At the Edenbridge and Oxted Agricultural Show, on the August bank holiday weekend, spectators are waiting for a treat. The sun beats down, and the smell of hamburgers and hot dogs drifts over the showground. Marquees are full of poultry and bleating goats. There’s even a pen of giant tortoises. But the real attraction is found somewhere between the horse ring and the giant bouncy castle.
Eight yellow machines are rolling onto a field dotted with yellow flags. “DIGGERS!”, a small boy roars. As a musical medley begins, the JCB diggers form a circle, initiating a highly choreographed routine. They start dancing, weaving past each other, narrowly avoiding collision. One rolls on to its front wheels in a “handstand” and drives backwards. Another child squeals with delight. The diggers raise themselves into the air, bending into an arch-like sculpture as a smaller model drives through the yellow tunnel. The crowd whoops and cheers. AC/DC blares over the loudspeaker. It’s “Highway to Hell”.
JCB diggers have become part of the culture—they helped inspire Bob the Builder, a 2005 hit single and the Diggerland theme parks—so much so that the brand name is used as a generic term for any mechanised digger-excavator. But in recent years, the company has also crept into our politics.
Anthony Bamford, JCB’s billionaire owner-chairman, is one of the UK’s richest men and most notable political donors. Bamford, his family and JCB companies gave more than £16m to the Conservatives in the two decades until 2019, including more than £1m in the five years before the 2010 election. He became a peer in 2013 and left the Lords in 2024. More recently, the MPs’ register of interests shows that, at the start of June 2025, Kemi Badenoch received a £150,000 donation from the company.
Bamford was also a fervent campaigner for Brexit, donating more than half a million pounds to Eurosceptic groups before the 2016 referendum and giving generously to pro-Brexit politicians afterwards. In 2019, JCB paid former Brexit secretary David Davis £60,000 for 20 hours of work as an “external adviser”. But one of Bamford’s most notable political relationships has been with Boris Johnson.
As a backbencher in 2019, Johnson received a £10,000 donation from JCB. Days later, he concluded a speech at the company’s headquarters with a rallying cry: “So let us… emulate the spirit of JCB and remove from our path the backstop that is the last Brussels-built blockage in the path of a global Britain.”
In December that year, at the height of the Brexit negotiations, Johnson (by then prime minister) smashed a JCB—its bucket emblazoned with “Get Brexit Done”—through a “gridlock” wall made of Styrofoam bricks. He urged the public “symbolically to get into the cab of a JCB custard colossus and remove the current blockage we have in our parliament”.
Bamford and Johnson are reportedly close friends; Bamford funded much of Johnson’s 2022 wedding party, which was hosted on the billionaire’s Cotswolds estate.
Now JCB is also building a relationship with Reform UK. There’s no record of any donations above £11,180—the threshold for declaring gifts to political parties, raised from £7,500 by the Conservative government in 2023—from JCB or Bamford to Reform politicians but, in October 2024, Nigel Farage (also a friend of Bamford’s) received a helicopter trip from the company worth £8,413.20, culminating in a factory tour.
At a Reform mega-rally in Birmingham in March, Farage clung to the cab of a JCB Pothole Pro as it rolled onto stage, the venue dressed with props designed to evoke “Broken Britain”: potholed roads, a rundown pub and black bins overflowing with rubbish. “Reform will fix it,” Farage promised supporters wearing “Make Britain Great Again” hats, in between vows to bring about mass deportations.
JCB’s case raises questions about the ways in which private interests influence our democracy—and erode trust in it.
How would Reform “fix it”? With a JCB machine, of course. Farage claimed the Pothole Pro he had arrived in could resurface roads “for half the price” of existing methods, if only councils were willing to break their contracts with “inferior providers”.
The JCB stunt—part tongue-in-cheek, part serious—looked like an attempt by Reform to court blue collar employees while presenting itself as the party of UK business, and attracting support from private donors such as Bamford. A slew of Conservative donors had already defected to Reform, as had many voters—and now some MPs. The machine itself was a potent symbol of all the traits Farage hopes to project: masculine, down to earth, quintessentially British and, well, fun.
JCB is not singularly different from other corporations. Nor is Anthony Bamford singularly different from other British billionaires, either for being interested in politics or for the nature of his politics. It is perfectly legal for private individuals and companies to make political donations and, unlike in many other countries, there is no maximum limit to what they can give. But JCB’s case does raise questions about the ways in which private interests influence our democracy—and perhaps erode trust in it. For the company also faces another accusation: that it is complicit in human rights abuses. In some parts of the world, the sight of a JCB can evoke fear.
