The Perfidious Albion 2025

The Perfidious Albion (TPA) is a monster. A 1600km self-supported bikepacking race in the mould of races like the Transcontinental, it starts in the borders and winds its way down the west coast, taking in every substantial climb on the way. The resulting elevation is serious: 23,000m. It’s a fixed route that focuses on sharp climbs and forgotten backroads, with the occasional gravel section to keep things spicy.

At the start of the year, I was looking for a challenge that scared me. I wanted something right at the far edge of what I thought I could do, that would force me to expand my own sense of what was possible if I was going to complete it. TPA provided all that, and more.

I headed for the start line in Scotland with a heatwave forecast alongside fellow Brixton Cycles ultra-veteran Rob Hyde. The plan was to take things easy early on. I’d never ridden for more than a day before, so the race would be uncharted territory from the very early stages.

At 9am, 17 of us rolled out of Lockerbie into some beautiful empty roads and started a remote loop of the borders. The heat was intense. Over the next two days, my Garmin clocked hour after hour in the mid-30 degrees with highs of 35 on the first day and 37 on the second. Despite my desire for an easy start, I arrived at the first checkpoint in 3rd place.

At 200km I was looking to resupply. I swooped into a shop car park, missing the existence of a little kerb. I heard a bang, looked down, and saw a hole in my wheel rim. I hoped against hope that it was just delamination, but when I gave it a poke it was clearly structural. Shit. I called my wife, Evelyn, thinking the adventure was over before it had even started. I felt awful, and probably looked a bit pathetic. As I was on the phone, a guy got out of his car and started looking at the wheel. I explained what had happened.

“How about I lend you a wheel. I’ve got a deep section DT Swiss at home that should do the trick. The only thing is, it’s tubeless. Is that alright?” 

Yes mate, that was more than alright. I tried to explain: I would be riding this wheel 1400km, sometimes off road, in whatever weather was thrown at us.

“You ride it as hard as you need to, don’t hold back.” 

Off he went to get it. Turns out my guardian angel is called Paul, and lives in Bellingham, Northumberland. 

Half an hour later, I was on the road again and heading towards a sunset rendezvous with the first gravel sector. I let the race director Rob Gardiner know that I had accepted a wheel. He told me that this would rule me out of the General Classification, as I would have received support that was not commercially available to all riders. Fair enough, those were the rules - but given the choice was between scratching or taking the offer of support, I felt like it was the best option on the table.

By midnight, I had spent two hours climbing through the North Pennines and was looking for a bivvy spot. Somehow, despite the heat of the day, the valleys were full of freezing fog. I knew that Nikki R, another Brixton Cycles ultra-veteran who had taken on the race before, had slept in a public toilet somewhere nearby when confronted with the same conditions. After a descent I came across the spot. It was midge-infested and smelt strongly of urinal cakes, but I was out of options. After a couple of depressing hours of sleep I was up again and cracking on towards CP2, Great Dun Fell, Britain’s highest paved road. 

By 10am I was done with the climb and heading over towards the lakes. I bumped into Rob at the base of the climb and had a quick chat. He was struggling with the heat and still had the big climb to come. An hour or two later I stopped at a shop in Keswick and, after raiding the shelves, doused myself with 2L of water. I was bone dry again in five minutes. This was when I heard Rob had been forced to scratch. I worried I might be about to join him: I would be working hard to climb the passes ahead and there was no wind. But I didn’t really have another choice, so I set off down the Borrowdale valley towards Honnister. 

The section through the lakes was tough. I managed to get through the passes without acute overheating, but the long drag round Cold Fell towards Eskdale saw me working very hard to maintain a 18kmph average speed. I planned to take an early stop for the day at the YHA at the base of CP3, the infamous Hardknott pass. As I rolled into the hostel I was properly cooked and considering bailing, but two beers and a 10 hour sleep sorted me out. This long break saw me fall back in the field. I woke up in the night boiling hot, and in retrospect I probably ended the day on the verge of heat exhaustion. Without the long sleep, I might have been one of the handful of riders who cracked early on day 3. 

In the morning, the heat had broken. I made good progress down through the Forest of Bowland to CP4 and then sped through the flatlands around Manchester to hit the halfway point just after midnight on day 3. Wales beckoned, with the weather switching from one extreme to the other, with brief interludes of sunshine. On the high roads we found lanes replaced by rivers and rain so strong it felt like hail.

