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Seamus Kearney 🎤 On his return to Belfast Joe Fenton was arrested by the Internal Security Unit on the 24th February 1989 and taken to a house in the Lenadoon area of West Belfast.

Freddie Scappaticci, prior to lifting Fenton, told his handler that Fenton would probably not survive this interrogation. This second meeting with Scappaticci and Fenton was not a mild affair, and violence ensued throughout his interrogation.

There might have been an attempt to transport Fenton to Dundalk on the orders of Brendan Hughes, who was in Dublin at the time, but all that came to an abrupt end when Fenton told Scappaticci and the former Marine, both men standing together in the bedroom, that the only reason he returned from England was because his handler assured him that his interrogators would protect him as they were on the same team. Little did Fenton realise that he had just signed his own death warrant for sure.

As was standard practice with Stakeknife, if a person being interrogated by him didn't present a threat to his personal position, then he would interrogate and vacate the scene, his particular job completed. On the other hand, if he felt his position was threatened then he would have to eliminate that threat, which in this case meant Joe Fenton couldn't possibly reach Brendan Hughes and tell him about the treachery of the men in charge of the ISU.

Therefore, instead of leaving the scene Freddie Scappaticci allowed his colleague to vacate the house but stayed behind to make sure Joe Fenton kept his secret to himself. He moved into the kitchen and waited for the firearm to arrive.

Having gone back upstairs and grabbing Fenton by the scruff of the neck, both men struggled on the staircase as Scappaticci dragged him into the street. As far as an IRA operation went, this was bizarre and completely unconventional, indicating that Scappaticci had to dispatch Fenton into the afterlife himself for fear he might reveal his secret.

While being force marched toward the Glen Road bus terminus, Fenton suddenly broke free and attempted to escape, but Scappaticci immediately shouted to his armed IRA accomplice to open fire, which he did, hitting him in the back and felling him. With Scapatticci standing over a badly wounded British agent, he ordered the gunman to finish him off with 3 shots to the head. Joe Fenton lay dead, along with his secret about Stakeknife.

After leaving the execution site Scappaticci immediately phoned his handler and briefed him on what had just happened. Speaking on the phone, he explained that he had no choice but to kill Joe Fenton himself, as Fenton had found out that he, Scappaticci, was a British agent, like himself. He felt his cover had been blown. Ten minutes later the RUC received a call about a body lying on the Glen Road.

When the news reached Dublin, Brendan Hughes went apoplectic and immediately enquired as to the reason why Fenton had been shot dead out of hand. The reply from Scappaticci was that there was ' too much Brit activity in the area', which meant Fenton couldn't be transported to Hughes.

Brendan Hughes did not believe this feeble excuse, realised Belfast was rotten, became frightened for his life and resigned from the Army he loved.

The controversy surrounding the execution of Joe Fenton resulted in an IRA Court of Inquiry which took place in Letterkenny, County Donegal, chaired by the Northern Command operations officer. One of the most pressing questions which was raised at the Inquiry was why Fenton was not delivered to Hughes and his staff, which drew attention to Scappaticci and the ISU. The outcome was that new 'checks and balances' would be introduced thereby limiting the authority of the Internal Security Unit to execute so freely. 

Perhaps for the first time, and at Brendan Hughes's persistence, Scappaticci and the ISU were at last coming under some sort of scrutiny.

Seamus Kearney is a former Blanketman and author of  
No Greater Love - The Memoirs of Seamus Kearney.

Stakeknife 🕵 The Rise And Fall 🕵 Act IX

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Seven

 

A Morning Thought @ 3083

Gary Robertson ⚽ Let’s get one thing very clear from the outset - emotions run high in derbies.

As football fans we know this and are prepared for it. However, what happened at Ibrox was shameful and somewhat reminiscent of the dark days of the 1980s.
 
Glasgow derbies aren’t just football matches. They are tribal, historical: two sides of a religious divide coming together to battle it out for 90 mins for supremacy. They’re cauldrons of hate, bitterness, religious sectarian bigotry, political and national identities on the line, paramilitary trappings on show,. Those loyal to the crown and the union on one side those opposed to British colonialism and the monarchy on the other.
 
This is somewhat of a simplification but you get the picture - you have two sides who for various reasons hate each other.
 
This isn’t a hundred year “war” but instead one that stretches way back for centuries. Sunday cast light once again on what is an ignored issue in Scottish society: anti-Catholic hate.
 
I make no apologies for using the words “hate” and “hatred” - there’s no other way to describe it.
It’s “acceptable” hatred though. Sing songs about killing Muslims, Jews, Gays or those of different races and you’ll be quite rightly arrested and charged with a hate crime. In the west of Scotland sing songs about killing Catholics and being up to your knees in “Fenian blood” (let’s not argue about this, the majority who sing this have no idea who the Fenians were and most probably think the Irish Republican brotherhood were a forerunner to the Wolfe Tones, an Irish Bee Gees if you like) and at worst you’ll be told to “keep it down” - not stop but lower your voice. It’s “acceptable” to be a religious bigot, and that bigotry runs deep.
 
Now this is a football column and you might wonder when I’m going to get to the game but when Mr McIntyre and TPQ approached me to write about Scottish football I knew somewhere along the line I’d need to talk about these things. Ignoring problems in society doesn’t make them go away. Facing them head on is what’s needed, and it’s time anti-Catholic hatred in Scotland was treated the same way as anti-Muslim hatred or white supremacy. We need to stop pretending that in 2026 this is merely a “football problem”. This is societal, it runs much much deeper, and the scenes at Ibrox whilst shocking and deeply disturbing at the same time were not entirely unpredictable.
 
