Why I took on JCB’s ‘bulldozer genocide’ in the heartland of UK fascism: The truth about Britain

On Sunday, 18 May 2025, I, alongside other members of the JCB: Stop Bulldozer Genocide campaign, attended the JCB Sportive cycle ride starting from the company’s headquarters near Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, UK.

The event, sponsored by the construction equipment manufacturer JCB (J.C. Bamford Excavators Limited) UK to celebrate its 80th anniversary, was raising funds for the British child protection charity, National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC).

The campaigners held a protest condemning JCB’s hypocrisy in supporting a children’s charity whilst producing bulldozers which are used in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of children in Palestine, India and Kashmir. This complicity has been detailed in a report produced by the campaign in early 2025.

My experience of the protest made me reflect on the connections between different facets of imperialist power. Companies like JCB, which are fuelling Israeli genocide and Indian fascism, are deeply embedded within the British establishment as landowners and large-scale employers.

This, in turn, fuels the rise of the far-right in certain areas and contributes to the justification of genocide and the devaluing of the lives of racialised others.

JCB complicity

In Palestine, JCB operates through its sole dealer, the Israeli company Comasco, which holds contracts with Israel’s Ministry of Defence for the same model of JCB machines used in the demolitions and construction of settlements.

From as early as 2006, the Israeli military has been photographed demolishing Palestinian homes in the West Bank with JCB bulldozers.

Currently, JCB is also complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, having been listed in UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s July report among numerous companies directly aiding and profiting from the genocide. Armoured, unbranded JCB High Mobility Engineer Excavator (HMEE) machines, known as ‘Ami’ in Hebrew, have long been used by the Israeli army and are now being used in Gaza.

In India, Narendra Modi’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has consistently used JCB bulldozers to demolish Muslim homes, shops and places of worship across various Indian states in an ongoing project disturbingly named ‘bulldozer justice’.

In fact, JCB is so closely intertwined with this project that it has come to symbolise attacks on Muslims. JCB bulldozers have been used to carry out both punitive and arbitrary demolitions. In the punitive demolitions, the homes of people accused of crimes, which include protesting against the BJP, are destroyed. 

In recent months, a targeted campaign of evictions, including demolitions by JCB bulldozers, has been underway across the country.

In the northeastern state of Assam, 1080 families were displaced on July 12, and 19-year-old Sakuar Ali was killed in police firing in the Goalpara district on July 17. According to Human Rights Watch, the BJP government is fuelling discrimination by arbitrarily expelling Bengali Muslims from the country, including Indian citizens.

Border Guard Bangladesh reported that India expelled more than 1500 Muslims to Bangladesh between May 7 and June 15. In July, around 3,400 Bengali Muslim homes were demolished in five eviction drives across Assam. In Siasat Nagar, Gujarat, 8,000 Muslim homes were demolished in May; and in the Wazirpur area of Delhi, JCB bulldozer demolitions in June have destroyed the homes, built several decades ago, of Dalit, oppressed caste and Muslim working class families, originally migrants from Bihar, with no rehabilitation. 

In Kashmir, which is one of the most militarised zones on earth, JCB machines have consistently been used in house demolitions during large-scale evictions, despite many residents providing proof of ownership.

This is just one aspect of a broader regime of human rights violations of the Kashmiri people by the Indian state, particularly since 2019, when the limited autonomy of the state of Jammu and Kashmir was revoked by the Indian government. In order to facilitate the entry of Indians and Indian capital, land and property are being acquired, dispossessing local owners without any due process.

The campaign JCB: Stop Bulldozer Genocide is a coalition of organisations with two main demands. The first is that JCB must end its relationship with the Israeli Ministry of Defence and cease all activities in occupied Palestine.

The second is that JCB must commit to ensuring that its products are not used for human rights violations in India and Kashmir through robust monitoring and prevention systems. This includes making compulsory the use of its existing LiveLink technology to trace and locate JCB machines. 

