institution saturated with competitive and commercial pressure produced such conduct, and why, when the affair exploded publicly, institutional survival demanded individualising responsibility.

Khawaja’s blunt formulation, “It was all of us”, cuts through the carefully constructed mythology of 2018. Whatever further evidence establishes about the knowledge of particular individuals, it points to a truth that extends far beyond cricket. When institutions create the conditions for misconduct but punish only those caught enacting it, scapegoating does not correct systemic failure. It is one of the main ways the system protects itself.

Bibliography

Cricket Australia. “Reviews Published into Cricket Culture.” cricket.com.au, 29 October 2018. [cricket.com.au]

Cricket Australia. “All 42 Culture Review Recommendations.” cricket.com.au, 29 October 2018. [cricket.com.au]

The Ethics Centre. Australian Cricket: A Matter of Balance. Review commissioned by the Board of Cricket Australia, October 2018. [sportnz.org.nz]

The Ethics Centre. “Cricket Australia: A Matter of Balance.” The review records its central finding that CA had developed a culture of “winning without counting the costs”. [ethics.org.au]

The Ethics Centre. “Renewing the Culture of Cricket in Australia.” 26 November 2019. [ethics.org.au]

Khawaja, Usman. Sabr. Autobiography, forthcoming at the date of this article, with publication scheduled for 10 November 2026. The Sandpapergate claims discussed above derive from material released ahead of publication. [smh.com.au]

Sydney Morning Herald. “It was all of us: Khawaja blows the whistle on more sandpaper use in South Africa in 2018.” 7 November 2026. This is the principal published source for Khawaja’s account of the dressing-room discussions and alleged use of sandpaper at Port Elizabeth. [smh.com.au]

ESPN. “‘It was all of us’ — Khawaja exposes sandpaper details from 2018.” 6 November 2026. [espn.com]

The Guardian. “‘It was all of us’: Khawaja says entire Australia team knew about sandpaper ball tampering plot.” 7 November 2026.

Reuters. “Khawaja denies throwing ‘anyone under the bus’ with comments about ball-tampering scandal.” 8 November 2026. [reuters.com]

  

Grenfell Britain: An insider’s indictment that stops at the threshold of socialism

A record of class contempt

The forthcoming Grenfell Britain: Greed, Power and a National Tragedy by Emma Dent Coad promises to be a powerful indictment of the social relations that produced the Grenfell Tower fire and of the political establishment that has denied justice to its victims ever since. Dent Coad stands in a unique relationship to the events. She was elected Labour MP for Kensington only four days before the fire of 14 June 2017, lived close to the tower and had already spent years as a councillor opposing the policies pursued by the Conservative-controlled Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The publisher presents the book as both an act of witness and an examination of what Grenfell reveals about Britain as a whole.

That starting point is entirely justified. Grenfell cannot be understood as an isolated building failure or even as the product merely of individual corruption, bureaucratic incompetence and corporate dishonesty. Seventy-two people died in a disaster whose essential conditions had been created over decades through deregulation, privatisation, attacks on council housing, cuts to fire services and the subordination of elementary human needs to property speculation and corporate profit. The final Grenfell Tower Inquiry report acknowledged that every death was avoidable and documented extensive failures extending through government, construction companies, manufacturers and the institutions supposedly responsible for protecting residents.

The term that best describes these processes was supplied nearly two centuries ago by Friedrich Engels: social murder. In The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Engels used the concept to describe how society knowingly places workers in circumstances that prematurely destroy their lives and then permits those circumstances to continue. The concept matters because it rejects attempts to separate individual catastrophes from the social order that produces them. The World Socialist Web Site applied this analysis to Grenfell immediately, and the Anatomy of the Grenfell Tower fire address delivered at the Socialist Equality Party's August 2017 public meeting traced the disaster through the interconnected processes of deregulation, austerity, property speculation and the degradation of social housing. [wsws.org]

Evidence since then has vindicated that assessment. The inquiry's final report found what the World Socialist Web Site described as "systematic dishonesty" among companies connected with the refurbishment, including efforts to manipulate testing, misrepresent data and conceal the dangers associated with products used in the tower. At the same time, government departments had failed over many years to respond adequately to warnings about combustible materials on high-rise buildings. [wsws.org]

What makes Dent Coad's intervention potentially valuable is that she approaches these processes not as an outside commentator but as somebody who witnessed the extraordinary gulf separating two Kensingtons. On one side stand enormous concentrations of property wealth, luxury housing and some of the richest households in Britain. On the other are council tenants, low-paid workers and families struggling for decent housing in what the publisher itself describes as a broader housing crisis. The publicity for Grenfell Britain explicitly connects the disaster to unsafe housing, empty luxury developments and the continuing domination of housing policy by wealth and privilege.