Tensions already high, seasons on the line, to the victors the spoils to the defeated another year of failure.
 
The match itself was entirely forgettable, two disallowed goals (no Liam Scales wasn’t offside, IMO, but of course you’d expect me to say that - right Steve R?) Extra time that couldn’t separate two poor versions of Glasgow big two and it all came down to who held their nerve in a penalty shoot out. 120 mins of mediocre football and a season defining penalty shootout loomed large.
 
Celtic prevailed and Rangers wilted.
 
Fans in the Broomloan Road stand celebrated enthusiastically, all 7,500 Celtic fans. Some spilled onto the pitch to take photos with their heroes to capture moments on camera for the future - to say I was there when this happened - snapshots for history. This was all way too much for the Rangers fans in the Copeland Road stand who armed with bottles, bars and flares rushed onto the park and toward the celebrating Celts.
 
What ensued will make headlines around the world, not because a poor patched together Celtic side managed to defeat their biggest rivals in their own backyard but because of the scenes of carnage: Celtic staff attacked, grown men dragged off the park, lines of police and stewards, police horses, injured fans and officials and God knows what outside the stadium. We’ve all seen the video, I don’t think I need to dwell on it other than to pray the guy was okay and no lasting damage was done (at the time of writing there’s no further news so I’m hoping he’s fine).

Of course the Scottish media were quick as always to try and suggest that celebrating Celtic fans were to blame for this carnage. In particular, Emma Dodds of Premier Sports who suggested this was bound to happen when you give Celtic their full allocation. TalkSport claiming Celtic fans were ripping the stand apart, attempting to tear down nets and goal posts. And less said about the BBC and STV reporting the better.
 
You’ll struggle to find someone in Scotland who’s impartial enough to admit that the fault for this lies with fans of the Rangers whose hatred spilled over into the scenes we saw. How dare some uppity Tim’s celebrate a victory!
 
In the cold light of day, and as the dust begins to settle, whilst both clubs have questions to ask, we must not pretend this was a “both sides battle” - it wasn’t. Once again the Rangers ultras, the Union Bears, showed they simply can’t handle defeat. This is what happens when behaviour becomes unchecked and normalised.
 
Sunday was a symptom of a much deeper problem and it’s time the Scottish government faced this reality and treated anti-Catholic, anti-Irish hate the way they treat all other forms of discrimination. As long as we keep turning a blind eye to this then these things will continue to happen.
 
Sunday was simply a boiling over of the simmering pan of shame that is Scottish society.
 
I’m looking forward to football filling this column next week but because I don’t talk about it, don’t think, to plagiarise a former IRA chief, “it hasn’t gone away, you know”

Til next time …

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

Shame And Blame Game

Raw Story ★ Written by Alexander Willis. Recommended by Christy Walsh.

An explosive allegation against President Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein has surfaced in the Justice Department’s recent release of 3.5 million files, including disturbing details about a supposed body allegedly buried at one of Trump’s more than a dozen golf courses.

According to an FBI document released by the DOJ, the agency received a tip in June of 2021 from an individual whose name has been redacted, but is described as an alleged “victim,” a former member of the Sinaloa Cartel, and a close confidant of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

According to the document, the individual was formally interviewed by an FBI agent, and accused Trump of being aware of and having funded “underage sex parties at the Donald Trump Golf course.”

That individual went on to claim that they had “recordings of Trump, Epstein and Maxwell discussing marketing strategies for high profile sex parties,” according to the FBI official who drafted the document, their name also redacted. The individual claimed that in one of the recordings, Trump can be heard stating “he was aware of the underage sex parties.”

Continue @ Raw Story.

‘Buried At The Trump Golf Course’ 🪶 Explosive FBI Interview Unearthed In Epstein Files

Barry Gilheany ✍😔 The aftermath of last month’s parliamentary by-election in the Greater Manchester constituency of Gorton and Denton in which Labour came third after Reform UK and the victorious Green candidate, Hannah ‘The Plumber’ Spencer has seen Labour entering into another of its long nights of its soul. 

The first by-election victory for the Green Party was a seismic enough event. It overturned a Labour majority of more than 13,000 votes in a constituency which had been a safe Labour seat since Labour’s wipe out at the hands of the National Government in 1931 in the aftermath of Ramsey MacDonald’s desertion of Labour over cuts to unemployment benefit in that year’s emergency budget. 

This was only the second by election since 1945 in which neither of the Big Two parties of government finished in first or second place. In this respect, the Labour loss was qualitatively different to its defeats in the 1980s to the breakaway Social Democratic Party; to the SNP in Hamilton in 1967 or Govan in 1988 or the usual mid-term kickings that unpopular governments receive. It was a real alarm signal; that Labour’s traditional electoral coalition of manual working class, progressive middle class and BME voters was sundering past the point of no return. The former segment is deemed to be switching to Reform UK, much of the middle segment and the South Asian Muslim portions of the BME electorate have gone over to the Greens in what is now an era of five party politics in England (Labour also faces nationalist challenges in Scotland and Wales.). The issue of migration with all the emotivism of the ‘small boats’ imagery; nativist fears for the safety of ‘our women and girls’ at the hands of male predators from ‘alien’ cultures; sympathy for the plight of migrants and refugees and abhorrence of the racist tenor of migration discourse is a major pivot on which debates on Labour’s hang. It is in this context that the latest migration proposals by the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood need to be understood.

