Consumerism

This one's about to get uncomfortable. In every other chapter of this book we've been innocent bystanders, looking at institutions doing things that were out of our hands. Not this one. This is the chapter where I have to admit I'm part of the problem. I've bought from Shein. I've bought from Temu. I've scrolled through cheap clothes on my phone and clicked buy without asking the obvious question. How can it possibly be that price? Deep down I knew. I just didn't want to know properly. So this is me knowing properly. And it's not pretty. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Consumerism. Buckle up please, because this one is about to get uncomfortable. This book so far has pointed outward. The banks did this, the government did that, the media lied, the pharmaceutical industry captured the regulator, the energy companies buried the science. All of it is true, but it's also easy. It's easy to blame institutions and forces that feel far away from your daily life because it lets you sit back and shake your head and say, look at what they're doing to us. This chapter is different. This one is about us. This one is about me. This one is about the fact that while I've been writing a book about institutional corruption, I've been clicking buy now on websites that are among the worst institutional actors operating in the world today. This is the chapter where I stop being an innocent bystander and have to admit I'm part of the problem. Let's start with where your clothes come from. Xinjiang produces around 85% of China's cotton and at least 20% of the world's cotton. Around one in every five cotton garments sold on the global market contains cotton that was grown, picked, or processed in Xinjiang. That's a US government estimate, not an activist figure. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute identified 83 major international brands benefiting directly or indirectly from Uyghur forced labour. The UN International Labour Organization in 2024 alleged widespread and state-sponsored forced labour practices across both Xinjiang and Tibet. The US passed the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act in 2021, which legally presumes that any product made in whole or in part in Xinjiang is the product of forced labour, unless the importer can prove otherwise. The UK hasn't passed anything comparable. So when I'm telling you that the clothes on your back, the clothes on my back, the clothes I ordered last month from an ad I saw on Instagram, are almost certainly linked in some way to people being held against their will in camps in northwest China, I'm not exaggerating and I'm not being dramatic. I'm telling you what multiple governments, UN bodies, academic institutions, and investigative journalists have now documented beyond any reasonable doubt. The worst offenders and the ones I'm most embarrassed to say I've bought from are Shane and Temu. Shane is a Chinese fast fashion company now headquartered in Singapore for tax reasons. Temu is owned by PDD Holdings, a Chinese e-commerce giant. Between them in 2021, they accounted for nearly half of all de minimis shipments into the United States, which is the customs loophole that lets packages worth under$800 enter the country without inspection or import duty. They do the same thing in the UK and Europe. In 2024, around 4 billion low-value packages entered the EU, 91% of them from China. They aren't just selling you cheap stuff. They're specifically designed to bypass every border inspection and every supply chain check that exists, by sending their products directly to your door in small parcels individually, so nobody ever gets the chance to look inside a shipping container. In 2022, Bloomberg News commissioned independent laboratory testing on garments that Shine had shipped to the United States. On two separate occasions, the tests came back showing that the cotton in the clothes came from Xinjiang. That's not an allegation, that's a lab result. In 2024, the US Congressional Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which is bipartisan, published interim findings from its investigation into Shane and Temu. One of the key findings was that Temu, in writing, admitted to the committee that it does not expressly prohibit third-party sellers from selling products based on their origin in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. TEMU also admitted that it conducts no audits and operates no compliance system to determine whether the products it sells are made with forced labour. Its code of conduct theoretically prohibits forced labour, but there is no mechanism to enforce it. The committee concluded that there is an extremely high risk that Temu's supply chains are contaminated with forced labour. In January 2025, executives from Shane and Temu were summoned before the UK Parliament's Business and Trade Committee. Shane's general counsel, Yinanju, was asked repeatedly whether cotton from Xinjiang was present in Shane's supply chains. She refused to answer. She refused to say whether the company's code of conduct prohibited Shenjiang cotton. She refused to comment on whether there was forced labour in Xinjiang at all, saying it wasn't Shane's place to have a geopolitical debate. The committee chair, Liam Byrne, said afterwards that the committee was horrified by her testimony and that her refusal to answer basic questions bordered on contempt. This is Shane a few months before it was preparing to list on the London Stock Exchange with a valuation of around£50 billion. Then in January 2025, the BBC published an investigation based on several days inside the Shane village in Panyu, Guangzhou. They spoke to workers and factory owners. They found workers doing 75-hour weeks in direct contravention of Chinese labour laws. One worker told them, if there are 31 days in a month, I will work 31 days. They