Grenfell exposed this class divide with almost unbearable clarity. Residents had repeatedly warned of the dangers confronting them. The Grenfell Action Group's warnings before the fire are now notorious. The failure was therefore not principally one of insufficient knowledge. Those with institutional authority possessed warnings and evidence, while those without power were treated as troublesome obstacles. As the inquiry's own findings later showed, avoidable danger coexisted with corporate cost-cutting and government failure.

This is precisely why Grenfell cannot be reduced to the language of "lessons learned". The facts point towards something far more fundamental: a social order in which the accumulation of private wealth takes precedence over the safety and dignity of working people. The facts Dent Coad assembles point towards a conclusion the working class of Grenfell had already reached by bitter experience.

The limits of the parliamentary perspective

The fundamental political problem posed by Dent Coad's account, however, is the contradiction between the devastating character of the evidence and the parliamentary Labour framework within which its author has historically operated. Grenfell does not simply indict Conservative politicians, corrupt companies or an unusually callous local authority. It raises an unavoidable question about the Labour Party and the entire political system through which capitalist interests have been defended.

Dent Coad's personal record of opposition to Kensington and Chelsea Council deserves serious treatment. But individual sincerity cannot resolve the historical problem Labour itself represents. Grenfell took place after decades in which Conservative and Labour governments successively deregulated the economy, expanded the power of private capital, facilitated the financialisation of housing and subordinated local government to austerity and market mechanisms. In its assessment of the inquiry report, the World Socialist Web Site noted that the inquiry itself identified governmental failures stretching through both Conservative and Labour administrations, while failing to impose genuine political accountability on the leading figures responsible. [wsws.org]

Jeremy Corbyn's experience is decisive in this respect. Corbyn's election as Labour leader generated enormous expectations among workers and young people who saw his leadership as a chance to reverse decades of Blairism, austerity and war. Yet the political orientation remained centred upon transforming the Labour Party and achieving social change through Parliament rather than constructing an independent revolutionary movement of the working class. Grenfell itself exposed the consequences of this orientation.

The World Socialist Web Site repeatedly warned that Labour's participation in the government-established Grenfell Inquiry risked subordinating popular demands for justice to institutions incapable of providing it. A 2018 report on a Justice4Grenfell meeting noted that Dent Coad participated alongside figures from the trade-union movement in pressuring the official inquiry and existing institutions. Another WSWS assessment in 2019 argued that Labour and its allies were legitimising an inquiry that could not itself establish criminal liability. [wsws.org]

The issue was never whether individual Labour politicians genuinely sympathised with the bereaved or regarded the conduct of the council and corporations with disgust. The more fundamental question was whether justice could be secured through the very state institutions responsible for maintaining the economic and political structures that produced Grenfell. It could not.

The 2019 general election supplied another bitter lesson. Dent Coad lost Kensington after having secured the historically Conservative constituency in 2017. But Labour's defeat cannot seriously be explained simply through electoral arithmetic. Corbyn's leadership retreated repeatedly before Labour's right wing and refused to mobilise the enormous movement that had emerged around his leadership in a political struggle against the party's Blairite apparatus. The result was not the transformation of Labour into an instrument of socialist politics but the preparation of conditions for restoring the party's openly pro-business leadership. Grenfell therefore poses the question that parliamentary reformism cannot answer: what happens when the institutions the working class is told to appeal to are themselves structurally integrated into the defence of capitalist property and political power?

After the Inquiry: Where is the justice?