But for the outbreak of the Iran war, the roll out of the Home Secretary’s latest migration policy would arguably have been the top political story coming as it did in the wake of Labour’s chastening defeat in Gorton and Denton. There are five key changes to existing asylum and refugee support. Firstly, under the new rules, those granted refugee protection will have this reviewed every thirty months whereas before refugees were granted five years leave to remain and after that could apply for indefinite leave to remain. Now should their country of origin be no longer deemed as dangerous, the government can return them. These changes have been signed into law by Mahmood without the need for a vote. In practice, many refugees will continue to qualify as such given the intractable nature of conflicts in countries such as Sudan and Eritrea along with the continuing conflicts across the Middle East.[1]

Secondly, on visas, Mahmood has temporarily halted new study visas for students from Cameroon, Sudan, Myanmar, and Afghanistan, as well as skilled worker visas from Afghanistan only on the grounds that the high numbers of arrivals on those visas who went on to claim asylum and the refusal of those countries to take back people whose claims had been rejected. Critics point out that Mahmood has just closed off a set of safe and legal routes for people who come from these four countries where conflict, war and human rights abuses persist. Thirdly, the Home Office is piloting a new scheme in which 150 families of failed asylum seekers resident in hotels will be offered payments of up to £40,000 to return voluntarily to their countries. These families have already been identified, contacted, and have seven days to accept the offer or face forcible removal.[2]

Fourthly, the government is changing the law so that it no longer has a legal duty to provide financial support to asylum seekers, and will now stop payments to anyone working illegally, convicted of a crime or of independent financial means. Provisions have existed for many years granting asylum seekers the right to work if their initial asylum claim has not been determined after twelve months of their own, though Mahmood is now expanding the number of jobs for which they can apply. In practice, however, individual asylum seekers will have to receive permission to work from the Home Office. Finally, Mahmood is doubling the length of time required before many migrants can acquire settlement rights from five to ten years. Refugees and those accessed benefits after being granted limited leave to remain may have to wait twenty years.[3]

In the aftermath of the Gorton and Denton by election defeat, Mahmood’s migration proposals are acting as lightening rod for backbenchers in the PLP and even some on the front bench who are urging Keir Starmer’s government to tack left in order to claim back those progressive voters who, it is feared, are deserting Labour in droves to the Greens and Liberal Democrats and who have been dismayed by the lack of a progressive offer after Gorton and Denton and who were distinctly unimpressed by Starmer’s response in the form of a letter to MPs in which he repeated his “extremist” attack line on Zack Polanksi’s party due to its advocacy of drug liberalisation and withdrawal from NATO while not mentioning anything about the cost of living.[4]

Just as the government’s welfare reform proposals last year galvanised concerned MPs into action, so a similar process is unfolding with migration and asylum. A letter drafted by Tony Vaughan, MP for Folkestone and Hythe (coincidentally or not, an embarkment point for the traffic of small boats across the English Channel) has attracted the signatures of a hundred of his PLP colleagues, says that the proposals undermined the government’s commitment to integration and social cohesion, saying that “we can change our immigration system for the better without forgetting who we are as a Labour Party” and that public confidence in the asylum system would not be restored “by threatening to forcibly remove refugees who have lived here lawfully for 15 to 20 years.” 

In the same vein, for the campaigning MP Stella Creasy, opposition to the proposals represented “True Labour not Blue Labour” (the socially conservative and economically dirigiste faction to which Mahmood belongs and whose most high-profile figure was the departed Svengali Morgan MacSweeney). In her opinion “There’s no ‘fairness’ in repeatedly spending money on asking victims of trafficking and civil war if they are still in that category’ or in ‘keeping Ukrainians, Iranians [and] Afghans alike in a perpetual state of war.’ She also warns of “the inevitable Windrush-style scandal coming that none of us stood on a manifesto to implement.” For Sarah Owen, a leader of the Tribune group of centre-left Labour MPs, the spectre of Trump’s ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention of children arises with the proposal to deport children and families and that “Moving the goalposts who have upped their lives to work in and for our country is unjustifiable.”[5]

The urgency to court progressive voters through oppositional stances on Mahmood’s asylum and immigration policies is, for their proponents, starkly highlighted by data circulated by senior Labour politicians suggesting that Labour could drop from first to fourth place in London in the forthcoming local government elections in May, losing control of all but two of their councils, with the Greens surging into first place. A new data modelling technique from the data firm Bombe, which correctly predicted the Gorton and Denton by-election result, forecasts that Labour, which holds 21 boroughs in London, could lose flagship authorities such as Hackney and Lambeth to the Greens. Labour is projected to lose more than half its council seats in the Prime Minister’s backyard, Camden, which would fall to no overall control. Labour could be left with an outright majority in only Newham and Redbridge councils. The Greens, if they were to run candidates in every ward, could also take Lewisham, Waltham Forest, and Greenwich, as well as Wandsworth, Hammersmith and Fulham, Hounslow, and Brent. According to the Bombe model, Labour could lose more than half of its council seats in the capital – 741. The Greens would pick up 530, the Tories 77 and the Liberal Democrats 72. Nine boroughs would be no overall control, with Greens the largest party in four, Labour in two and one each for Reform and the Tories. The Lib Dems and Labour would have the same number of seats in Southwark, while the Tories and Greens would be neck-and-neck in Westminster.[6]

This chronicle of carnage foretold represents for Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, an “existential threat” for Labour in May and who warns “If we don’t unite progressives, we risk opening the door to the darkness and division of Reform.” For Tony Travers, professor of government at the London School of Economics, this prospective “political earthquake” for Labour is the consequence of the national party having “taken London for granted for years” and summoning “all their efforts on targeting Reform-prone areas” which has led “to this huge flank exposed on their left.” In the words of one Labour source “the dead end of McSweeneyism must be abandoned before it’s too late.” There has to be a thumbs down for those like the departed Chief of Staff “who ridicule Labour values and think we can afford to sacrifice our core vote by mimicking the performative cruelty of Suella Braverman.”[7]

As well as electoral calculus, there is an overwhelming moral imperative for the Hundred to oppose the Mahmood proposals when one considers the explicitly racist history of British immigration policy. For by increasing periods for application for UK citizenship and rights to remain by decades and by preventing family unions for so many categories of migrants, this Labour government seems determined to replicate the “hostile environment” for refugees of Theresa May when she was Home Secretary which created the conditions for the Windrush Scandal. And in relation to the Caribbean, the Home Office is continuing with the policies that have fractured generations of families. Take the case of eight-year-old Lati-Yana Stephanie Brown left destitute in Jamaica after the devastation of Hurricane Melissa in late October. But after her UK-resident parents appealed for the Home Office to speed up her visa application, officials rejected it and Lari-Yana has been left to sleep on the floor of her elderly grandmother’s destroyed home[8].

