Non-reductive automorphism groups, the Loewy filtration and K-stability

We study the K-stability of a polarised variety with non-reductive automorphism group. We associate a canonical filtration of the co-ordinate ring to each variety of this kind, which destabilises the variety in several examples which we compute. We conjecture this holds in general. This is an algebro-geometric analogue of Matsushima’s theorem regarding the existence of constant scalar curvature Kähler metrics. As an application, we give an example of an orbifold del Pezzo surface without a Kähler-Einstein metric.