After climbing over the World’s End I ended up at the manned CP5, a tiny little off grid cottage. Now, the priority was trying to dry my kit and eat as much as possible. I arrived whilst second place, Chris Murkin, was still hiding from the conditions. I realised that there was a little scrap developing for second place on the road, with Mark Baker following up just a few kilometres behind. The sole leader, Mark Turnbull, a 24hr time trial specialist, was another 100km down the road and, barring a disaster, he would remain out of reach.  

In the next couple of hours I ran into the worst weather Wales had to offer. I was absolutely smashed by the rain and wind as I climbed over the mountain roads of Eryri towards Dolgellau. At times I was a bit scared for my safety. By the time I got down into the valley, I was soaked through, and so decided to call it a night early rather than tackling more exposed climbs (particularly because the race organisers reported that conditions around CP6 were no better.)

The next day started with a break in the weather. I left at 5am and quickly rode through CP6 and hiked over most of the gravel section that followed. Mark B had left in the middle of the night and ridden well to catch me, and we swapped back and forth throughout the day. For breakfast I gorged on butter buns, the speciality of Tywyn, before cracking on over the mountain roads. The weather was good early in the day but deteriorated as the hours went on. 

By now, Chris had scratched, which meant the race for second on the road was just between me and Matt Baker. We were both forced to call it early again because of weather. We could have pushed on if we had been willing to take some risks, but a night on remote mountain roads with more heavy rain and winds rolling in wasn’t appealing. This early stop meant that I had enough time to get a Chinese takeaway in one of the larger villages we passed through (mushroom chow mien and crispy beef, in case you’re wondering). We ended up staying in the same pub. When I went down to get my bike the next morning I found Mark had set off before me. As I left the pub, bleary eyed, I had a vague idea that I might be at the start of a big push to the finish, but nothing was certain. 

We went over CP7, Devil’s Elbow, in the rain. Shortly after I had an involuntary encounter with the tarmac after locking up round a wet corner, then suddenly we were into the valleys. In these conditions, the next ‘gravel’ sector was just wet sand. I blasted a kilogram of it through my drivetrain with predictable results - a pair of mechanicals, first the front brake then the front derailleur, both of which had to be fixed roadside in the pissing rain. I was shivering, I’d lost an hour, but finally I was on my way.

Mark was now 20km down the road, and I had a long chase ahead. We went across South Wales, snaking over every steep bit on the way. After Sugarloaf I finally caught up with him. We climbed over CP8, Gospel Pass, in the twilight.

That was when I made my big push. I went into TT mode on the beautifully flat English roads. I had energy drink in my bottles, techno in my headphones, and I was down on the aero bars. 30kmph feels very fast when you’ve spent days crawling along at 20kmph. By 2.40am I needed a nap, so I lay down on the verge. I was back up at 3am and pushing to the finish. The final climbs in the Cotswolds were short, sharp, and unwelcome. I had to talk myself through those final Ks. I was literally holding a constant conversation in my head, and sometimes out loud: 

“Okay, well done Callum, now change down ready for the next hill. Keep the cadence up, breathe deep. That’s it. Smile, not far to the finish now.” 

I did that for probably two hours, just willing myself to the finish. Finally, I rolled to the line at 8.30am, meaning a 5d23h30m finishing time and second on the road (although not second place, due to the wheel swap.)   

What a race. It’s bonkers, brutal, and wildly inspiring. Riding it provokes good tears, bad tears, moments of bliss and moments of despair. But most importantly, it completely shattered my pre-existing sense of what I could do.

In retrospect, I rode the race in totally the wrong way. I had the fastest moving speed of anyone in the field by miles, but I spent almost 50% of my time off my bike. I should have prioritised constant movement at lower intensity. Primarily, that would have meant going slower in the heat and carrying more kit so as to be able to push through bad weather. But given it was my first multi-day ride and first backpacking race, I can forgive that.  

If you’re looking for an event that will take you within inches of breaking point on some of the most beautiful and horrible terrain Britain has to offer, TPA is it. If you want to chat about the event then feel free to drop me an email. I'm always happy to chat with people who have a similar commitment to doing strange things. 

You can read the dotwatcher coverage and take a look at the GPS tracking for the event here.

Photos: Nadia Shahanaz (@nadiashahanaz) Rob Gardiner (@robgardinercyclist) Kitty Dennis (@bluberrysmoothie_photos) and The Perfidious Albion (@theperfidiousalbion).