found wages below the living wage. They found factories where the staff had no days off. And this is just the Tier 1 supplier factories. These are the ones Shine acknowledges as part of its chain. What happens upstream from there in the cotton fields and the spinning mills is even worse. And then in April 2025, Stop Uyghur Genocide UK published research showing that Shane had invested in and promoted an industrial park in Guangdong Province called the Guangching Textile and Garment Industry Orderly Transfer Park, which had been deliberately set up in cooperation with the Xinjiang Development and Reform Commission specifically to connect Xinjiang cotton and textile producers with major e-commerce platforms like Shane. Shane hosted an investment promotion event at the park in March 2024. The research concluded there was credible evidence that Shane knew what it was promoting and that it was highly likely that clothes made or sold through that park contained Xinjiang textiles. I've bought from Shane, I've bought from Taymu. I've sat scrolling through a phone looking at a four-pound t-shirt, thinking, how is that even possible? And at some level I already knew how it was possible. Deep down I knew. I just didn't want to know properly, because knowing properly would have meant I couldn't click by. So I let the thought pass and I clicked by. I'm not proud of it. I'm telling you because the whole point of this book is that the feeling is inside us and we're trained to ignore it. I ignored it. For years. Now you might be sitting there thinking, fine, I'll stop shopping at Shane and Temu. I'll pay a bit more. I'll shop somewhere reputable, Primark, H and M Boohoo, the middle tier of the High Street. I'm sorry to tell you this, but it's not that simple. Primark, to its credit, publishes a supplier map that shows the factories where its clothes are actually assembled. That's more transparency than most brands offer. By Primark's own account, that map covers roughly 95% of its products, which sounds good until you realise what's not included in the other 5%, and what's not included even in the listed 95%. The map only shows Tier 1 factories. Tier 1 means the final assembly stage, the factory where the cut fabric gets sewn into a finished garment. It doesn't show tier 2, the mills that wove the fabric. It doesn't show tier 3, the dye houses that coloured it. It doesn't show tier 4, the spinning mills that turned raw cotton into yarn. It doesn't show tier 5, the cotton farms themselves. And tier 4 and tier 5 are where forced labour is most concentrated, because they're the furthest from the brand's oversight and the hardest to audit. In Indian spinning mills, there's something called the Sumangali scheme. It targets poor teenage girls from rural villages, typically between 14 and 18 years old. The deal is presented to their parents as an opportunity. The girl works in a spinning mill for three years, lives on site in a dormitory, and at the end of the three years receives a lump sum that's supposed to go towards her dowry. In reality, she's often confined to the factory compound, works 12-hour shifts, six or seven days a week, for wages far below minimum wage with no freedom of movement and frequently doesn't receive the promised lump sum at the end. The International Labour Organization classifies it as a form of bonded labour. Several brands have been linked to mills using the Samangali scheme over the years, not through deliberate sourcing, but through the fact that their tier 2 and tier 3 suppliers use those mills and nobody further up the chain is looking. Then there's unauthorised subcontracting. This is when a tier 1 factory, the one that is on the brand's supplier map, takes an order it can't fulfil on time and quietly farms part of it out to a smaller unaudited workshop somewhere down the road. Rana Plaza, the factory building that collapsed in Bangladesh in 2013, killing 1,134 workers, was a case of unauthorised subcontracting. The brands whose labels were found in the rubble, which included Primark, Benetton, Walmart and others, had not knowingly sourced from Rana Plaza. The orders had been subcontracted out to it from listed factories. The brands usually only find out about this kind of thing when something goes wrong. Then there are homeworkers. A huge amount of finishing work in the global garment industry, beading, embroidery, hand stitching, crocheting, is sent out to women working from their homes in South Asia, paid by the piece, often earning a tiny fraction of the minimum wage, completely invisible to any audit, because there is no factory to visit. Primark's own policy says a supplier factory only appears on its public map after a year of successful production. So any factory in its first year of supplying Primark is, by definition, not on the map. There's always a rolling gap of unaudited new suppliers. And Primark is one of the more transparent ones. Most of the others don't even publish a Tier 1 list. Maybe you think, fine, I'll spend more. I'll go to the expensive end. I'll buy Prada, Vuitton, Ralph Lorraine, Hugo Boss, Lacoste, proper brands, the kind of thing that costs£200 for a polo shirt. At least then I know I'm paying for quality and for workers being treated decently, right? This is where the whole system reveals itself for what it really is. In the 2020 report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 83 major international brands were named as directly or indirectly benefiting from Uyghur forced labour through labour transfer programs. The list includes Ralph Lauren, Hugo Boss, Lacoste, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Puma, Nike, Adidas, Fila, Hart Schaffner Marx, Zara, H ⁇ M, UniClo, and dozens more across electronics, automotive and retail. Some of them have since cut ties or investigated, others haven't. Some deny the findings. The list keeps