Atta Jaber, 62, is a farmer from the West Bank. His face is sun-tanned, with deep-set wrinkles and a white beard. The valley in which he lives, Beqaa, east of Hebron, is fertile and ridged by mountains. Much of the region’s produce grows here, from olives to grapes.
The story of Jaber’s birth goes that his heavily pregnant mother was tending to tomatoes in the field when she felt labour pangs. Far from a hospital and without time to go inside their house, she lay down alone and gave birth to Atta.
He tasted the soil before his mother’s milk, he tells me: “I belong to this land.” It was his great-grandfather who had bought almost 90 acres, but the family had resided there longer—for around 800 years, he says.
During the 1967 War, the land was occupied by Israeli forces. A settlement, Kiryat Arba, was established for Jewish settlers 300 metres from Jaber’s house. Like all Israeli settlements in the West Bank, it is considered illegal under international law (the fourth Geneva convention prohibits the transfer of an occupying power’s civilian population into occupied territory).
Jaber used to grow enough produce to feed his family, and would sell the rest. But despite possessing a 100-year-old deed of ownership for his farm, he has now lost most of his land to Kiryat Arba and to Highway 60, which links Israeli settlements and Jerusalem. His olive orchard has been fenced in and he is prevented from accessing it. His home has twice been demolished without notice, along with a water reservoir built by his brothers. Settlers routinely abuse his family, throwing stones, setting fire to his olive trees, even temporarily occupying his home.
In February 2018, the Israeli civil administration sent workers and soldiers to Jaber’s farm, who informed him he was now forbidden from farming on “Israeli state land”. It also sent two bulldozers, including a JCB, to tear up the terraces that Jaber had built over the years. Grapevines and 150 fruit trees were uprooted, including those bearing olives, figs, lemons, apples and almonds. “The noise of the bulldozer is the music of the occupation,” Jaber told documentarians last year.
Jaber estimates the cost of the damage was equivalent to $50,000. Even the cistern he had dug to collect rainwater was destroyed (the authorities informed him that the water collected in it belonged to the Israeli state—he now spends $1,000 buying water each summer).
Now, Jaber is only allowed to farm a narrow strip of land. In August, settlers invaded that remaining strip and cut water pipes for the irrigation system, destroying his crops for this year. The civil administration told Jaber in 2018 not to build any new structures or renovate old ones on his farm; in Area C, which makes up 60 per cent of the West Bank and is where Jaber’s farm lies, 99.6 per cent of building permit requests by Palestinians were rejected between 2021 and 2024, according to the Israeli NGO Bimkom. By contrast, the number of permits approved for Israeli settlers was 8,806—400 times higher than for Palestinians. The discriminatory planning system has made it nearly impossible for Palestinians in the West Bank to build or extend houses for growing families, forcing many to build without approval. When the structures are then demolished, Palestinians are driven out.
JCB is not the only company whose equipment is used in demolitions and the expansion of settlements. Caterpillar, for example, manufactures armoured D-9 bulldozers for the Israeli military that can be equipped with weaponry. But the JCB brand is among the most commonly used in demolitions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and its machines have been used to destroy Palestinian homes across nearly two decades.
Thousands of Palestinians have been displaced by actions involving JCB machines: Amnesty International counted 1,000 in the first nine months of 2021 alone. Corporate Occupation, a project supported by the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions UK (ICAHD UK), reports at least 41,251 people were displaced or directly impacted by actions involving JCB machines in the West Bank, between 2019 and 2022 alone. Of those, it finds 915 were made homeless. Among them are people like Jaber, whose livelihoods were endangered by the uprooting of trees or razing of agricultural land.
JCB argues that it doesn’t have operations in the OPT, does not directly sell machinery to Israeli authorities and that, once products are sold, it bears no responsibility for their subsequent use or abuse. The company only operates in the region through the third-party distributor Comasco, a privately owned Israeli company which has contracts with the Israeli Ministry of Defense for maintenance of the same type of machinery used in demolitions. JCB states that it has little leverage over its dealership network or people who use its products.
In a 2021 report, Amnesty argued that the company could embed human rights conditions into contracts, or take sanctions against its dealers by refusing to supply them with equipment or to update their diagnostic technology. Other heavy machinery companies, such as Hyundai, have set a precedent for terminating some contracts with Israeli dealers found to be involved in home demolitions. John Deere, a manufacturer of agricultural equipment, has disabled machines at risk of being misused in Ukraine after being stolen by Russian forces, by changing a pin number remotely.