JCB’s chairman, billionaire Anthony Bamford or Baron Bamford of Daylesford and Wooton, is a major donor to the British Conservative Party and a close friend of Boris Johnson.

The JCB empire is controlled by the Bamford family trusts, which have been consistently involved in offshore tax scandals. More recently, Bamford has been getting closer to the far-right Reform Party.

In March 2025, party leader Nigel Farage entered a major Reform rally on a JCB machine lent to him by Bamford. Earlier Bamford had treated him to an £8,000 helicopter flight to tour a JCB site.

Disrupting an anniversary

The protests at the Sportive included several cyclists taking part in the ride, alongside supporters holding banners and placards and chanting slogans at various points on the route.

At the start of the ride, by the bulldozers which frame the entrance to the JCB headquarters, we took out our banner and cyclists and supporters revealed T-shirts reading ‘Stop JCB Bulldozer Genocide’. JCB security then asked the group to leave the premises, informing us that we were "on private property," and proceeded to follow us around in JCB-branded cars throughout most of the day.

We later reconvened at a ‘Feeding Station’ on the cycle route outside a local school, the Mosley Academy. Here, our predominantly South Asian heritage group of protestors was met with extreme hostility and racism from both local business owners and cyclists in the race, many of whom were white-collar JCB employees, including being told "go back to your own country" and "you don’t look like you were born here."

At one point, as I was chanting through a megaphone, a passing cyclist grabbed it out of my hands and threw it into the road, damaging it in the process, before doing the same to a mobile phone belonging to a fellow protester trying to film the incident.

Despite these experiences, we remained chanting with our banners before returning to the JCB headquarters. Whilst the cyclists from the protest group were allowed to continue with the race, the rest of the group were prevented from re-entering the site by security staff blocking our cars.

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Attending the JCB Sportive showed the dominance of this company in the local area surrounding its headquarters. Local business owners were enraged by our daring to criticise a company which has provided jobs and customers in their area, even when we explained the company’s role in the genocide of children.

This experience was a stark reminder that not all lives are valued equally by the UK establishment and that companies representing this establishment like JCB, with children’s blood on their hands, reinforce this thinking among their employees and supporters.

Being told to go back to your own country whilst protesting about the genocide of children in Palestine by a British company feels like having the entire logic of racism and imperialism hurled at your head at once.

A company monopoly

The JCB headquarters is located on a 2,600-acre estate, including farmland and a golf course, owned by the Bamford family, and the surrounding villages are essentially JCB-run company towns.

The staff at a pub opposite the school had extreme reactions when they realised we were protesting against the company, aggressively shouting, threatening us to take our banners down, and explicitly telling us we couldn’t protest JCB there because JCB supported their business. These reactions spoke volumes about the fear, alongside utter reverence, invoked by the company’s dominance. 

One man started yelling at us to get off the pavement and telling us we were on private property, indicating the figurative monopolising of public land by JCB, and the complete refusal of local business owners and workers to engage with any criticism of the company.

This man angrily told us how JCB had provided jobs in the local area, as though this fact inherently invalidated our right to protest against them. When we retorted, asking the man if he cared about the children being killed in Palestine by JCB bulldozers, he replied, "No, because my kids are alright."

In that moment, I was overcome by anger. But later, I realised how much this one sentence evoked for me. The white supremacy entrenched in the open devaluing of the lives of those beyond the West, combined with the hyper-individualist values of the UK's neoliberal capitalist society.

Work hard, raise your children, appreciate the scraps handed down to you by the powerful, never examine the world beyond you, and most importantly, maintain an unabashed hostility towards anyone remotely obstructing these goals.

If a company gave you a sense of stability and security, however illusory, what does it matter if they did the exact opposite, and far worse, for someone else, somewhere else than here?

Layers of fascism

The cyclist that knocked the megaphone out of my hand was almost certainly, like many other participants, a JCB employee. In any case, he was upholding their reputation by silencing the protest.