The publication of the final Grenfell Tower Inquiry report in September 2024 demonstrated the dimensions of this contradiction. It identified extensive failings and corporate wrongdoing, yet years after the disaster, criminal accountability had still not followed. The Grenfell Tower fire public inquiry's final whitewash noted that the inquiry had no power to determine criminal or civil liability and that, when the report appeared, the Metropolitan Police had not arrested or charged anyone in connection with the disaster.

The subsequent After the Grenfell Fire inquiry: Where are the arrests? drew out the political implications. Its central argument was that Grenfell involved identifiable decisions made under conditions in which profit and commercial advantage were treated as more important than working-class safety. The inquiry documented regulatory failures, corporate dishonesty and the ability of private businesses to exploit a weakened regulatory regime, yet justice remained deferred. [wsws.org]

This continued under the Labour government elected in 2024. The final inquiry report appeared under Keir Starmer's premiership. Starmer apologised on behalf of the British state and said that the disaster should never have happened. Still, the response did not overturn the basic conditions that had allowed political responsibility to be evaded. The WSWS noted at the time that the government promised to consider the inquiry's recommendations, while accountability through prosecutions remained unresolved.

There could be little more devastating evidence of the inadequacy of the proposition that institutional exposure automatically produces justice. Grenfell has been investigated, reconstructed, analysed, documented and memorialised. Parliamentary statements have been delivered. Political apologies have been issued. Thousands of pages of inquiry evidence have entered the historical record. Yet the fundamental issue raised by the bereaved and survivors from the outset remains. Justice has not followed automatically from truth. Nor has the housing crisis that gave rise to Grenfell disappeared. Indeed, the publicity for Dent Coad's forthcoming book makes precisely this argument. Grenfell Britain is promoted as asking why, if Grenfell failed to change everything, the conditions surrounding housing inequality and insecurity remain embedded in British society.

This is the question the book must ultimately confront. But the answer cannot finally be found by demanding that the existing political establishment behave differently. The persistence of the conditions exposed at Grenfell is not simply a failure of political will. It expresses social interests.

Grenfell and the logic of capitalism

Housing under capitalism possesses a fundamental contradiction. For the working class it is a basic social necessity. For capital, it is property, an investment, an asset class, and a source of rent, interest, and speculative wealth. In London this contradiction reaches grotesque proportions. Homes exist simultaneously as places where human beings must live and as financial instruments whose profitability may depend on restricting supply, increasing rents, or maximising land values.

Public housing represented, however partially and inadequately, an intrusion of social need into this logic. This is why its destruction became a central component of the neoliberal offensive associated with the Thatcher governments and why subsequent administrations never reversed that offensive. Council estates sitting upon enormously valuable London land occupy territory whose potential exchange value is regarded by developers, banks and investors as being squandered when it provides secure and affordable accommodation to working people. Grenfell stood at the geographical centre of this social antagonism.

The disaster therefore cannot be answered by regulatory rearrangement alone, necessary though rigorous safety regulation unquestionably is. Regulations operating within a society dominated by private profit are under continual pressure from the corporations they regulate. Housing remains shaped by the power of landowners, banks, developers and construction conglomerates. Local authorities operate amid financial constraints imposed from above. Governments of every political colouration insist that the commanding heights of economic life must remain privately owned.

This is why the concept of social murder remains indispensable. It shifts attention from individual wickedness towards the social structure that continuously reproduces conditions in which preventable suffering becomes normal. That does not absolve individuals or corporations of responsibility. On the contrary, those responsible for criminal conduct must be held accountable. But prosecution, however necessary, cannot by itself eliminate the economic system that generates the same conflict between private profit and social need in another form.

What is to be done

The great merit of Emma Dent Coad's proposed indictment is therefore also the source of the political questions it must raise. If Grenfell demonstrates the consequences of corporate greed, political cowardice and class privilege; if successive governments allowed conditions to emerge in which working-class lives could be subordinated to commercial interests; if official investigations can document devastating evidence without automatically producing justice; and if the housing crisis persists after all the pledges that Grenfell must never happen again, then what conclusion follows?