But the rejection was based on factual errors, according to Lati-Yana’s mother Kerrian Bigby. Correspondence with Dawn Butler, her MP, raised concerns about “misrepresentations” in the decision notice including the claim that Bigby does not have full parental responsibility, which she says is false. The doubling down by the Home Office on this decision speaks to the historical truth and reality that Britain’s immigration system routinely separates children from their parents with little regard for the trauma that follows in its wake.[9]

In Caribbean history, family separation was built into the slavery system. And by the effects of the 1971 Immigration Act which made it harder for “New” Commonwealth citizens to enter the UK and the intergeneration scars caused by the leaving behind of thousands in the Caribbean including the “barrel children,” sustained by love, yet carrying the weight of separation have lasted to this day. The author Nadine White relates how her father never came to terms with his separation from his parents right up to his death at the age of 49.[10]

For the author and journalist George Monbiot, a descendant of East European Jewish refugees, the current discourse and received prejudices around migrants bear more than uncanny echoes of migration policy and debate almost exactly a century ago. For in 1924, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin sought to appease right wing opinion Sir William Joynson-Hicks as home secretary. Having in the words of Martin Pugh in his 2005 book Hurrah for the Blackshirts! “established himself as an unapologetic antisemite,” in post he “raised the hurdle” for immigrants to achieve “naturalisation” (equivalent to indefinite leave to remain) “from five to 10 years, and to 15 years for Russians”. “Russians” tended to mean Jewish refugees, fleeing pogroms and other persecutions. As the historian David Cesarani has noted, the home secretary “issued instructions to immigration to increase their vigilance and never to give the benefit of the doubt to an alien attempting to enter the country.” He visited the ports “to examine the tighter procedures and encourage officials to greater zeal.” While the current incumbent at the Home Office may not be taking quite such a hands-on approach, and while Shabana Mahmood’s pronouncements may lack the explicit nativist prejudices of Joynson-Hicks, there is more than an echo of history in her policies.[11]

The zones of public opinion then, as now, were flooded, Steve Bannon-style of the ordure of paranoia, misinformation, and nativist prejudice around immigrants. The right wing press had for two decades led hues and cries around the “flood” of “aliens” and “undesirables”, code for Jews who were seen as “un-English”, refusing to assimilate, who “leeched” off the state, were threats to “white women”, were blamed for housing shortages and unemployment and put out conspiracies about the creation of a Jewish world order. Fast forward a hundred years and right-wing media spaces are agog with accusations that Muslims and immigrants fail to assimilate; that they are a threat to white womanhood; take jobs and houses from the natives and that Muslims in Britain seek to create an Islamic world order in the form of a global caliphate.[12]

Economic metrics also stack up against the Home Secretary’s new immigration and asylum regime. For new visa restrictions have hit middle-skilled jobs across a wide range of industries faster than domestic training and higher wages can address the problem. A growing number of job vacancies have emerged for butchers, chefs, cancer scientists, deckhands, and sheepshearers. Net migration has fallen by 78% in two years, dropping from a record peak of 944,000 in early 2023 to about 204,000 in the year ending June 2025. A report from Oxford University’s Migration Observatory found little evidence to support the government’s belief that employers would train and rely on domestic staff. It found that labour shortages are driven by poor pay and conditions, not just lack of skills, leaving sectors such as social care in limbo without domestic reform.[13]

Professor Samra Turajlic, director of the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute, in referencing the loss of a prospective scientist to her research programme due to the cumulative cost of visa fees, healthcare surcharges and uncertainty over settlement, writes that the proposed changes to indefinite leave to remain are stoking anxiety. The doubling of the waiting period for settlement from five to ten years would affect the majority of internationally recruited researchers at her institute. Arguing that stability is a necessity for long-term scientific success as scientific breakthroughs develop over many years and that it is necessary for UK remaining globally competitive when recruiting international talent, Professor Turajlic emphasises that the current five-year pathway to settlement must be retained for scientists, along with the three-year fast-track route for those on global talent visas.[14]

It is to be hoped that these moral, economic, and political arguments against the Home Secretary’s migration proposals gain greater traction and will reach critical mass within the Parliamentary Labour Party and wider sections of the labour movement. After all, to quote Harold Wilson, the Labour Party is a moral crusade, or it is nothing.

