UK Desk for Arts Express

I sit down with Josh Cliffords, the founder of @freewater.io the startup giving away bottled spring water for free and somehow managing to tackle the global water crisis while they’re at it. It’s like Mad Men meets mutual aid: every bottle’s an ad, and every sip helps fund clean water projects in East Africa. We talk philanthropy, advertising, why FreeWater might be capitalism’s glitch in the matrix, and why, when 2 billion people still don’t have safe drinking water, innovation without ethics isn’t innovation at all. It's part tech vision, part moral reckoning, and somehow still makes room for hope.

They said it was just about the bins. But if you’ve ever lived on an estate, you know better — it always starts with the bins.In this episode, I’m reporting from the streets of Birmingham, a city on its knees with a bankrupt council, a broken promise to workers, and rubbish piling up faster than excuses. I joined Unite the Union and the striking bin workers right outside the council house as they raised their voices (and a fair bit of hell) against a system that’s failing them — and us.This isn’t just about pay. It’s about dignity. About working-class people being pushed into a Victorian underclass while the powers that be hide behind buzzwords and balance sheets. You’ll hear from the frontlines — chants, chaos, and community — and we’ll trace how Brum got here, what it means, and why this fight matters beyond the Midlands.

On this edition of the UK Desk for Arts Express, I take a close look at New Flesh, the debut novel by Adam Jones—a brutal, stylish piece of speculative fiction that fuses body horror with bureaucratic dread. Think Cronenberg meets Kafka, shot through with a very British kind of collapse. I dig into how the book speaks to our current moment: digital numbness, institutional violence, and the way desire gets twisted by systems meant to control us. It’s grotesque, sharp, and hard to look away from—just like the world it reflects.

Sitting down with Greenaway, aka The Lit Crit Guy, for a chat about his new book felt like pulling back the curtain on something we all live in but rarely name: a system so inescapable, so total, that it starts to feel like air — poisoned, pressurised, but invisible unless you stop to really look. And that’s what the book does: it doesn’t just point at late-stage capitalism and say “this is bad,” it opens the trapdoor and drags the whole thing down into the genre it belongs to. Not economics. Not politics. Horror.Because what is capitalism if not a haunted house? A slow-burn possession? A monster that feeds off every moment of rest you almost had, and every future you thought might still be possible. Greenaway maps it all — from the daily grind to the crisis of meaning, from wage labour to the endless content churn — and makes the case that the scariest part isn’t the chaos. It’s the order. The cold, systemic, spreadsheet-shaped order that knows your worth down to the last decimal and still says, “Not enough.”

The independent publisher that’s been shaking up the literary scene with its bold, anti-establishment ethos. From philosophy to politics, music to subcultures, Repeater has carved out a space for radical thought and unflinching creativity. In this episode, we unpack the explosive whistleblowing that exposed the tech-capitalist ties behind the scenes, the role of AI in eroding independent publishing, and what this means for the future of leftist literature. Featuring voices from those on the front lines, we explore how corporate power is suffocating radical thought—and why the fight for Repeater and Zer0 is far from over. Free Palestine. Smash the machines. The struggle continues.

For this weeks UK Desk, I reflect on my experiences in the UK film and creative scene and the current plight facing the industry at the moment which has left more then 70% out of work across the sector. Can the working class artists survive this war on culture?