Britain cannot need merely better politicians administering the same economic system. The necessary conclusion is a break with Labourism and every conception that the machinery of capitalist government can gradually be transformed into an instrument for abolishing the power of capital. The working class requires its own independent political movement, organised internationally and armed with a socialist programme. In Britain, this means building the Socialist Equality Party as the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International and developing independent organisations of working-class struggle that can challenge the authority of the trade-union and Labour bureaucracies.

Housing must cease to be organised primarily as a vehicle for private accumulation. The major property interests, construction conglomerates and financial institutions upon which the housing system depends must be brought under democratic public ownership and workers' control. Housing construction, maintenance and fire safety must be planned according to social need and scientifically established standards, not the profitability requirements of investors and contractors. Vast social resources must be directed towards building high-quality council housing and making existing homes genuinely safe. That would not constitute an administrative modification of capitalism. It would mean an attack upon capitalist property relations themselves.

Grenfell's residents did not lack warnings. They did not lack intelligence. They did not lack determination. They did not lack evidence. Long before the fire they understood the danger facing them, and after the catastrophe survivors, relatives and residents refused to allow the dead to disappear beneath official condolences and public-relations exercises. What they lacked, and what the working class continues to lack, is political power.

Grenfell's enduring significance lies here. The tower stands not merely as the site of a terrible disaster but as an indictment of an entire social order. No inquiry report can resolve that indictment, because the decisive question lies beyond any inquiry's jurisdiction: which class controls society, and in whose interests are its immense resources organised? The answer to social murder is not another promise that capitalism will regulate itself more carefully. It is socialism.

Bibliography

Dent Coad, Emma. Grenfell Britain: Greed, Power and a National Tragedy. London: Verso, forthcoming 8 June 2027. The publisher description presents the book as an examination of Grenfell's legacy and Britain's continuing housing crisis. [penguinran...mhouse.com]

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845.

Scripps, Thomas. Anatomy of the Grenfell Tower fire. World Socialist Web Site, 22 August 2017. [wsws.org]

Scripps, Thomas. After the Grenfell Fire inquiry: Where are the arrests?. World Socialist Web Site, 12 September 2024. [wsws.org]

Stevens, Robert. Grenfell Tower fire public inquiry delivers its final whitewash. World Socialist Web Site, 4 September 2024.

Stevens, Robert. Labour and unions seek to corral social anger over Grenfell fire behind official inquiry. World Socialist Web Site, 20 June 2018. [wsws.org]

Stevens, Robert. Grenfell fire anniversary used by pseudo-left to boost Labour and Corbyn. World Socialist Web Site, 17 June 2019. [wsws.org]

Stevens, Robert. Grenfell Tower to be dismantled: Why is there still no justice?. World Socialist Web Site, 11 February 2025. [wsws.org]

 

The Bluesky Scammers Are the New Yahoo Boys

The fraud networks preying on Bluesky users are not an aberration confined to one social-media platform. From Nigeria’s Yahoo Boys to the trafficking compounds of Southeast Asia, online fraud has developed alongside an economic order that produces mass insecurity and poverty while transforming the internet into another arena for private enrichment.

On 17 October, Bluesky acknowledged that a phishing campaign had compromised more than 4,500 accounts. The attack spread posts promoting a fake government payment. The company temporarily suspended compromised accounts while attempting to secure them and restore access to their owners. [thehackernews.com],

The scale of the aftermath is evident in an independent analysis of Bluesky's public moderation stream. Agent Sky recorded 3,896 reversed account takedowns between 17 and 19 October. The researcher cautions that the moderation data do not themselves establish why each account was restored, although the exceptional increase coincided with the phishing incident. The episode was only the most visible manifestation of a problem that has grown alongside the platform.

Fake support accounts, impersonators, romance scams and investment fraud have followed users onto Bluesky. In December 2024, NBC News reported a “rapid increase in scam activity”, including romance and so-called pig-butchering scams. In March 2025, Bluesky Safety warned of scammers impersonating Bluesky and its staff while approaching artists through direct messages and attempting to move them off the platform. The potential target population has grown dramatically. According to the company's 2025 Transparency Report, Bluesky grew from 25.94 million to 41.41 million users that year, an increase of nearly 60 per cent.