In 2019, on the same day that Boris Johnson drove that Brexit-themed JCB through a wall, a specialist human rights charity called Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights (LPHR) filed a complaint to the UK National Contact Point (UK NCP), an independent government body that is part of the Department for International Trade. It suggested that JCB was not meeting its human rights responsibilities under the guidelines of the OECD, which sets standards for responsible business conduct.
When JCB refused the offer of mediation, the NCP proceeded to examine the complaint, eventually stating it could not “conclusively” prove that the specific vehicles shown in evidence provided by LPHR came directly through JCB’s distributor, Comasco, rather than on the second-hand market or by other means. But the NCP still found JCB in breach of two principles: JCB did not have a policy commitment to respect human rights, and failed to carry out human rights due diligence in its supply chain.
The finding pointed to a bigger story: that JCB bulldozers are used in human rights abuses in other parts of the world, too.
In India, the far right has adopted JCB’s machines as a strange and unofficial symbol. At rallies for Hindu nationalist parties, such as prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), you might find JCB machines, their buckets emblazoned with the party’s lotus flag. Like Farage, politicians make entrances on JCBs, or campaign with bulldozer roadshows. Supporters unwrap snacks from bulldozer-themed packaging, while JCB-themed pop songs play; others are held aloft by the bulldozers as they shower marigolds on those vying for votes. At one event, a far-right lawmaker was greeted by 200 JCB diggers.
Nowhere is this imagery more pronounced than in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). Its chief minister, occupying one of the most important political positions in the country, is a BJP leader (and monk) who has earned the moniker “Bulldozer Baba”. Posters depict “Yogi” Adityanath alongside JCBs, and fans have presented him with model diggers: some have even been pictured with toy bulldozers fixed atop their turbans.
Saffron-clad and shaven-headed, Adityanath is the former leader of a temple with a militant Hindu supremacist tradition, and founded the vigilante Hindu Youth Brigade. During his first term as head of UP, Adityanath introduced a law against interfaith marriages and there were frequent anti-Muslim lynchings. He is widely seen as a contender to succeed Modi. He is also a pioneer of what many Hindu nationalists call “bulldozer justice”.
Hindu nationalist supporters are held aloft by bulldozers as they shower marigolds on those vying for votes
In recent years, JCB bulldozers have been used to demolish homes and businesses under the pretence of removing illegal encroachments or punishing alleged rioters. High-profile criminals and mafia leaders were the first targets—but demolitions have been increasingly used to intimidate the opposition and critics of the government, especially Uttar Pradesh’s Muslim minority.
Championing “bulldozer justice” has significantly boosted Adityanath’s popularity and earned him Modi’s praise while campaigning for last year’s general election. Opposition parties “should take tuition from Yogi-ji, where to run a bulldozer and where you shouldn’t”, said Modi.
In a video posted to social media in 2022, one elected BJP leader from Hyderabad rallied his “Hindu brothers” and threatened voters that they would face the demolition of their properties by JCB bulldozers if they did not back Adityanath’s re-election. “Those who do not vote for BJP, I’ll tell them Yogi-ji has got thousands of JCB bulldozers… After the election, anyone who hasn’t supported Yogi-ji, all those areas will be identified. Do you know what JCBs and bulldozers are used for?” he said. This is not the only time JCB equipment has been invoked by BJP politicians to threaten voters.
After Adityanath won a second term as head of the state, a celebratory rally of JCB machines was held in the city of Gorakhpur.
In April 2022, while Adityanath was still campaigning, Boris Johnson was accompanied by Anthony Bamford on a trip to India, where the British prime minister opened a new JCB factory in Gujarat. JCB India, a fully owned subsidiary of the UK firm, has a network of more than 60 dealers and 700 outlets.
The visit took place as demolitions were ongoing in Gujarat and other states, and a day after a local BJP-led body used JCB bulldozers to destroy 20 shops, food stalls and the front of a mosque in northwest Delhi—apparently in reaction to clashes between Hindu nationalists and Muslims four days earlier. The demolitions, which were launched by the North Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC), disproportionately affected Muslims, and continued for more than an hour after India’s Supreme Court ordered the NDMC to stop. In a now-deleted tweet, a BJP MP and spokesperson joked that JCB stood for “Jihad Control Board”.