The Mirage of Polycrisis

Today I’ve published a new open access article in Capital and Class on the concept of ‘polycrisis’. The article uses an Althusser-inspired symptomatic reading approach to dig into a concept that has gained widespread usage without any real theoretical development. My conclusion is that the concept, particularly as it is articulated by the prominent left-liberal historian Adam Tooze, has embedded within it three key elements that render it actively harmful to a radical analysis: it replaces structural explanations with a profusion of empirical data; perceives that data from the implicit standpoint of the bourgeois state; imagines this state as a universal objectivity without a class basis and, as a result, implies a political programme based on the stabilisation of the existing social relations of production.

The idea behind the article came out of some work I was doing during my postdoc at the Oxford Internet Institute on theories of crisis and social collapse. Initially I wanted to interrogate the catastrophist visions of AGI that formed an increasingly important plank of Silicon Valley ideology, and then I ended up interested in Cliodynamics and so on from there. (I am hoping to write up some of the Cliodynamics literature on here in the future - fingers crossed.) During this work, polycrisis initially seemed like an interesting avenue to explore, but then pretty rapidly turned into a dead end. The idea of the article is to elucidate how and why it was a dead end on a larger scale.

I hope it’s useful to readers.

A Building Problem

In preparation for an episode of Workers’ Inquiry, the podcast hosted by Notes From Below, I went down the rabbit hole on the Labour promise to build 1.5 million homes by 2029. I’ve collected some of the most useful results here, in the hope that they provide a starting point for someone else. If you work in construction and want to make something exploring the industry from your perspective, please do get in touch with NFB.

I’ve been interested in construction ever since I did a single day working as a labourer. I was doing the cement for a small project. That meant standing in the sun for hour after hour mixing and barrowing more than 1.7 tonnes of cement. It was brutal work. When I got home at the end of the day the lime had eaten through my skin. As far as I remember, I got paid £50 cash – which wasn’t much, even nine years ago. I didn’t go back.

Labour like this is the unseen prerequisite for Starmer’s promise to get the private sector to build 1.5 million new houses. It’s funny how we talk about companies ‘building’ houses – companies don’t barrow cement or lay bricks. But semantics aside, Labour wants to unleash the animal spirits of construction by removing planning restrictions. The hope seems to be that this acts as a kind of crypto-Keynesian generator of effective demand. 300,000 homes a year means lots of people working on sites, lots of materials and commodities being produced in the supply chain, and (they hope) falling housing costs. Falling housing costs seems to be a critical part of what the government is looking for out of this process, because a) they think it will create a new layer of young homeowners loyal to the ‘pro-growth’ vision of social democracy (a kind of pathetic echo of Thatcher’s strategy with right-to-buy) and b) because lower rents act to effective increase real wages. Lower rents feed through into higher elastic consumption budgets for the working class, thereby stimulating industries like hospitality. You can see why a Labour government incapable of any kind of meaningful transformation of the balance of class forces in Britain might grasp at this particular straw.

 The housing crisis continues to hit the working class in the pocket. In 69% of local authorities a healthcare assistant would have to spend more than 30% of their income to rent a one bed property. Housing costs are a significant reason for the constant upwards pressure on the minimum wage that is squeezing margins across the service sector. Average rents are no longer surging at 10%+ per year, but they remain above 4%.

The Corn Laws are a much-quoted example of how cutting subsistence costs for the working class by using the state against the landlord class can produce an alliance between the bourgeoise engaged in labour-intensive production and the working class. There’s an obvious analogy here: Labour could form an alliance with elements of capital (construction firms, major employers) to raise living standards for much of their electoral base by increasing housing supply and papering over some of the cracks revealed by the housing crisis. But the engine of the construction industry is sputtering.

Take a look at the monthly releases of the S&P Global UK Construction Purchasing Managers’ index, and you won’t find an industry roaring into life. The index is constructed by asking construction managers what’s going on at their firms. In February the index reported housebuilding activity was falling at the fastest rate since earl 2009, in the early days of the financial crisis. The trend continued in March. By April the index was reporting: “a reduction in staffing numbers for the third consecutive month. The rate of job shedding was the steepest since October 2020. Subcontractor usage also decreased at a solid pace in March, while construction companies reported further cutbacks to their input buying in response to lower workloads.” May extended that record to make it four consecutive months of job shedding.

Rather than speeding up, the construction industry is pumping the brakes. Citing weak ‘consumer confidence’ and rising input costs (read: the return of inflation in the supply chain), they are mothballing projects. Housebuilding in particular is highly cyclical – no company wants to be left with a lot of stock on their hands when a recession hits. The whole thing is a game of musical chairs, with firms trying to match their supply pipeline with what demand will look like when those projects reach completion.