The comparison with the Nigerian “Yahoo Boys” is apt, although not in the manner suggested by racialised representations of Nigerian cybercrime. The fundamental connection is neither nationality nor ethnicity. It is the growth of an international economy of fraud alongside poverty, precarious employment and extraordinary concentrations of wealth.

What produced the Yahoo Boys

The Yahoo Boy phenomenon developed in Nigeria during the formative period of popular internet use in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The name reflected the importance of Yahoo and Yahoo Mail to early internet communications. Fraudsters exploited email for advance-fee scams, fabricated inheritances and other schemes. Over the ensuing decades, the methods expanded into romance scams, business fraud and financial sextortion.

The consequences for victims can be devastating. Statistics maintained by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection show a pronounced predominance of boys and young men among identified victims in the sextortion reports and requests for assistance it receives. An investigation by CBC Marketplace reported in October 2025 that it had verified more than 40 suicides across North America, Australia and the UK during the previous four years that were linked to sextortion, including five in Canada.

The social-media companies themselves have revealed something of the scale. In July 2024, Meta announced that it had removed around 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria that had attempted to engage in financial sextortion. Among them was a coordinated network of approximately 2,500 accounts that the company linked to a group of around 20 individuals. Meta said that the coordinated network principally targeted adult men in the United States, though some accounts also attempted to target minors.

Explaining the social origins of such criminality is not an excuse. Where children and young people are subjected to financial sextortion, there can be no ambiguity about the destructive character of the crime. But moral denunciation by itself explains nothing about why the phenomenon has developed on such a scale.

Nigeria is Africa's most populous country and has enormous natural resources. Yet its official 2022 Multidimensional Poverty Index found that 133 million people—63 per cent of the population—were multidimensionally poor. Older claims that youth unemployment exceeded 50 per cent should no longer be repeated without substantial qualification, as Nigeria later changed its labour-force methodology. The National Bureau of Statistics reported unemployment of 7.2 per cent among 15-to-24-year-olds in the second quarter of 2023. But this headline figure hardly captures whether people have secure, well-paid work.

The same survey reported informal employment at 92.7 per cent, time-related underemployment at 11.8 per cent, and a youth NEET rate of 13.8 per cent. These statistics point to a social reality far more complex than an unemployment rate alone can reveal: enormous numbers of people classified as employed remain in informal and precarious economic circumstances.

Academic research has likewise placed Nigerian cybercrime within a broader social crisis. A doctoral investigation by Tolulope Lembola Ojolo at the University of KwaZulu-Natal conducted in-depth interviews with 29 Yahoo Boys across Lagos, Ibadan and Ado-Ekiti. The research identified poverty, unemployment, corrupt political leadership and law enforcement, the failure of vital social institutions, and the proliferation of internet services as conditions that combined to facilitate cybercrime. Some interviewees rationalised their activities as redistribution or retaliation for Africa's historical exploitation through slavery and colonialism.

Such rationalisations do not transform fraud into anti-imperialism. The pensioner whose savings are stolen or the teenager subjected to financial blackmail bears no responsibility for colonial oppression. But the testimony reveals how social desperation can be refracted through a reactionary ideology in which exploiting another ordinary person is represented as revenge against the system. The result is not resistance to exploitation but its reproduction at another level.

The con moves to Bluesky.

As Bluesky attracted users leaving established social networks, fraud followed the migration. NBC News reported in December 2024 that scammers were using established romance and pig-butchering methods familiar from other platforms. Artists and writers have become targets. In July 2026, editor Rob Bignell documented what he described as the proliferation of supposed beta-reader and editor profiles targeting authors on Bluesky. He described profiles using similar approaches and said he had traced a number of the suspected scams to Nigeria, including through accounts on freelancing sites and suspicious LinkedIn identities. His investigation is an individual case study rather than a systematic measurement of fraud across the platform. Still, it illustrates how established forms of online fraud can be adapted to particular online communities.

The targets themselves are revealing. Writers, illustrators, editors and freelancers increasingly work under conditions of insecurity, competing for readers, commissions and contracts in a cultural economy being reorganised by digital platforms and artificial intelligence. Fraud preys upon the hope of a break. Somebody's search for readers, professional recognition or employment becomes the scammer's opening. One insecure layer of the international workforce is turned against another. Bluesky's own statistics demonstrate the pressures created by rapid expansion. User-submitted moderation reports rose from 6.48 million in 2024 to 9.97 million in 2025, a 54 per cent increase. “Misleading” content accounted for 43.73 per cent of reports in 2025.