When Johnson was asked whether he would raise the demolition controversy with Modi, he was evasive: “We always raise the difficult issues,” he claimed, “but the fact is that India is… the world’s largest democracy.”
In the two months following Johnson’s visit, authorities in four BJP-governed states—Gujarat, Assam, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, as well as in Delhi—used JCB machines to demolish places of worship, homes and businesses, affecting hundreds of people, largely Muslims, following protests against discrimination or episodes of communal unrest. Amnesty International investigated 63 documented demolitions that took place between April and June 2022, finding that JCB machines, while not the only ones used, were the “most widely deployed equipment” and the “brand of choice” in these demolitions.
One of the victims was a 56-year-old widow, Hasina Bi, from Madhya Pradesh.
In testimony heard by Amnesty, she said that her family were asleep at noon from the fatigue of fasting during Ramadan, when they were suddenly woken up. Looking outside, they saw “four or five JCB machines” coming their way. “The machines directly attacked our house. We weren’t given any notice, nothing,” she said. Bi held all the ownership documents for her house, which was built under a government housing scheme.
Without due process, the demolitions of residential buildings, businesses and mosques amounted to forced evictions. Amnesty found that areas with high Muslim populations were chosen for demolitions, while Muslim-owned properties were selectively targeted in diverse areas. Particularly in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, nearby Hindu-owned properties were left undisturbed.
More recently, after the Pahalgam terror attack in April 2025 and a subsequent conflict with Pakistan, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs issued a 30-day ultimatum ordering states to identify and deport alleged illegal migrants and establish holding centres. By May, 8,000 homes had been demolished in Gujarat, triggering mass displacement.
Similarly, authorities in Assam state—which has been flagged by Genocide Watch, a volunteer-run international non-profit, for sustained persecution of its Muslims—evicted more than 3,400 Muslim families, many of whom held Indian citizenship documents, without notice, personal hearings or time for appeal. In June 2025 alone, mass evictions and demolitions affected an estimated 667 families in the state. Footage clearly shows JCBs being used in many of the demolitions.
The same month, independent experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council warned that India must immediately end its practice of arbitrary and punitive demolitions.
JCB has previously responded to the allegations that its machines are used in demolitions in India by telling Amnesty that, as in the OPT, once its products have been sold to customers, the company has no control over or responsibility for their use or abuse.
The price of a JCB bulldozer in India is almost twice what it used to be. In the age of “bulldozer justice”, the machines are in high demand by those wielding power. Peter Frankental, the economic affairs programme director at Amnesty International UK, told me “the Indian market is one that clearly JCB feel that they cannot ignore…[and] in order to develop that market, it serves their interest to be on good terms with the government of India.”
What’s striking, Frankental says, is that JCB, an established company enjoying a good reputation, doesn’t appear at all concerned about this loss of control over what the brand represents. Instead, he notes, JCB has “allowed [its] equipment to be used as a symbol of Hindu nationalism, as a symbol of hate against Muslims”.
Since JCB is a private company, it is exempt from the accountability mechanisms that publicly listed companies face. It does not have to report on human rights issues, nor does it hold annual general meetings where stakeholders and members of the public can have their say. There are no institutional investors who have leverage over decisions; the primary shareholders are members of the Bamford family.
Companies cannot be held accountable for complicity in war crimes—no such offence exists
When private companies distance themselves from human rights abuses, they are not doing anything unlawful. There is no legal framework in the UK that requires companies to conduct human rights due diligence in their value chains and global operations. Companies cannot be held criminally accountable for complicity in war crimes—no such offence exists. Nor is there an avenue for victims in other countries to pursue legal claims against British companies for their actions, or failures to act. Even findings from bodies like the UK NCP, which exists to resolve complaints against multinational companies, are not legally enforceable. Companies can effectively behave with impunity and shrug off concerns about the downstream human rights impacts of their business.
Campaign groups such as the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and the Stop JCB Demolitions campaign—a coalition of organisations including the South Asia Justice Campaign—have held protests and launched legal challenges to draw attention to the ways in which JCB’s machines are misused abroad. JCB tends to ignore them.
The groups argue that JCB could carry out due diligence, embed human rights conditions into contracts with external suppliers and use its existing LiveLink technology more extensively. The software monitors diagnostics and tracks the location of JCB products. Campaigners argue that it could be deployed to identify when JCBs are used in high-risk areas, helping to mitigate misuse.
In January, the Stop JCB Demolitions campaign filed a complaint to the UK NCP regarding demolitions in India. It is ongoing.
