Paul Mason is a writer, journalist and political consultant. A life-long member of the Labour Party, he is a radical social democrat, passionately engaged in the defence of democracy, humanism and universal rights. He is the author of eight books, including his latest: Reds: A Global History of Communism.

Born in Leigh, Greater Manchester in 1960, he studied Music and Political Theory & Institutions at Sheffield University. He taught at Loughborough University in the 1980s, worked as a special needs teacher in London, and entered business journalism in the 1990s, becoming deputy editor of Computer Weekly during the Dotcom boom.

From 2001 he was business correspondent and then economics editor at BBC Newsnight. In 2013 he moved to Channel 4 News, before going freelance in 2016 in order to campaign publicly against Brexit and enter the fray of Labour politics.

As a reporter, Paul covered the Enron bankruptcy, the 2008 financial crisis, ethnic conflict in Kenya, the 2014 war in Gaza and the 2015 Greek crisis – producing hundreds of video news reports for the BBC and ITN, plus weekly columns in The Guardian, iPaper, New European/New World and Frankfurter Rundschau.

His books include the bestseller Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (2015, How To Stop Fascism (2021) and the novel Rare Earth, a satire on Western attitudes to China. Three of his plays have been staged: including The Divine Chaos of Starry Things (White Bear, 2017) and Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere (Young Vic/BBC TWO, 2017),

In 2015 he produced the influential documentary series #ThisIsACoup – about the Greek financial crisis. Radio documentaries include Spinning Yarns (2007) – a series on the history of the cotton industry for BBC Radio Four, and Wagner: Power, Sex and Revolution (2013), also for Radio Four.

A lifelong engagement with the social impacts of information technology is reflected in Paul’s books and articles, including Clear Bright Future: A Radical Defence of the Human Being (2018) and the paper Postcapitalism and Agentic AI (2026)

Since 2018 Paul has focused on the economics of defence, security and resilience, co-authoring Labour’s Defence Industrial Strategy as the party prepared for government in 2024. He is the Aneurin Bevan adjunct fellow in Defence and Resilience at the think tank Council on Geostrategy where he has authored reports on defence industrial strategy, nuclear rearmament, UK strategic culture and economic statecraft.

He is visiting senior fellow at the University of Exeter’s Centre for the Public Understanding of Defence and Security, where his report Designing the 21st Century Wartime State set the framework for the Centre’s work on regional civil contingency planning.

He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Sheffield. Awards include RTS Specialist Broadcast Journalist of the Year (2012), the Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize (2018) and the Erich Fromm Prize (2020).

His latest book Reds: A Global History of Communism is published in the UK by Head Of Zeus in August 2026 and in the USA by Scribner in October 2026. He lives in London.