This is an indicator of the multiple levels of imperialist power enacted by JCB, their complicity in ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine, India and Kashmir, facilitated by the silencing, through their employees and monopolising of the surrounding neighbourhood, of those trying to peacefully protest against this complicity.

Fear, indifference and racism ensured there would be zero accountability for such an attack.

The owner of the pub opposite the school, whilst consistently joining in the calls for us to leave on the grounds that we would upset his customers, did admit that he understood our reasons for protesting, telling us, "I’m from the Middle East."

This interaction added to the unsettling sense of JCB’s power in the area, in an evidently racist environment, both this man and his business would no longer be accepted and patronised if he was not seen to vocally condemn anti-JCB protests, even in the face of genocide.

The response to our protest did not feel surprising in the context of the deeply worrying Reform win across Staffordshire county council and the neighbouring Derbyshire county council in the recent May elections.

However, the far right has a longer history in the region. It does not feel like a coincidence that the school outside which we were protesting, at the exact point that the fascists attacked us, was named Mosley Academy after the family of the notorious English fascist, Oswald Mosley, also a large landowner in this area.

There was evidently considerable wealth among the residents in the area, in contrast to the stereotypes of Reform voters as exclusively disadvantaged and working-class.

At one point, when a group of us were walking to our car, a man complained that he didn’t have space to move his car out of his driveway and volunteered that "it’s a very big Jaguar."

Reflecting these genteel environs, we were also met with stern telling-offs for our unruly behaviour in protesting against JCB. Two elderly passers-by complained that we were making too much noise, admonishingly saying "it’s a Sunday," evoking the ultimate traditional English, stiff-upper-lip mentality: keep your head down, stay well-mannered and respectful of authority, don’t make a scene or challenge the status quo.

Dark times

Driving into Stoke-on-Trent after the protest, I was struck by the contrast in demographics. Like many towns and cities in the UK’s Midlands, Stoke has a significant South Asian population, and the juxtaposition of this with the presence of fascism in the more rural surrounding areas felt like a microcosm of the UK more widely.

Fascism is on the rise across the country, and non-white communities are routinely made to feel increasingly unsafe and unwelcome, as exacerbated by legislation such as the government’s new anti-immigration measures.

The right are out in large numbers on our streets, and protesting against them, whether in the form of anti-fascist counter demonstrations or disrupting the activities of companies involved in genocide, comes with big risks, especially if you are visibly not white. 

Whilst the violent reactions to our protest left several of us feeling shaken, we refused to be chased away. As one of my fellow protesters commented: 

"They can abuse us, they can take away our megaphones and attempt to silence us, but we will continue to demand an end to JCB’s bulldozer genocide and its deep-seated hypocrisy in supporting a children’s charity. Children deserve to live in peace and safety, whether in the UK or in Palestine, India, Kashmir or anywhere else in the world."

We are living in dark times. As Israel’s genocide continues, both the authorities, security staff, police, and the fascists are turning on those desperately trying to do whatever we can to expose UK complicity in upholding the apartheid regime. 

Nonetheless, we must not give up. There is hope for change. Undeterred by racism and heavy policing, activists with groups like Palestine Action,  with widespread support from local communities, have caused significant disruption to the activities of weapons manufacturers such as Elbit Systems in recent years.

Last October, Barclays Bank reportedly divested from Elbit thanks to pressure from activists and campaigners. More recently, in early July this year, JCB was included in a report published by UN expert Francesca Albanese, which listed 61 companies as complicit in Israel’s genocide. 

Companies like Elbit and JCB are right on our doorstep here in the UK. It is crucial that we continue to target them and their ongoing role in imperialism, fascism and genocide. They have blood on their hands, and we must not let them forget it.

Paulette Champa is the pseudonym of a British activist whose work challenges power and uplifts the oppressed.

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff, or the author's employer.