The rate of construction Labour wants to see was last hit in the late 60s, early 70s. Only, the market never achieved anything like those numbers. Even in an economy characterised by higher rates of economic growth, the state was still building 40%+ of those homes, or over 140,000 a year in absolute terms.

It would be wildly optimistic to expect capital to double its production volumes even in a boom period, let alone a conjuncture characterised by the seemingly secular slowdown in growth rates and frequent bouts of economic turbulence.

But even if 300,000 new homes a year a built the OBR predicts it would only lower house prices by 0.8%. The effects on the rental market are even more diffuse. So, it seems both unlikely that these 300,000 houses a year could be produced, and then even more unlikely that they would have the intended effect of ameliorating the housing crisis. Take just one example of what’s happening to many of these new single family homes: private equity is buying up more than £2 billion annually with an eye to taking a dominant position in the rental market. Rather than forming a cross-class alliance corn law style with the intention of mitigating the housing crisis, these elements of financial capital are piling into landlordism to make a profit from it.

One of the key limitations to any prospective boom is labour availability. The sector is short approximately 200,000 construction workers, and the people doing the work at the moment are ageing rapidly. The Department For Education is bricking it (pun intended) and looking for workers to fill this gap in the wake of EU migration. You can read their latest report here – it’s a bit thin. There is no real plan to ameliorate this shortage given the anti-migration stance of all the major parties. Bourgeois politics is increasingly tied up in contradictions on the question of migration and labour supply.

If there aren’t enough workers in the industry and they’re getting older, one obvious solution for capital would be to raise productivity per worker. More houses produced by fewer people means a smaller workforce isn’t such an issue. But the trend is heading in the opposite direction. Multi factor productivity for construction has actually been falling over time:

The solution? A reorganisation of production. Now we can see a new wave of potential deskilling on the horizon. The use of modular timber building techniques (with brick-style wallpaper – and no that is not a joke) and automated construction techniques looms over this workforce shortage.  Technology isn’t a neutral player in the class struggle.  

“The 2D method was on display at the Derby factory of Oregon Timber Frame, which supplied the Cotgrave development. Timbers are cut and nailed together in panels up to 10 metres long down three production lines, according to detailed instructions given on computer screens. Computer-guided metal stops and rollers ensure the frames are square and correctly positioned, while a menacing-looking automatic nailing machine assists with the more intensive steps, such as attaching the boards to the outside of the frame. At full capacity, about 200 workers can produce the timber structure for 32 houses every day, which are flat-packed on to lorries like sophisticated Ikea kits — complete with a labelled box of bolts and fittings. Once delivered to the development site, a timber frame house usually takes between 12 and 14 weeks to finish, compared with 20 for traditional masonry construction.”

Some construction firms claim to be aiming for 30% timber construction by 2030. Who knows if they will actually end up pouring fixed capital into the supply chains required to produce prefab housing on this scale given the threat of recessions leaving much of this capital sitting idle – but the possibility is there. If building is to accelerate (and it’s a big if) then changes like this would be needed to get anywhere near that 300,000 target - and that could shift the balance of forces between classes.

A call for inquiry

In all of this discussion I worry the labour of building has become a bit obscure again. With a few more abstract analyses we could be back to thinking about capital as the agent producing houses.

I haven’t done the work required to present anything more than notes on struggle in the industry here. But I do want to share a few resources that help us understand how workers have fought in construction historically, and what the experience of work looks like in parts of the industry today. Building the bridges between the initial diagnosis presented above and the balance of class forces in the workplace is clearly the fundamental task. If you want to do that work, get in touch.  

• Dave Smith and Phil Chamberlin, Blacklisted: The secret war between big business and union activists

• Reel News, Sparks Unofficial Action Shuts Down Balfour Beatty Sites Across the UK

• Dave Ayre, Reuben Barker, Jim French, The Flying Pickets: The 1972 Builders' Strike & the Shrewsbury Trials

• Thomas Wood, Time Served: A short reflection on working in the construction industry

• Joe Hayns, ‘We’re talking about billions stolen from workers’: Organising in the construction industry

• Charlie McGuire, Linda Clarke and Christine Wall, Battles on the Barbican: the Struggle  for Trade Unionism in the British  Building Industry, 1965–7

• Gregor Gall, The engineering construction strikes in Britain, 2009

• Janet Drucker, Blacklisting and its legacy in the UK construction industry: employment relations in the aftermath of exposure of the Consulting Association

• Dave Lamb, The Lump: A heretical analysis

(If you need help finding a PDF of any of these, drop me an email)

Platform Capital Sclerosis

As of today, Tuesday 6th May, Deliveroo has been acquired by Doordash in a deal worth £2.9 billion. Having written about Deliveroo and the struggles of platform workers for almost a decade now, I thought it might be useful to offer some brief contextual thoughts on what the deal represents, and more importantly, what it might mean for the people dragging burgers across London and New York for poverty wages.

