Newsletter No 24

Date: 30 June 2026

Heat, fish and capture of the state

Plus: ten big ideas for curbing corporate power

An unprecedented heatwave has swept through Europe and yet there’s still a noisy lobbying campaign being waged in the UK to permit new fossil fuel extraction in our offshore waters. This campaign's claims about the benefits to the UK (cheaper energy, lots of jobs and tax revenues) have all been rebutted and yet it persists. I can't work out which planet Big Oil's executives and investors are planning to go and live on once they've cooked this one.

This month on Critical Takes, Neal Haddaway’s essay linked the depletion of African fish stocks as feed for salmon farms in Norway with African migrant workers having to become exploited labour in the commercial greenhouses of southern Spain. He offers a strong list of recommendations for breaking the grip of “food imperialism” from, and in, the global North.

Ben Cokelet talked with me about corporate capture of the state: how to define it, what forms it takes around the world and what we might do about it. I really enjoy these in-depth conversations about a problem of corporate power and its variations. This one included reflections from Ben (who’s based in Mexico) on Latin America and South Africa.

I’m working on an update of last July's "So, What Should We Do About Corporate Power?" and I’m pleased to have wrestled it down from eight pages then to a mere six pages this time. I'm keeping it short on the assumption that few of you will have time or headspace for long reports at the moment.

The update will come out on Critical Takes next month and it will make ten proposals for a civil society agenda for curbing and ultimately transforming corporate power. These ideas are drawn from across civil society and you’ll know some or all of them already: possibly you’re the person who had this idea in the first place! The purpose of the note is simply to put it all together in one place.

The draft (below) may be tweaked before publication but I’m sharing it with you now because there’s no newsletter next month. I’m going to think about what’s next for Critical Takes and start writing newsletters again in late summer.

Till then, good luck with your work!

Diarmid

 

Ten proposals for curbing corporate power (draft)

1. Change the purposes of very large corporations in law so that their directors must give the same weight to their impacts on society and nature that they give to profit.

2. Democratise the ownership and control of very large corporations by increasing worker ownership and democratic public ownership more broadly.

3. Use the power of the state to shrink the dominant corporations in each industry and put hard caps on how much of a market or industry can be controlled by a single corporation.

4. Promote public, non-profit and socially-purposed alternatives to very large corporations, especially in the supply of public necessities like food, medicines and digital infrastructure.

5. Make very large corporations pay more tax on their profits, on a globally fair basis, and impose taxes on windfalls and profits from destructive activities like fossil fuel production.

6. Limit the proprietary control of knowledge by multinationals.

7. Oblige very large corporations, by law, to ensure respect for human rights, including labour rights, in their own activities and throughout their supply chains.

8. Require very large corporations to obtain genuinely free, prior and informed consent from affected people for physical investments, such as mines and data centres.

9. Curb corporate capture of the state, including by banning non-public lobbying and corporate donations and closing the revolving door between public and private office.

10. Back these reforms with strict public disclosure requirements and sanctions for non-compliance, including public black lists for corporations and personal liability for executives.

 

The idea is that these proposals are general principles which could be campaigned for globally and adapted to the circumstances of different countries. If you have thoughts on any of these, please send them over! There’ll be more detail and some sourcing in the published version of the list.

 

This is the end of the newsletter.