A manifesto to challenge corporate power 

A manifesto for a comprehensive response to corporate power

Although monopolies and excessive corporate power are not new to our times, the rapid rise and spread of Big Tech in the hands of a few billionaires, has brought the concept of challenging corporate power to a wider audience. 

A growing number of people are coming together to campaign against data centre monstrosities, or to boycott Amazon for its tax avoidance.

Ethical Consumer's work has always been to spotlight damaging corporate power. We are now branching out into a shared manifesto that will help pave the way for action to challenge large corporations who put profit before people and planet. 

Read on to find out about the new campaign for 2026-27 and the manifesto.

The Challenging Corporate Power campaign so far

Many people now agree that corporate power has so effectively captured our political systems that modern societies appear unable to take effective action on the key political issues of our time. These include runaway climate change, rising inequality and loss of biodiversity. This inability to take action is leading to established political parties and ideologies breaking down everywhere.  

In May 2025, alarmed by the rise of racist far-right movements in many countries, which we argued was just one consequence of this runaway corporate power, we published our vision for a different world where big businesses had undergone a fundamental change and were not constantly seeking to maximise profit at every turn. With it came a list of steps we thought might be necessary to get there.

Following consultation with our readers, in September 2025 we launched a crowdfunder to help fund the campaign and our research in this area for another 12 months. During this consultation many readers urged us to build more links with other groups to take a project of this complexity forward.

As a result of this successful first crowdfunding round, we hosted a first 'roundtable' with other NGOs in April 2026. Attendees at this and our subsequent meeting in July included people from: 

• Global Justice Now
• Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice (at Queen Mary University London)
• Corporate Justice Coalition
• Balanced Economy Project (working on monopolies)
• Friends of the Earth
• Critical Takes
• Fairness Foundation, and others.  

The group keeps each other updated on campaigning actions, and were keen on the idea of a manifesto for a comprehensive response to corporate power and happy to advise on its contents and shape. 

The manifesto statement of principles

Although we weren't trying to find consensus or to get a formal endorsement on each of the practical steps from everyone in the roundtable, there was broad agreement to explore activity in eight 'focus areas'. 

It is possible to expand these focus areas to a series of statements of principles which are likely to be uncontroversial. 

Goals of the challenging corporate manifesto

The manifesto that Ethical Consumer has begun working on is designed to:

• Draw attention to the problem of corporate power itself and to how it has become central to contemporary crises. The short list of eight items above begins to do this by illustrating, succinctly, the multiple ways in which corporate power has evaded systems designed to constrain it.
• Provide a focus for conversation, dialogue and creative thinking about how some of these deeply entrenched problems might be solved (see the longer list below).  
• Provide a blueprint for a programme of practical actions for interested political parties with links to more information and groups working in each area.
• Help begin a discussion around a positive vision for the future where co-ops, social enterprises and democratically managed state owned companies have grown to replace more damaging business types everywhere.

It can also show how the different focus areas interact with each other, and how just one of the reforms on its own is unlikely to be enough. Or in other words, why a comprehensive response is needed. 

For example, it is the excessive profits generated through monopoly positions that can allow big businesses to dominate political decision-making so effectively. Domination of decision-making can also help businesses undermine attempts to make them legally liable for their social and environmental impacts. Tax avoidance gives them yet more resources with which to capture regulators. And without trying to fix the fundamental business models or purpose of business, these problems are likely recur again and again because the system we have glorifies a self-interested approach.  

And, of course, fixing the business models will come up against the same lobbying pressure as the other interventions. 

As we have written elsewhere, this does mean that the kind of non-parliamentary work that Ethical Consumer specialises in, such as buycotts (deliberately buying from brands), boycotts and putting public pressure on corporate wrongdoing, will still play an important role in the journey.

Building a detailed programme of practical steps

This is Ethical Consumer's first attempt to flesh out these focus areas into an actionable manifesto for government. There are currently 25 suggested practical steps under the 8 focus areas which range from areas like tax, where interventions have already been designed, to areas like re-designing corporate governance to get companies to act in the public interest, where a lot of learning and experimentation remains to be done.  

We are publishing it now for three main reasons.

1. The time for alternative ideas is right now, and there are some politicians around today that might find some inspiration from it and be able to take action on some of the elements.
2. We are looking for feedback. We know it can be improved over time by people amongst our super-well-informed readership and beyond.
3. We are opening up our crowdfunder call in autumn 2026 to ask our community to help fund this next stage in our Corporate Power Campaign, which is to take the manifesto forward.  

We think that with another £15,000 we'll be able to use the additional magazine pages to research and publish discussions on some of the less-well visited ideas for another year, and to continue working with our roundtable of other groups. We hope to start building a wider coalition too, which is likely to include progressive businesses and trades unions, as well as other campaigners.

We are under no illusion that this will be easy. People have tried before and failed to draw attention to corporations in this way. As mentioned above, opposition from corporations to some of the elements will likely be fearsome and well resourced, and the danger of co-option or greenwashing is everywhere.  