Doordash is the largest US food delivery platform. It has a capitalisation of $87 billion and controls more than two thirds of the US market.

 Its origin story is so Silicon Valley that it verges on parody. In 2013, three Stanford students set up PaloAltoDelivery.com, and before long they had seed backing from infamous venture capital fund Y Combinator. (For more on the Silicon Valley ecosystem, see Malcom Harris’ magisterial Palo Alto, for more on the structural power and history of venture capital see here and here). By 2019 the platform was the biggest in the US, and in 2020 the company went public with a $3.37 billion IPO. The platform made its first annual profit in 2024. Its list of shareholders reflects the role of US based asset managers in pooling the common stock of the capitalist class. Major institutional shareholders include Vanguard at 9.98%, BlackRock at 6.10%, and Morgan Stanley at 4.80% and the Singapore state wealth fund at 4.86%.

So far, so generic. The model was the same as every other food delivery platform: get venture funding, absorb massive losses to grow market share, gradually drive down delivery worker wages, weather their strikes and protests, extract rents from restaurants, speculate about the automation of food production as a pathway to profitability – whilst actually becoming profitable through hyper exploitation of precarious migrant workers. This is all relatively familiar to anyone who has spent time thinking and reading about the dynamics of platform capitalism.

The new element of the story that Doodash begins to tell is how the monopolistic tendency of platform capitalism plays out on a global scale. Like many platforms, it has attempted to internationalise through direct market entry. But it has also used acquisitions to enter markets without the need to fight existing local platforms for dominance. In 2022, Doordash bought Wolt, a Finnish platform operating in 25 countries (primarily across Scandinavia and Eastern Europe.)  

Deliveroo has become the next target for acquisition shortly after posting its own first annual profit. But as the FT’s Lex put it, the platform’s lack of deep-rooted domination in any one market made it ripe for a takeover: “This is a market for deep-pocketed duopolies, not for those ranked third or fourth. Growth is thus about empire building: collecting top slots in as many jurisdictions as possible.”

In any one national market, platforms act as desperate wannabe monopolies. The whole industry lives and dies by Peter Thiel’s rule that “competition is for losers.” They are willing to burn $20 billion plus to take control of a market. Dirty tricks are part of the game. In a 2024 case, Uber claimed Doordash had “coerced restaurants into working exclusively with them by threatening to issue penalties or demote restaurants in the DoorDash app.”

But increasingly the apps are becoming profitable. As market share becomes consolidated, capital valorisation is no longer a distant future prospect. It is interesting to compare how the platform founders used to say they would become profitable with the reality. Early investors were seduced with dreams of automated food production and delivery – but actual profits have only been reached when hyper exploited migrant labourers have had their wages forced down to below subsistence levels. This is not high-tech production, it’s algorithmically-enabled sweated labour.

Platform workers have repeatedly shown that they are very able to contest this exploitation. Massive mobilisations have been achieved over and over again - the challenge they continue to face is creating a form of collective organisation that can endure from once cycle of struggle to the next. There are no simple answers to that challenge.

It strikes me that food delivery platforms represent a mode of operation somewhat analogous to the emerging Trumpian political economy. US-based firms are using their resources to stake out territory in a global marketplace defined by the constant looming threat of economic contraction and declining ‘consumer confidence’. They are engaged in a zero sum fight to the death, grappling with each other to find whatever advantage they can. Jamie Merchant’s excellent Endgame, which diagnosed the economic nationalist turn well in advance of events, offers us a way to think about how this competition might play out.

Needless to say, platform capital is not a dynamic global force that could lead to a revival of capital’s fortunes. These platforms extract rent from existing industries and hyper exploit urban surplus populations by using technology to accelerate the informalisation of labour. The colossal valuations of firms like these represents something like the nihilism of the contemporary ruling class. They know this system is rotten, and yet they continue to pump it for all its worth. As Adorno put it, “the bourgeoise live on, like spectres threatening doom.”

The only way to escape that doom is through struggle. Start climbing. One way out!  

Strike bulletin produced by riders and supporters in London, 2024