References

[1] Diane Taylor and Kiran Stacey. Asylum system in flux. Refugee status and visa brake applied. The Guardian. 6 March 2026 p.15

[2] Ibid

[3] Ibid

[4] Ben Quinn Analysis. Backbenchers riled over what party says on migration – and what it doesn’t on economy. The Guardian. 6 March 2026 p.15

[5] Kiran Stacey and Diane Taylor. Mahmood mimics Trump with her refugee proposals, say Labour MPs. The Guardian. 6 March 2026 pp. 1 and 14

[6] Pippa Crear. Labour ‘must court progressives to avoid catastrophe. The Guardian. 7 March 2026 p.14

[7] Ibid


[8] Nadine White. Whitehall is still tearing Caribbean families apart. Guardian Opinion. 2 December 2025 p.3

[9] Ibid

[10] Ibid

[11] George Monbiot. It’s 2026 – time to stop putting new gloss on old bigotries. The Guardian Journal. 5 March 2026 pp.1-2

[12] Ibid, p.2

[13] John Simpson & Catherine Nellan. Immigration revolt against Mahmood’s plans grows. The Observer. 8 March 2026 p.12.

[14] Samra Turajlic. Offer scientists stability or the UK will lose out in economic growth and health. The Observer. 8 March 2026 p.32

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Twist Or Turn 🪶 Shabana Mahmood’s Immigration Plans And Labour’s Post Gorton And Denton Existential Crisis

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Six

 

A Morning Thought @ 3082

People And Nature ☭ Written by Simon Pirani.

A carbon capture project is being used to greenwash the expansion of one of the UK’s largest waste incinerators, at Belvedere, Kent.

Cory Topco, which owns one incinerator and is building another, says it will capture greenhouse gases from burning waste, liquefy them, and send them by ship to Yorkshire, to be piped under the North Sea and stored.

🔴 Cory promises to capture more than 90% of its incinerators’ greenhouse gas emissions – but no carbon capture plant on earth ever got close to that.

🔴 Cory has an agreement with Viking CCS to to offtake its captured carbon in Yorkshire and bury it under the North Sea – but there are doubts about how, and whether, that could work. Competition authority officials, who say non-pipeline schemes should not get government funding, could cause problems.

Crossness Nature Reserve, Belvedere, with the Cory incinerator in the background.
Photo: Dudley Miles / Creative Commons

🔴 Cory claims it will generate electricity to power 371,000 homes – but is more likely to put less than half of that into the grid. The CCS plant would have a devastating impact, though – doing irreparable damage to the Crossness nature reserve.

🔴The incinerator expansion will encourage local authorities to send waste for burning that could be avoided or recycled, reinforcing fossil-heavy economic throughput and putting the impact-light “circular economy” ever further out of reach.

🔴 Cory hopes the project will be funded by the government’s multi-billion-pound carbon capture subsidy schemes – money that could be spent more effectively on genuine decarbonisation measures.

Doubts about Cory’s claims it can capture 90% of greenhouse gas emissions at Belvedere arise from carbon capture and storage (CCS)’s 40-year global history of failure.

Cory would use post-combustion carbon capture technology, that pulls carbon dioxide out of the flue gases (i.e. gases coming out of chimneys) with amine solvents.

Only one company in the world – SaskPower, which operates the Boundary Dam coal-fired power station in Saskatchewan, Canada – uses this method. In more than ten years of operation it has not once hit its target of capturing 90% of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Boundary Dam’s average capture rate was about 50%, not 90%, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found. Less than 65%, said separate analysis by Carbon Tracker.

Some CCS has higher capture rates, but only at gas processing plants, where the CO2 is easier to collect, because it comprises such a big proportion (up to 90%) of the flue gases. Even these plants struggle to make the process pay: usually they do so by pumping the CO2 back into oil fields, to increase the pressure underneath oil deposits and make them easier to produce … which obviously defeats any decarbonisation purpose.

Cory’s Belvedere plant is not the only one plagued by doubts that CCS can work. Almost all projects proposed in the UK have been “delayed, cancelled or undisclosed”, the energy consultancy Ember reported, scathingly, in November. “No project has moved beyond the pilot phase or begun construction. No carbon has been captured at commercial scale”, it remarked.

The stakes are highest with waste-to-energy plants like Cory’s, because they belch out even more carbon dioxide per unit of electricity generated than coal-fired power stations, as UN Environment Programme and European Union researchers have shown.

The answer, campaigners for a “circular economy” say, is to switch resources into reducing the volume of waste, and sorting what is unavoidable.

Investment in incinerators, and CCS for them, is an “expensive, high-risk distraction” from other more effective approaches, a report by Zero Waste Europe and Only Solutions showed. “Do not build” should always be top of the policy hierarchy, they argued; bad as landfill is, sending plastic and/or biostabilised waste there is better than burning it.

The carbon capture unit at the Boundary Dam power station in Canada.
Photo: Implicit Matrix / Creative Commons

Further research by Zero Waste Europe and Equanimator showed that sorting mixed waste is “always swift and cost-effective” – a “lower-regret solution with much less potential for lock-in”.

Another giant question mark looms over the proposal to liquefy the captured CO2 at Belvedere and ship it to Yorkshire’s east coast, for burial under the North Sea by Viking CCS.

Viking, sponsored by Harbour Energy, Associated British Ports and the oil company BP, could be eligible for subsidies under Track 2 of the government’s £22 billion Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage (CCUS) programme. A Front End Engineering and Design (FEED) report has been commissioned, but a final investment decision, expected in 2025, was not taken.

And officials at the Competition and Markets Authority have, potentially, thrown a spanner in the works: their 2024 report on the Waste Industrial Carbon Capture scheme, under which Cory hopes to receive funding, says projects using non-pipeline transport – such as Cory’s ships – should not be considered.

A government consultation on non-pipeline transport, running until 1 May, could further frustrate Cory.

On top of that, carbon capture researchers say that the oil industry is dangerously exaggerating the potential for undersea storage of greenhouse gases.

Studies of two apparently successful projects, Sleipner and Snohvit in the North Sea off Norway, show that “the security and stability of the two fields have proven difficult to predict”, reported IEEFA, drawing together conclusions from multiple research papers. “Each CCS project has unique geology”; “geologic storage performance for each site can change over time”; and “high quality monitoring and engineering response is a constant ongoing requirement”.