growing. Ralph Lauren in particular has been under formal investigation since 2023 by the Canadian Ombudsperson for responsible enterprise after a coalition of 28 human rights organisations filed a complaint. The complaint referenced bills of lading showing Ralph Lauren had imported more than two dozen unique shipments into Canada from Esquell Group subsidiaries, a Hong Kong textile manufacturer whose Xinjiang subsidiary, Changji Eskel Textile, had been placed on the US Commerce Department's entity list for alleged use of forced labour. The complaint also cited research from Sheffield Hallam University's Helena Kennedy Centre, linking Ralph Lauren to multiple companies named in Uyghur Forced Labour Investigations. Ralph Lauren has publicly stated that it prohibits its suppliers from using any cotton grown in Xinjiang and has tried to block the Canadian investigation on jurisdictional grounds, arguing that the Canadian subsidiary isn't responsible for decisions made at head office in the United States. You can believe the denial if you want. But here's the thing, even if Ralph Lauren is being completely honest, and even if its direct suppliers are not using Xinjiang cotton, the broader problem remains, because Xinjiang cotton doesn't stay in Xinjiang. It gets shipped out to spinning mills in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam and elsewhere. It gets blended with cotton from other regions. It gets turned into fabric that's then sold to garment factories anywhere in Asia. By the time it reaches the Tier 1 factory making your polo shirt, there's no label on it saying where it came from. Independent researchers at RTA in Ireland traced cotton from Xinjiang through at least 15 Bangladeshi factories in 2024 that supplied clothing to major Irish high street retailers. The cotton had been shipped from two companies directly linked to Chinese forced labour transfer programs laundered through Bangladesh and arrived in Irish shops with labels like Sustainably Sourced. In 2022, US Customs and Border Protection seized shipments from Esquell's Vietnamese subsidiary, which had been originated outside China, because they suspected Xinjiang cotton had been laundered through the Vietnam operation. A 2025 analysis by the Rand Corporation found that while direct imports from Xinjiang to the US had dropped sharply since the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act came into force, US companies continued to have considerable exposure to Xinjiang tied firms in the second, third, and fourth tiers of their supplier relationships. A KPMG survey found that 68% of companies were only reviewing Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers. Everything beyond that, where the forced labour actually happens, is in the dark. So the depressing reality is that spending more doesn't necessarily buy you an ethical garment. It might buy you a slightly better cut and a label you can show your mates, but it doesn't guarantee that the cotton wasn't picked by someone who can't go home to their family. Nobody can guarantee that. The system is opaque by design because opacity is profitable. And this isn't just about cotton and clothes. The same pattern runs through almost everything we buy. Around 35% to 40% of the world's polysilicon, the material used to make solar panels, comes from Xinjiang. Several of the major polysilicon producers there have been linked to forced labour. So when a Western government proudly announces a push for renewable energy and installs solar panels everywhere, there's a significant chance those panels were built on the backs of Uyghurs in camps. Xinjiang produces around 12% of the world's titanium sponge, used in aerospace and automotive manufacturing. It produces 11% of the world's beryllium, used in defence, telecommunications, and electronics. It produces hundreds of millions of lithium batteries a year, which go into smartphones, tablets, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. The Just Transition, the whole green energy story we're being sold, is partly being built on Yuga forced labour. Then there's tomato paste. Around one in four tomatoes processed globally comes from Xinjiang. An investigation in 2024 found that tomato paste products labelled as Italian were likely to contain Chinese forced labour tomatoes that had been shipped to Italy, processed there, and rebranded. When you pick up a jar of pasta sauce with an Italian flag on the label, you have no way of knowing where the tomatoes came from. Then there's Cobalt for batteries from the Democratic Republic of Congo, a lot of it mined by children as young as seven working in unregulated artisanal mines for a few dollars a day, feeding into the supply chain of every smartphone, laptop, and electric vehicle on the planet. Then there's cocoa from West Africa, where the International Labour Organization estimates around 1.56 million children are working in child labour on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast and Ghana alone, producing the chocolate we eat every day. Then there's coffee, palm oil, fish from Thailand, bricks from Pakistan, garments from every corner of the developing world. The entire global supply chain, the thing that lets you buy a shirt for£4, or a smartphone for£500, or a chocolate bar for£80 is held up at every level by people who cannot say no to the work they're doing, who cannot leave, who cannot complain, and who will never be seen by the people who buy the final product. Earlier in this book I wrote about the transatlantic slave trade, about how the people who ran it, bought shares in it, profited from it, and lived comfortable lives off it, all knew it was wrong. They knew, John Newton knew, and wrote a hymn about it. Thomas Jefferson knew and owned 600 people anyway. The plantation owners in the American South told themselves complicated stories about why it