The October 2026 phishing attack provides another perspective. Agent Sky's examination of the public moderation stream counted 76,772 account takedowns between 21 September and 20 October but no application of Bluesky's “scam” label to accounts over the same period. The analysis recorded just nine “impersonation” labels. These figures come from an independent analysis, not statistics published by Bluesky itself, a distinction that should be maintained.  But the underlying contradiction goes beyond warning labels. Social networks depend upon enormous populations communicating with minimum friction while simultaneously confronting organised actors seeking to exploit precisely that openness.

Fraud becomes an industry.

The Yahoo Boys represent one historical and predominantly decentralised manifestation of online fraud. In Southeast Asia, however, the fraudulent economy has assumed something approaching an industrial form.

Enormous scam compounds have emerged in which criminal organisations combine internet fraud with human trafficking and forced labour. In 2023, the United Nations Human Rights Office reported that credible sources indicated at least 120,000 people across Myanmar might be held in situations where they were forced to conduct online scams, while estimates for Cambodia were around 100,000. Laos, the Philippines and Thailand were also identified as destination or transit countries.

This phenomenon demonstrates the contradictory character of the international scam economy. Among the people committing fraud are willing participants, but others have themselves been trafficked and coerced into criminal activity. Research published by Asia Times in April 2026 described the experience of a trafficked worker who reported working 15-hour days, seven days a week, simultaneously conducting multiple conversations with prospective victims. The account described an organised division of labour in which different workers established contact, cultivated targets and extracted payments.

A 2026 UN report also documented torture, sexual abuse and forced labour within scam centres. It reported that survivors described severe economic pressures before their recruitment and that some police and border guards were alleged to have been complicit. Here the language of individual criminality becomes insufficient. A person sitting behind a keyboard may be perpetrating fraud against someone thousands of miles away while simultaneously being coerced by the organisation controlling the compound. Recognising that reality does not minimise the harm inflicted upon the person being defrauded. It reveals the extraordinary social relationships through which contemporary cybercrime operates.

The revenues are enormous. Guardio, citing Chainalysis, estimated $17 billion stolen across cryptocurrency scams in 2025, while saying pig-butchering scams grew by nearly 40 per cent year on year. Separately, the Associated Press reported a UN estimate that losses from scams in Asia during 2023 were between $18 billion and $37 billion. Governments have responded with raids, criminal prosecutions and geopolitical pressure. On 13 October 2026, a Chinese court sentenced three members of the Wei family criminal organisation to death for their roles in a criminal network operating in Myanmar's Kokang region. Another three were given life sentences, and 55 received prison terms of varying lengths.

But suppressing individual organisations does not abolish the economic conditions sustaining the industry. Research published in Asia Times described how infrastructure remained after supposed closures and argued that operations driven out of one location could reopen elsewhere. The same article cited estimates placing annual scam revenue in Cambodia at $12.9 billion in 2023, roughly 40 per cent of the country's GDP.

The platforms and the limits of moderation

The same contradiction appears at platform level. There is extensive evidence that technology companies are aware of the growth of financial sextortion and organised internet fraud. The Network Contagion Research Institute documented the circulation of instructional materials, scripts and videos facilitating financial sextortion and described Yahoo Boys as playing a major role in the extraordinary expansion of financial sextortion targeting minors.

The scale makes moderation immensely difficult. In June 2026, Snap said it was enforcing against about 220 suspected sextortion instances per day, or roughly 6,600 per month globally, counting both proactively identified cases and alleged violations reported by users. The company published these figures specifically while disputing the decontextualised circulation of an earlier figure claiming 10,000 user reports of sextortion each month.

Bluesky faces the same problem on a smaller scale. Its moderation operation was expanded to roughly 100 moderators during 2024, a year in which its moderation service received 6.48 million reports. The company also increased automation, which reduced processing times but could produce false positives requiring subsequent human involvement and appeals. Bluesky's decentralised architecture distinguishes it from some older social-media companies, but a different technical architecture cannot abolish the social relationships the technology operates within. A decentralised network connecting millions of people still exists within a world characterised by poverty, private wealth, commercial competition and economic insecurity.