All this “calls into question the long-term technical and financial viability of the concept of reliable underground carbon storage”.

The two Norwegian fields bury only 1.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. Nevertheless, Viking says that it can store “up to 10mt of CO2 annually by 2030”.

Cory’s claim that its new plant, complete with CCS, will produce enough electricity to power 371,000 homes is exaggerated.

Cory’s existing Riverside 1 incinerator, and Riverside 2, which is under construction, could together burn 1.5 million tonnes of waste per year. And that could produce about 1230 gigawatt hours (GWh) per year of electricity.

About one tenth of that electricity would run the two incinerators. And between a third and a half would power the energy-intensive process that captures CO2 – plausibly leaving between 488 GWh and 734 GWh to go to the grid. (See detailed estimates below, “Cory’s business model”.)

Assuming (as Cory does) that an average home uses 2800 kWh in a year, there would be enough for, at most, 262,000 homes, or, more likely, 175,000 homes – less than half the 371,000 that Cory claims.

Cory also says that up to 300,000 London homes could receive heat via a grandiose plan to pipe it from Riverside. But this idea, first mooted in a simpler version more than a decade ago, is still nowhere near construction.

Far more certain is the damage the CCS plant would do, if built, to the Crossness Nature Reserve next to the incinerator, a remnant of ancient marsh grazing land and home to a cornucopia of wildlife.

In giving the go-ahead to the CCS project with a Development Consent Order (DCO), the government admitted its “great negative weight” on the reserve – but rejected calls by the Save Crossness Nature Reserve campaign and others to disallow expansion.

Cory’s speculative CCS project could end up just facilitating expansion of incinerator capacity – when any serious climate policy, and any rational waste management regime, would seek to reduce it.

This is part of an international trend: a waste-to-energy sector that, “at odds with the circular economy”, relies on an increasing volume of waste and creates a “scramble for waste”, as the Transnational Institute put it. This model “creates a dependency on waste, which runs counter to the principle of waste avoidance” and “stands in direct contrast to recycling initiatives”.

Shlomo Dowen of the UK Without Incineration Network (UKWIN) said in an interview that incinerator overcapacity stimulates demand for supposedly “residual” waste, most of which can and should be sorted and/or recycled – “and this is being exacerbated by industries such as sustainable aviation fuel and cement kilns, that are now competing with incinerators for this waste”.

Dowen added that, although the corporations that dominate waste management treat its composition as a commercial secret, it is clear that “once you take plastics and food waste out of municipal solid waste, there is not much left to burn”.

Environment department monitoring shows that, of total residual household waste in England, an estimated 53% is readily recyclable, 27% is potentially recyclable, 12% is potentially substitutable and only 8% is difficult to either recycle or substitute.

The rapid rise of waste incineration took root during the drive to emasculate local government in the 1990s, Vera Weghmann argues in a report for the European Public Service Union. Municipalities were encouraged to turn the expanding waste business over to private partners.

Incinerators require minimum feedstock to work, and local councils across the continent were tied into deliver-or-pay contracts. Countries including Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands even became dependent on waste imports.

Private waste management is an ever-heavier burden on cash-strapped local authorities. When Sheffield discovered that Veolia had been diverting recyclable waste to an incinerator, the council voted to scrap its 35-year contract with the multinational, but backed off when threatened with a high compensation claim.

Dowen of UKWIN said: “These contracts were brokered by government, and forced many local authorities into financial difficulties.” Municipalities, alarmed at the prospect of failing to meet targets for reducing waste deliveries to landfill, were seduced into signing the onerous contracts.

In 2028 fossil-fuel-origin waste (e.g. plastics) is due to be added to the Emissions Trading Scheme, and a certificate will have to be bought for each tonne burned. But waste management companies including Cory are already planning to pass that cost – totalling hundreds of millions of pounds per year across the UK – back to local authorities.

Cory’s CCS project leans heavily on state funding. Before it was granted its DCO, company spokesman Matthew Fox told an inquiry that Cory will apply for a grant under the government’s £8.35 billion Waste Industrial Carbon Capture programme. If it pre-qualified for support, Cory would then undertake further development before securing a contract award.

The Waste ICC programme would fund up to half of the capital cost of the scheme, plus some operational expenses, through a “contract-for-difference” mechanism, similar to that used to support renewable electricity generators. This would guarantee Cory an income from its sales of electricity, regardless of the market price.

Separately, Viking CCS may be eligible for state funding under the government’s CCUS support scheme.

The treatment of biogenic greenhouse gas emissions as zero-rated – an international regulatory loophole to which there is mounting opposition – means that Cory has its eye on another income stream: it can earn Greenhouse Gas Reduction credits by taking out of the atmosphere emissions produced by burning waste that starts out as biological matter (mostly, wood, paper and food waste).

Cory’s Riverside incinerator. 
Photo: Ross.Brown.Cory / Creative Commons

In emissions trading markets, Cory will be able to sell these credits to companies that need them to swap for fossil-fuel-origin emissions of their own – allowing both sides of the trade to provide more greenwash to their PR departments.

Cory did not respond to a request to comment on the issues raised here. Nor did Viking CCS.

In conclusion: extravagant government funding for fitting CCS to waste incinerators is a microcosm of the disastrous, corporate-driven global heating disaster.

Just think about it. Consumer goods manufacturers, food processors and supermarket chains generate mountains of single-use plastic, much of it unnecessary by any standard. In the UK, about 100 billion pieces end up as waste each year. On top of that is food waste: £17 billion worth of it each year, in the UK.