was actually fine, because the alternative was giving up the lifestyle their wealth had built, and I wrote with some satisfaction that we can't judge them by modern standards because they were of their time. The implication being obviously that we would have been different, that we would have been the ones refusing to buy the sugar and the cotton. That's the line that finished me when I started researching this chapter. Because I am not different, I am exactly the same. The man in 1790's London buying sugar made by enslaved people in Jamaica, telling himself it's not his fault, the market exists, everyone's doing it. I'm not the one holding the whip, I just like it in my tea. That's me in 2025, buying a t-shirt from Shine. The only difference is 230 years and the fact that the people exploited are now far enough away, and the chain has enough layers that I can pretend I don't know. But I do know. I've known for ages. I clicked by anyway because it was convenient, and because I could tell myself I was skint and couldn't afford to be particularly ethical. Skint, I was skint, right. A slave owner in 1800 could have said the exact same thing. I can't afford to free them. The plantation wouldn't be viable, I'd lose the house, I'd lose everything my family has built. I know it's wrong in principle, but I'm not in a position to do anything about it right now. Maybe when things are better. We have not changed. We have just moved the suffering far enough away that we don't have to look at it over breakfast. And the question that the reader has to sit with, the question I've had to sit with, is the one I've been asking in this book. Would you actually do it differently if you could? Would you actually pay more for a shirt if you knew the person who made it was treated with dignity? Would you actually buy half as many clothes if it meant the ones you bought weren't made by someone being held in a guarded dormitory in Guangdong? Would you actually refuse the four pound t-shirt? I genuinely don't know what your answer is. I don't even fully trust my own answer yet. But I know this much, until you've answered that question honestly, until you've sat with the discomfort of it and looked at your own wardrobe and your own habits and your own excuses, you cannot sit in judgment of anyone. Not the slave owner in 1800, not the banker in 2008, not the politician in Westminster, not the CEO of Shane. Because until you've looked at your own hands, you're not in a position to point at anyone else's. So what do we actually do? I'm not going to lecture you because I haven't earned the right to lecture anyone. I'm still working it out myself. But here's what I'm doing and what I'm going to do from here on in. I'm buying less, a lot less. I don't need 20 t-shirts, I need five. I don't need new stuff every season. I need stuff that lasts. The fast fashion model depends entirely on persuading us that we need to buy constantly. The moment enough of us stop, it collapses. I'm buying second hand wherever I can. Charity shops. A second hand garment is already in circulation. Buying it doesn't fund any new forced labour. It also costs a fraction of the price, so the I'm skint excuse disappears. I'm learning to repair things instead of replacing them. Sewing on a button, fixing a small hole, patching knees. There's a generation of us who were taught none of these skills because the stuff was always cheap enough to throw away. That was deliberate. Making us helpless made us better customers. I'm researching brands before I buy anything new, not perfectly, because perfect information doesn't exist in this system by design. But checking whether the brand publishes a supplier list, whether it's been named in any investigations, whether it produces in countries with documented labour abuse, Good On You is a decent app and website for this kind of thing. They rate brands on labour, environment and animal welfare. I'm supporting small and local makers where I can. Not because small always means ethical. Plenty of small brands have the same problems. But because a small local maker is usually someone whose entire supply chain you can actually trace, often all the way to them personally. And I'm accepting that this is uncomfortable, that I'll slip up, that I'll sometimes click by on something I shouldn't have, and I'll notice it later, and I'll have to sit with it and do better next time. This isn't about achieving purity. Nobody achieves purity in a system this rigged. It's about waking up enough to stop lying to yourself about what you're part of. This chapter is about the moment you realise the feeling you have isn't just telling you to look at them, it's telling you to look at yourself. And that's the hardest thing the signal has ever asked us to do, because it means we can't just be angry at the banks and the politicians and the corporations and the priests. We have to be angry at ourselves too, or at least honest with ourselves, and then we have to do something about it. This was the chapter that made me realise I'm no better than any of the people we've talked about. I've ordered online thinking that's a bargain. How can Even do it for that price. Well, deep down I knew I knew that someone somewhere was being taken advantage of. But ultimately it was convenient, and I could bat it off by saying, Well, I'm skint, so I can't afford to be particularly ethical. I've talked about how the slave owners knew, but they did it anyway, and how I can't judge 200-year-old standards by today's standards. Are we any better? Would we really say, Okay, I'll pay more if I know workers are treated with dignity? Would we really buy less? Would we really go to the charity shop instead of Shane? Only you can answer that. But until you do, it's impossible to sit and judge others. I suppose it boils down to this should we buy things made by people who aren't free?