UK

‘Be careful what you wish for…’

Emma Burnell  8  October, 2025

Tory conference ends today with a speech by Kemi Badenoch. Did you notice it was happening?

As a reader of a political website, you might have.  But you would be very unusual.

Drifting to apathy

This is not to say that the other party conferences, even that of the Party of government, would have made a huge public impact. That isn’t how our current news environment works. But reports from the conference all describe small audiences and a lack of energy and coherence from the top down. I mean this is a party that can’t even be trusted to spell Britain, never mind govern it. They are no longer a serious party and the burghers in Barbour who would once have flocked to this gathering of the faithful know it. Some have drifted to Reform, some to the Lib Dems, many to apathy.

Most of the talk about the Tories is about what would have seemed unthinkable (if desirable) for most of my life – their demise as a major political party. God I wanted to see that. To see the party of Thatcher consigned to the dustbin of history – well I am not going to pretend that this likelihood doesn’t still give me a definite thrill.

But here’s the thing – Thatcher may have long since departed but her economic legacy doesn’t just remain – it has metastasised. I do not believe that New Labour were the children of Thatcher in quite the way she purported to (and how clever was that as a piece of political messaging? Further cementing distrust of Blair from the left while allowing the Tories to claim their austerity as a “continuation” of Blairism).

But the notion of Thatcherite economics has gone from a deep philosophy of a small state where the government was unafraid to go through the pain of having distinctive losers (both workers and the millions made unemployed) and winners to a vague notion that any and all tax cuts will bring growth – no matter what the impact on the state’s capacity to deliver or the economic ability to fund those cuts. The Tories became unwilling to make the argument for cutting the state – the prerequisite for Thatcherism – because by the end, even they knew there were no more cut they could make that wouldn’t lead to a howl of pain from the country they wanted to serve. Boris Johnson was no Thatcherite – he was too unwilling to be unloved. That he became despised for his own careless cruelty overseeing a Downing Street that saw itself as above the ‘plebs’ should not be confused with having a genuine political philosophy rather than simply a desire to be ‘World King.”

The supposedly ‘liberal’ Tories David Cameron and George Osborne – who did so much talking left on social issues to woo a gullible commentariat who were bored with Labour dominance – are now wining and dining Robert Jenrick – he of the “No non-white faces” comments. This is seen by some as a dramatic shift. It’s not. Their politics of austerity always had winners and losers too. It was described by some as “Thatcherism on steroids” and so it proved both in the impact it had on the losers and the long term damage it did to our economy, our productivity and people’s lives. Those losers have seen wages stagnate for a decade and a half while the services they relied on were chipped away at (at best) and torn away. Their anger has been directed into first Brexit and now immigration protests. I might disagree with the solutions they believe in but their anger at their loss is genuine and should be respected and understood.

The Tories are now trying to reclaim the mantle of “fiscal rectitude” at their mini conference. Good luck, as they say, with that. But they don’t actually mean running a good economy that benefits the majority of the citizens of the UK. They mean cutting the state back ever further with no answers for what that would mean for these same people who are angry at what has already been lost. This is something even Reform UK don’t support. As they have found out in the places they are in power – such as Kent where they are mooting raising Council Tax – there are some things the (local in this case) state has to do and it has already been cut to the bone by Cameron and Osborne.

The party of Liz Truss Boris Johnson  and Cameron and Osborne making claims to be the party of sound finances is just laughable. And people are just laughing. The Tories don’t inspire the kind of fear or admiration (depending on your viewpoint) that they previously generated. They just inspire derision. I’ve never – not even when we were laughing at William Hague in a baseball cap in the pretty sound knowledge that the Tories wouldn’t come back at the 2001 election – known a party so beaten. Even the 2015 Lib Dems might look at the Tories now with pity.

No path back

It is very hard to see a path back for the Tories at the moment. The Tories haven’t just been beaten, they have been hollowed out first by their consequences of their own bad policies then by their inability to face those consequences head on. And finally by the fracturing of their vote to an insurgent populist right that they were utterly unequipped to fight. In fact they can’t even decide if they want to fight or flirt with Reform.

Where the Lib Dems were given a political lifeline by Brexit and their chance to remake themselves in opposition to their former allies, there is little on the horizon that offers hope of a resurgence of Tory conservatism. If people want right wing populism they will vote for the (more) popular version in Reform. If people want ‘small c conservative’ economics with a liberal bent they will vote for the Lib Dems. Some have said that a recession might be the way back for the Tories. I don’t think a recession will push the ever growing band of those likely to lose out away from populists. That’s not the lesson I take from history. So even if the Tories are wishing for Labour to fail in this way, they too should be careful what they wish for. Even more they should be careful to not be seen wishing for it.

Easier opponent?

Labour may be in the doldrums in terms of their polling and popularity but what they aren’t is beaten. However, there are significant problems that come for Labour in the demise of the Tories.

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Labour know how to fight the Tories – we’ve done it for decades. Sometimes we’ve even succeeded. We have become very good at defining ourselves against the Tories. We now have to unlearn a lot of that.

If Labour simply try to run the same playbook against Reform as they have against the Tories it will fail. Because Reform are not the same as the Tories nor are they seeking to appeal to the same voters as the Tories. Some of their older voters, true, are some of the lower middle class winners from Thatcherism. The tiny brief cohort that did well out of the ‘property owning democracy’ who became landlords of houses that were once socially owned. But mostly, Reform are appealing to those who feel they have lost out and are angry about it. Reform have an answer to that anger.