Instead of cutting down the waste mountain, corporations focus on undermining attempts to mandate reusable packaging. McDonald’s, having loudly promised in 2021 to stop making 1 billion plastic toys per year, last year said it will go back to “durable” plastic toys with Happy Meals.

Government, instead of standing up to climate-trashing sabotage and further reducing the flow of waste, piles obligations on cash-strapped local government to dispose of it.

Reuse, sorting and recycling are downgraded, whatever the government’s empty commitment to the “waste hierarchy” says. Instead, those horrible piles of plastic are fed into incinerators – whose corporate owners claim to be “green” and even “zero carbon”, on the basis of plans, funded by the state rather than their shareholders, to fit carbon capture technology that does not work as efficiently as they claim.

Then, promises are made to ship some of these captured greenhouses gases, that need never have been generated in the first place, to Yorkshire, to be piped under the North Sea.

It is insane, but that is not all it is: the whole process is guided by the twisted, society-destroying logic of capital, which prioritises corporate profits above all. Each challenge to a part of that logic will work most powerfully as part of a challenge to the whole.

Simon Pirani, 3 March 2026

==

Cory’s business model

If Cory’s planned carbon capture project goes ahead then, according to the information the company has made public, it could look like this:

🔴 Each year, about 1.5 million tonnes of waste could be burned (750,000 to 850,000 tonnes from the Riverside 1 incinerator, judging by its throughput in recent years, and 650,000 tonnes from the new Riverside 2 incinerator.)[1]

🔴 From each 1.5 million tonnes of waste, we might expect 1.75 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to go into the atmosphere. Of the 1.75 million tonnes, about 850,000 tonnes would come from burning fossil-origin waste, including plastics, and about 900,000 tonnes from burning waste produced from biological material, including wood, paper and cardboard (biogenic waste).[2] This 900,000 tonnes would be treated as “zero carbon” by most methods for counting emissions, because when new trees and other plants are grown, carbon is removed from the atmosphere.

🔴 Most of the carbon dioxide emissions would be captured, compressed and liquefied. The liquid carbon dioxide would be transported by ship to Yorkshire, and buried by Viking CCS in an exhausted oil field under the North Sea. Cory reckons that the transportation and storage would put an extra 17,600 tonnes/year of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) into the atmosphere.[3]

🔴 The combustion of the waste would drive turbines to produce about 1230 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity per year. Of these, 127 GWh might be used to run the incinerators.[4] Anything between 369 GWh and 615 GWh (that is, 30-50%) could be needed to power the capture, compression and liquefaction of carbon, leaving between 488 GWh and 734 GWh to be exported to the grid. Estimates of the energy cost of capture, compression and liquefaction of CO2 at a waste-to-energy plant range from 30% to 50% of the electricity available.[5]

🔴Assuming (generously) that the electricity is supplied uniformly throughout the year, that’s a 56-84 MW power plant, perhaps one fifth of the size of a small-ish gas-fired plant. It’s about enough electricity to power between 175,000 and 262,000 homes – no more than 70%, and quite possibly less than half, of the 371,000 that Cory claims.[6]

🔴 Some energy could be captured in the form of heat, and added to a heat transfer system to households.

🔴 Money-wise, Cory’s incinerators will continue to receive revenue for the electricity generated, plus waste management fees (gate fees) – i.e. fees for accepting waste – paid under contracts by local authorities. The industry norm is that these contracts either require minimum volumes of waste to be delivered and fees paid by the local authority for any shortfall, or they specify a fixed capacity that will be reserved for the authority.

🔴 Cory envisages that much of the capital investment, and operating expenses, for carbon capture and storage will be funded by the government, under the Waste Industrial Carbon Capture Business Model.[7] The government intends to pay out such subsidies in the form of “contracts for difference”.[8]

🔴 In 2028 the government intends to add waste incineration to the emissions trading scheme (ETS), under which companies will have to pay the government for certificates to cover each tonne of fossil-origin carbon dioxide that they pump into the atmosphere. Cory has assured its shareholders that they need not worry: the company has already been “ensuring contracts include change-of-law provisions, and build ETS liabilities into pricing strategies” – in other words, charges for greenhouse gas emissions will be passed back to local authorities.[9]

🔴 For the proportion of waste burned that counts as biogenic, and is captured, Cory will receive Greenhouse Gas Reduction credits. As the company’s representative explained to a planning enquiry, these can be “sold to third party purchasers such as international tech companies, banks, or oil and gas majors, for the purposes of carbon offsetting”.[10]

References

[1] Cory says on its web site that the two plants together will be able to process more than 1.5 million tonnes of waste per year

[2] In its environmental statement, Cory forecasts that 95% of the CO2 emissions would amount to 1,651,780 tCO2 – so 100% would be 1,738,716 tCO2. It forecasts that 49% of the emissions would be from fossil sources. I have rounded the numbers for convenience. In 2017, Cory has reported the biogenic proportion of the waste at its plants as 54.1% (Cory Riverside Energy, A Carbon Case (2017), page 16). A report from the UN Environment Programme estimated that waste-to-energy plants typically emit 1000-1100 kg of emissions when 1000 kg of waste is burned. (UNEP, Waste to Energy: considerations for informed decision-making (2019), page 40.) A report by researchers working the EU estimated the emissions at 700-1700 kg per 1000 kg of waste burned (Best Available Techniques Reference Document for Waste Incineration (JRC Science for Policy Report), see page 152)

[3] Cory Environmental Statement: 6.1. Chapter 13. Greenhouse Gases. March 2024, pages 42-43