The company responded to the first NCP finding regarding its conduct in the OPT by introducing a human rights policy, which mentions equality of opportunity and fair work conditions, but neglects to seriously engage with the concerns brought by the charity LPHR.
According to the company, JCB is not responsible for any alleged human rights violations that may be committed by third parties using its products, but it maintains that, “JCB is committed to respecting internationally recognised Human Rights principles and standards in all aspects of our business operations.” A follow-up, ascertaining whether the company has taken steps to respond to the NCP finding, was expected in November 2022, but is currently overdue.
Schillings, a legal firm representing JCB, has previously argued that JCB’s products are “inanimate objects which users have full autonomy... of, control over, and responsibility for”, and that stopping supply to India or Israel would not affect demolitions, as other equipment is available. JCB also “complies with all relevant national laws and regulations in all jurisdictions within which it operates”.
But in countries where the law is weaponised against minorities, where its brand and machinery have become tools for far-right extremists to perpetuate displacement and ethnic cleansing, the company has remained quiet.
A lawyer representing victims of demolitions in India commented that the BJP uses legislation, as well as legitimate brands and bodies, to carry out violence against minority groups: in this sense, he said, “JCB is also a weapon at the hands of the government.”
The real world impact of its products continues to be felt. One 14-year-old girl, whose home was demolished in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, told Save the Children that she saw yellow bulldozers in her nightmares. In 2024, the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land featured three segments showing JCB machines involved in demolitions in Masafer Yatta, in the West Bank.
Does Anthony Bamford know about this? Those I spoke to said that it is likely that Bamford was “insulated” from much of the criticism. Still, Amnesty’s Peter Frankental was of the view that: “Anthony Bamford has no excuse… The buck stops with him as it does with the CEO [Graeme Macdonald]. They must…take steps to avoid their company’s products being used for grave human rights violations repeatedly.”
In recent years, the amount of money in our politics has increased dramatically but “the number of donors hasn’t really changed”, says investigative journalist Peter Geoghegan, former editor-in-chief of OpenDemocracy, who runs the Democracy for Sale newsletter.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, businesspeople like Bamford, “want to be close to power. They want to be close to people who are making decisions,” says Geoghegan. “People who donate money often get government contracts or seats in the House of Lords,” he adds. “We effectively have a system where money buys access to parliament.”
But democracy is meant to be an indicator of “equal access to power”, and so when the voices of mega-donors and their companies are “massively amplified compared to the average voter”, Geoghegan warns, “It really feeds into the sense of distrust about politics.”
If companies that are seen to be connected to some atrocities are also connected to politicians, faith in democracy may be eroded. “I don’t think companies should be able to donate, full stop,” says Geoghegan. But if they are, “there’s a reasonable question about whether those that may have even vaguely been linked to human rights abuses” should be allowed to make political donations.
Last year, many big business donations came from private companies that are “almost always… run by somebody who is also a donor in their own right,” says Geoghegan. Companies face no consequences for failing to mitigate negative human rights impacts through the misuse of their products, and can still exert significant influence over our political system.
In the 2024 general election, Labour’s manifesto promised to “protect democracy by strengthening the rules around donations to political parties”. But Geoghegan describes the recently proposed Elections Bill as “very technical” and says it would not “substantially change the role of money in our politics”.
For now, Bamford and JCB seem attuned to Reform as a growing political force. The company, no doubt aware that nearly 900 local councillors from Reform had been recently elected, decided to be an “official exhibitor” at the party’s autumn conference, in return for showcasing the JCB Pothole Pro. Deputy leader Richard Tice duly sat inside a JCB and praised the company’s “wonderful British manufacturing”.
Amnesty has issued a legal opinion to all councils in England arguing that public bodies can exclude JCB and other companies from public contracts because of their business involvement with Israeli settlements. Still, some of Reform’s new councillors are now considering spending public money on JCB contracts. The Reform leader of Lincolnshire County Council, Sean Matthews, recently pushed for a year-long trial of JCB’s Pothole Pro, despite the fact that the machine had already been piloted and turned down in 2021 because engineers had “found better tools”. Matthews insisted his decision was “not about JCB”, adding that the company was “by the way, the market leader”.
At the Edenbridge and Oxted Agricultural Show, the music stops for a moment. Anthony Bamford’s voice cuts through: “We are a family business… So we show something which is ‘different’.” A remix of Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” plays in the background, as the diggers—the bulldozers—circle slowly.
The machines raise their buckets in a wave. The crowd waves back.
