BP's war profits expose britain's rotting political economy

As the oil giant doubles its quarterly profit to $3.2bn on the back of the Iran conflict, 53% of UK households now rely on in-work benefits to survive.

The corpse on the operating table

Let me tell you what happened on Tuesday, April 28th, 2026. While you were probably worrying about your energy bill or your child's school lunch, BP announced its latest quarterly results. Profits had more than doubled, from $1.38bn to $3.2bn. The reason? The war with Iran. Not a new technology. Not a clever investment. Blood. Bombs. The incineration of human beings in a part of the world the UK helped destabilise.

This is not an accident. This is the system working exactly as designed.

Britain's political class has spent four decades constructing an economy that funnels wealth upwards with the efficiency of a medieval tax farmer. And now, when the world burns, the oligarchs toast marshmallows over the flames.

The numbers that should make you sick

Let's be concrete about this. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 53% of UK households now require some form of in-work benefits to survive. Not unemployed households. In-work. People with jobs. People who get up at 6am, commute for an hour, work eight or nine hours, and still cannot afford a home, a holiday, or a security deposit.

A third of children in this country live in poverty. Not relative poverty. Not "they can't afford the latest iPhone" poverty. Real, grinding, can't-afford-a-winter-coat poverty. Meanwhile, the UK's productivity — the fundamental measure of how much value an economy creates per hour worked — ranks 26th in the OECD. Below Slovenia. Below Estonia. Below the Czech Republic.

We have the fifth largest economy in the world, and we cannot house our own people, feed our own children, or heat our own homes. What exactly is the point?

The war dividend

Let's talk about BP. This company made $3.2bn in three months. That's $35m a day. $1.5m an hour. Every time you blink, BP makes around $400.

Their chief executive, Murray Auchincloss, will no doubt describe this as "delivering value for shareholders." He will not mention that this value is built on the corpses of Iranian civilians, on the destruction of infrastructure that took decades to build, on the displacement of millions of people. He will not mention that the UK government, which owns nothing in BP, which regulates BP with the enthusiasm of a sleeping cat, could have imposed a windfall tax that would have raised enough money to insulate every cold home in Britain. They didn't. Of course they didn't.

The Labour Party — supposedly the party of working people — has done nothing. Absolutely nothing. They talk about "fiscal responsibility" while watching a company that extracted £12bn in dividends and buybacks from the UK economy over the last two years funnel those same profits into offshore accounts and executive bonuses. They talk about "growth" while presiding over an economy that has become a giant extraction machine for the already-rich.

The great stagnation

Supratim Biswas, writing on social media, put it better than any think tank report: "The UK is a stagnating economy with low/no growth, low/no innovation and high inflation. Without restoring growth, politics becomes a fight over distribution of stagnation."

He's right. But he misses the deeper point. The stagnation is not a bug. It's a feature. When you have an economy built on financial services, property speculation, and fossil fuel extraction — when you have systematically destroyed your manufacturing base, your industrial capacity, your municipal housing stock, your public transport, your energy security — what did you expect?

The City of London doesn't want growth. Growth means higher wages, stronger unions, more regulation, higher taxes. The City wants extraction. It wants to take a pound out of the economy and give back 50p. The other 50p goes to bonuses, dividends, and offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands, Jersey, and Bermuda.

The Reform scandal and the rot beneath

This week, the Liberal Democrats reported Reform UK to the Electoral Commission. The reason? JCB, the construction equipment company, donated £200,000 to the party. JCB's "Pothole Pro" machine is regularly promoted by Reform figures and appears on local election leaflets.

Let me explain why this matters. JCB is owned by the Bamford family. Lord Bamford has donated millions to the Conservative Party over the years. He is a billionaire. His company makes construction equipment. The company's "Pothole Pro" is a machine that fixes potholes. And Reform UK — the party that claims to represent the "common sense" of ordinary people — is now being bankrolled by a billionaire whose company benefits directly from the infrastructure spending they claim to support.

This is not corruption. This is how British politics works. Every party, every faction, is bought and paid for by someone. Labour takes money from hedge funds. The Tories take money from property developers. Reform takes money from construction magnates. The Liberal Democrats take money from... well, they probably take money from anyone who offers it.

The result is an economy that serves no one but the donor class. An economy where fuel shortages cause airlines to cancel flights (as Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander admitted this week) while BP posts record profits. An economy where the King of England personally intervenes to get tariffs lifted on Scottish whiskey — because that's what monarchs do, apparently, act as lobbyists for the wealthy — while 4.3 million children go to bed hungry.

What is to be done?

I am tired of writing these articles. Tired of pointing out the same facts, the same figures, the same outrages, while the system grinds on regardless. But I will keep writing them because the alternative is silence, and silence is complicity.

The answer is not more "growth." Not more "innovation." Not more "aspiration." The answer is a wholesale reorganisation of the economy. Public ownership of energy. Public ownership of transport. Public ownership of water. A wealth tax that actually captures the billions that slosh around the City of London. A windfall tax on BP that funds a mass home insulation programme. A living wage that is actually a living wage. Rent controls. Price controls. A financial transactions tax. The breaking up of the big banks. The abolition of offshore tax havens. The renationalisation of the railways.

None of this is radical. It is basic social democracy. It is what other European countries do. It is what we used to do, before the Thatcherite revolution turned Britain into a giant hedge fund with a flag.

The question is not whether these policies are possible. The question is whether the political class has the courage to implement them. And the answer, based on everything we have seen, is no. They are too busy taking donations from billionaires, too busy defending the interests of their donors, too busy pretending that the current system is the only possible system.

But it isn't. It never was. And every day we accept it, we choose it.