[4] This is based on Cory’s published figures for 2015, when 700,138 tonnes of waste went into the Riverside plant, and it generated 574.4 GWh, of which 59.2 GWh was used on site and 515.2 GWh exported. See Cory Riverside Energy: A Carbon Case (2017), page 13

[5] A review by the IEA Technology Collaboration programme concluded that the net electricity production of incinerators with CCS “would be almost halved due to the carbon capture energy requirement”. In 2021, environmental engineers estimated that adding CCS to the Amager Bakke incinerator in Copenhagen, would reduce electricity output from 615kWh per tonne of waste burned to 310kWh, while heat output would increase from 9.1 GJ to 9.5GJ. The incinerator’s owners applied for national government funding to add CCS equipment and that was rejected. A demonstration-scale project is now in progress at the plant. Researchers point out that the energy cost of CCS on incinerators will differ according to factors including the respective use of electricity and heat, the type of amine solvents used, and the type of construction of the plant

[6] I have assumed 2800 kWh per year per home, the same number that Cory uses in its A Carbon Case document

[7] Written summary of the applicant’s oral submissions at compulsory acquisition hearing 2 (EN010128), February 2025

[8] “Subsidy scheme details. The Industrial Carbon Capture Business Model”, Gov.UK

[9] Cory Topco 2024 Annual Report, page 37

[10] Written summary of the applicant’s oral submissions at compulsory acquisition hearing 2 (EN010128), February 2025

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Carbon Capture Project Greenwashes Waste Incinerator Expansion

Ukraine Solidarity Group ✊ A Digest of News from Ukrainian Sources ⚔ 16-February-2026.

In this week’s bulletin

⬤ Welsh Senedd member on aid mission.
⬤ How Trump facilitated Russian war crimes.
⬤ Targeting Kherson civilians.
⬤ Russia religious persecution.
⬤ Terrorising children.
⬤ Ukrainians tortured to death in captivity.
⬤ Looting of the dead.

News from the territories occupied by Russia

Ukrainian resistance to Russian occupation has gone underground (Meduza, 13 February)

Russia sentences 70-year-old pensioner from occupied Tokmak to 15 years for supporting Ukraine (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 13th)

Armed terror and planted ‘prohibited literature’ in new attack on Crimean Tatar family (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 13th)

The Face of Resistance: Crimean Tatar Activist Emil Ziyadinov (Crimea Platform, February 13th)

Crimean women face prison sentences on ‘extremism’ charges for studying the Bible (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 12th)

The Situation In Occupied Crimea On February 10, 2026 (Crimea Platform, February 10th)

Abducted, likely tortured and sentenced to 10 years for opposing Russian occupation of Kakhovka (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 10th)

Crimea 2025 review: human rights and humanitarian law norms (Crimea Human Rights Group, 10 February)

Ukrainian POWs forced to exhume the dead in Mariupol, with the Russians looting the bodies (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 9th)

Crimean abducted, then sentenced to 18 years after criticizing Russia’s war against Ukraine (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 9th)

News from Ukraine

Trade union support for Ukrainian skeleton pilot Vladyslav Hereskevich (Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine, 13 February)

Winter in Kyiv (London Review of Books, February 13th)

“Stepping outside is a mortal risk”: Russia targets civilians in Kherson (The Insider, 12 February)

Ukraine defends Zaporizhzhia stronghold, Russia force gathers in Donbas (Meduza, 11 February)

War-related news from Russia

How Russia tries to show that the invasion of Ukraine is sacred (Meduza, 13 February)

Russia’s economy in 2026: A rising deficit, regional depression, and the possible depletion of sovereign reserves (The Insider, February 13th)

Five-and-a-half years for serving in Ukrainian military … 11 years ago (Mediazona, 12 February)

When Russia first turned its terror against children (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 11th)

Analysis and comment

Türk calls on Russia to cease attacks on Ukraine energy sites (UN commissioner for human rights, February 12th)

You Handed Us Over: Ukrainian and Russian socialists judge the Western left (Red Mole substack, February 11th)

Surviving genocide: resistance and solidarity of the Rohingya people (Commons.com.ua, 10 February)

Emigres split over film about Russia’s classroom war propaganda (Meduza, 9 February)

The Week Trump Helped Putin Commit Two War Crimes (Phillips’s Newsletter February 8th)

Research of human rights abuses

Ukrainian prisoners of war tortured to death in Russian captivity (Tribunal for Putin, February 11th)

International solidarity

UK Young Greens stand with Ukraine (Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, 13 February)

Return to the front line (Labour Hub, February 11th)

Practical solidarity: motion to Unison union conference (Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, 11 February)

Upcoming events

Saturday 21 February, 2.0pm, Piccadilly Circus, London. Demonstration: “Russian troops out. Stand with Ukraine!” on 4th anniversary of full-scale Russian invasion

Sunday 1 March, 6.0-8.0pm, Shoty Cafe (upper ground), SW7 3DL. Write letters to Russia’s political prisoners. No knowledge of Russian is required. All materials and guidance will be provided.

Wednesday 4 March, 6–8pm, Ukraine Solidarity Campaign Public Meeting. Wilson Room, Portcullis House, Parliament, 1 Victoria Embankment, London SW1A 2JR. Chair: John McDonnell MP. Speakers include: Mick Antoniw MS / Yuliya Yurchenko, Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine / Yuliia Bond, Ukrainian Association of Wales / Tanya Vyhovsky, Vermont State Senator / Mariia Pastukh, Vsesvit – Ukraine Solidarity Collective / Johanna Baxter MP / Clive Lewis MP / Stephen Russell, TUC International / Mick Whelan, former ASLEF General Secretary

🔴This bulletin is put together by labour movement activists in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance. More information at Ukraine Information Group.

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News From Ukraine 💣 Bulletin 183

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