Nor can the struggle against fraud justify unlimited surveillance. The existence of criminal exploitation cannot provide a blank cheque for states and corporations to impose universal identification or monitor legitimate political communications. Protection from fraud and defence of democratic rights must not be presented as mutually exclusive. Technology does not exist outside society. Neither do the criminals who exploit it.

The new Yahoo Boys

To describe the Bluesky scammers as “the new Yahoo Boys” therefore requires precision. It cannot mean that fraudulent accounts appearing on Bluesky are necessarily Nigerian, still less that fraud reflects some characteristic peculiar to Nigerians or Africans. The historical significance of the Yahoo Boys lies elsewhere. They represented an early manifestation of a criminal economy that has subsequently become international, technologically sophisticated and, in the Southeast Asian scam compounds, increasingly industrialised.

The form continually changes. The advance-fee email becomes the romance profile. The romance profile becomes the fraudulent cryptocurrency opportunity. Individual scammers operate alongside large criminal organisations commanding labour forces measured in the thousands.

The platform changes too. Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and now Bluesky become different territories across which fraudulent activity migrates. What persists beneath technological change is an international social crisis that provides both vulnerable targets and a continual supply of people who can be recruited, voluntarily or coercively, into the scam economy.

The individual fraudster remains responsible for deliberate harm. Social explanation cannot become moral absolution. But individual morality alone cannot explain mass social phenomena. When similar criminal industries continually regenerate across different continents, platforms and technologies, the question necessarily becomes social. Police operations can arrest perpetrators. Platforms can remove fraudulent accounts. Stronger security can prevent particular phishing attacks. Human moderation can disrupt individual networks. These measures matter because they can prevent concrete harm.

What they cannot do is abolish the conditions continually reproducing the problem. The experience of the Southeast Asian compounds exposes this most starkly. The worker carrying out the online fraud may have been recruited through fraud. The person sending deceptive messages about fictitious employment, investments or relationships may himself have answered a deceptive advertisement promising legitimate work. Capitalist social relations can therefore transform the deceived into the deceiver and the exploited into an instrument for exploiting somebody else.

Romanticising the scammer is not progressive. The victims, particularly young people subjected to sextortion, have an unquestionable right to protection and justice. But neither is anything gained by transforming the Yahoo Boy into a racialised foreign menace whose existence supposedly expresses an exclusively Nigerian pathology. The phenomenon tells us considerably more about the world economy.

A global problem requires a global answer.

Online fraud reveals one of contemporary society's sharpest contradictions. Humanity possesses communications technology capable of overcoming geographical isolation on a historically unprecedented scale. Yet this infrastructure has developed within societies characterised by staggering disparities of wealth and opportunity. The internet can connect the unemployed Nigerian graduate, the precarious British illustrator, the American teenager and the trafficked worker in a Cambodian compound instantaneously.

Capitalism determines the social circumstances under which they encounter one another. Too often that encounter becomes another relationship of exploitation. The answer cannot be nostalgia for an imaginary internet before fraud, nor continual migration from one commercial platform to another. Users moved to Bluesky. Fraud followed them.

Working people need both secure digital communications and democratic control over the infrastructure upon which social and economic life increasingly depends. These requirements cannot remain indefinitely subordinate to systems organised around private ownership, commercial competition, and wealth accumulation.

The worker whose savings are stolen and the unemployed young person recruited into cybercrime do not occupy morally equivalent positions. The latter has robbed the former. But both can confront different manifestations of the same international social order. Understanding those relationships does not diminish the crime. It helps explain why policing its symptoms has repeatedly failed to eradicate the underlying phenomenon.

A genuine solution ultimately requires reorganisation of economic life according to social need rather than private profit: secure employment, housing, and education for the world's youth, together with democratic control over the communications infrastructure on which humanity increasingly depends. Only on such a foundation can the extraordinary productive and communicative power represented by the internet stop functioning as another arena in which desperation is turned against desperation.

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