However, we are in a unique moment. People everywhere know that a more profound change to the way we run our societies is needed. It has to be worth trying to see whether things might turn out differently this time with the new evidence around corporate malpractice that is emerging daily.

To contribute: go to our crowdfunder page

To feedback: send feedback via our contact form or email enquiries[at]ethicalconsumer.org

At our conference on October 23rd 2026 in London, some members of our roundtable will be talking about how solutions in the manifesto might help to deal with the problems of big tech. Do join us at the conference!

Detail of the manifesto to challenge corporate power 

The eight areas of focus in the manifesto are outlined in more detail below. This provides a roadmap to a world where all businesses can learn to serve society and nature first. 

a) Companies and public institutions should identify and prevent human rights and environmental harms throughout their global supply chains. In the UK, a coalition of campaign groups and businesses has a well developed call for A Business, Human Rights and Environment Act which would require UK companies and public institutions to identify and prevent human rights and environmental harms across their domestic operations and their global supply chains.  

b) Ethical Consumer and others have written about how cash fines for law-breaking are failing to deter corporate abuse. We are arguing that courts should be given the power to issue "Equity Fines" which require a company to hand over an equivalent value of shares instead.

c) Enforcement agencies should be properly funded. Corporate lobbying has contributed to the systematic de-funding of environmental agencies particularly USA and to a lesser extent in the UK.

d) In the Victorian age forming a company was not a right but a privilege that came with obligations. The idea of formal charter reviews for large companies that persistently break rules should be explored in more detail. 

a) Corporate courts are courts through which companies can sue states for loss of potential future profits if laws (including environmental and social regulations) are changed. The European Trade Justice Coalition's call for their eradication has been signed by over 380 organisations, and many governments are already moving against these courts.

b) The balance between the corporate interest and the public interest is out of kilter under current "intellectual property" regimes and needs reform. For example, governments can be prevented by corporate patents from producing essential medicines for public health.

c) Companies providing outsourced public services should be subject to the same freedom of information laws as publicly-owned providers. Political calls for this have been growing in the UK since at least 2009. 

a) There is an urgent need for existing anti-trust and monopoly regulations to be properly enforced, particularly in the tech sector. The need for democratic societies to prevent monopoly positions from emerging has been well understood for more than 100 years.  

b) Michelle Meagher has written extensively on how anti-trust regulations need to be reformed to consider our current social, environmental and political reality. These include considering consumer interests other than prices, and addressing the multinational nature of monopoly trading. Michelle has also written about bringing wider stakeholder groups into anti-trust regulatory processes.

a) All lobbying meetings, and their purpose, should be a matter of public record. At present, in the UK, only around 4% of lobbyists are captured by disclosure rules. In July 2026 the UK government's Ethics Commission published a report "Lobbying, Business Appointment Rules and Disclosure" which should be implemented quickly.

b) Institute a tight cap on all donations to political parties. We currently favour a maximum from any one source of around £2,000 annually, as is the case in Canada.  

c) Closing the revolving door between public and private office is important. Creating a mandatory 'cooling off period' of five years and penalties for breach would make sense.

d) The need to pay attention to media ownership and its plurality is well understood. Enforcement and action are little practised.

a) A number of groups, including a B Corporate coalition, are calling for the amendment of company law to require companies to consider the interest of society and nature as well as shareholders. A different framing might give the interests of society and nature primacy.

b) It is likely that new forms of democratic board representation for much wider groups of stakeholders (e.g. workers, nature, consumers) will create corporations less likely to be sociopathic. Much experimentation needs to be done in this space and government requirements and support will be essential if it is to scale.

a) The need to support new forms of democratic public ownership, particularly in the supply of necessities for life like food, water and energy, is becoming increasingly evident. Ethical Consumer had written about the work of WeOwnIt in this space in the UK.

b) The Co-operative Party, amongst others in the UK, has a coherent strategy for local people to be given stronger legal rights, dedicated funding, and institutional support to take over and run valued local assets.

c) Significant fiscal advantages, such as reduced rates of VAT, for co-operatives and other types of formal social enterprise would allow companies which externalise fewer social costs to compete on price.

d) Rewarding less damaging business models with public procurement advantages makes sense. Some progress was made in the 2023 Procurement Act.

a) Require "Public Country-by-Country Tax Reporting" (PCbCR) as a condition of trading for multinational corporations. PCbCR is already required in some countries.

b) Reform global tax rules. Already drawn up and implemented to a very limited extent are the OECD's "Pillar I and II" proposals. A UN Tax Treaty is also in discussion.

c) Limit public sector purchasing only to those companies able to demonstrate that no artificial tax avoidance schemes are used anywhere in the group.

a) A central body, perhaps a "corporations regulator", could perform a co-ordinating role across the different entities likely to be tasked with delivery. It could also challenge underperformance from other regulatory agencies.

b) Complex long-term change programmes can benefit from a dedicated independent body to report regularly on progress and challenge under-delivery. The Climate Change Committee in the UK is one example of this.