I may believe with every fibre of my being that every element of their answer is wrong. But I do know who they are appealing to and I recognise the strength of that appeal. And some of that strength – the reason for their ‘us and them’ rhetoric is that they have recognised that we are in a time of winners and losers. And they are appealing to those who have felt themselves to be on the losing side for far too long. Grievance politics is ugly and would be a catastrophic path for Labour to ape. But if Labour does not recognise that this is what we’re fighting against – and offer hope to the aggrieved – then we will fail to stem the tide.

Labour have also got a lot of the fight against the Tories wrong over the years. Labour’s have suffered losses through many attempts to draw very simplistic ‘class war’ lines against the Tories that might please activists but repelled voters. Voters in the Red Wall loved Boris until they didn’t. And it wasn’t him being posh that did for him. Simply pointing at Nigel Farage and saying “But he’s posh” will do nothing to diminish his credibility.

Reform would be seriously lost without Nigel Farage. In fact, one thing that has really struck me when listening (as I do obsessively)  to political programmes and podcasts is that the words ‘Farage’ and ‘Reform’ are pretty much interchangeable. So it will be an important part of Labour’s strategy to bring down Farage’s popularity.

But they will not do this if they return to that old playbook of pointing out he went to Dulwich and used to be a stockbroker. The voters have that priced in. We need to be asking Reform curious voters what they are most worried about when it comes to Farage and use that to define him. Not simply tell ourselves the scare stories about him that get our juices flowing.

Labour might end up missing the Tories as an easier to define opponent. They may also (whisper it) want them to recover just enough in the polls to split the right wing vote to allow them to come through the middle. If Labour don’t manage to adjust to a post-Tory reality the irony might be that the last thing the Tories manage to harm is – once again – Labour.

Emma Burnell

View all articles by Emma Burnell

UK

Half-way point in rail nationalisation as Greater Anglia returns to public hands

James Moules & Daniel Green  10th October, 2025

Train services operated by Greater Anglia will be brought into public ownership this weekend, marking the half-way point in the nationalisation of the nation’s rail network.

Public ownership of the railways was one of the key pledges Labour made upon its return to office last year, with promises to improve services and drive down fares.

As Greater Anglia services transfer into public ownership on Sunday, almost half of rail passenger journeys that Great British Railways will ultimately be responsible for will be operated by publicly owned companies.

The rail operator, which covers routes across the East of England and parts of London, boasts being the country’s most punctual service.

Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said: “From this Sunday, passengers commuting into Norwich or heading for a day out in Cambridge will be travelling on services that are owned by the public, and run with their interests front of mind.

“We’re reforming a fragmented system and laying the foundations for a more reliable, efficient and accountable railway – one that puts passengers first and delivers the high standards they rightly expect.”

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It comes after South Western Railways and c2c were both returned to public ownership earlier in the year. West Midland Trains and Govia Thameslink Railway are expected to follow suit in 2026, meaning that eight out of ten passenger rail journeys will be on publicly owned services by the middle of next year.

Martin Beable, managing director for Greater Anglia, said: “I am very proud of what we have achieved here in East Anglia over the past thirteen years, significantly improving standards, investing in a complete fleet of new trains, and working closely with the local community.

“Moving into public ownership is an exciting opportunity to build on this success. By working more closely with the wider family of publicly owned operators, we can share expertise, drive innovation, and deliver even better journeys for our passengers across the Anglia region.

“This transition also brings us one step closer to Great British Railways – a simpler, more unified network that puts passengers at its heart. Together, we can create a railway that drives growth, sustainability, and pride for the communities we serve and right across the UK.”

High fares hurt working Londoners and students, and exacerbate social isolation – new briefing

HubMP2012

OCTOBER 5, 2O25

London’s high public transport fares obstruct access to employment opportunities, education and reasonable living standards, a briefing published today by Fare Free London shows. 

Working Londoners spend many extra hours a week – and, in some cases, many extra hours a day – commuting, to avoid expensive trains and use cheaper but slower buses. 

Students tangle with trade-offs between housing costs, which are lower outside the capital, and travel costs that are much higher.  

London’s tube and train fares are among the world’s highest. They exacerbate social isolation and mental illness among the most vulnerable Londoners. They obstruct people’s ability to socialise, to take their children places, and to access London’s cultural treats. 

The briefing, Fares Unfair: London public transport and the cost of living crisis, is based on the results of a survey conducted over the summer by volunteer researchers. 

Pearl Ahrens of Fare Free London said: “We did not have the intention, or capacity, to survey a demographically representative group of Londoners. We focused on the way that the relatively high cost of public transport in London affects lower-income households, whose views are often least heard.

“Nearly half of our respondents said they worry about costs every time they use public transport. More than half said they use cheaper modes of transport because better ones are too expensive. This often meant people taking long journeys by bus instead of tube.”

Respondents’ quotes in the survey are a stark reminder of the yawning gap between London’s wealthiest and poorest households.

One takes a journey from Lewisham to the Royal Docks using three buses and the Woolwich Ferry, “to save the money I would have to spend if I took the Underground or the DLR”. Another takes an hour’s journey to school by bus, double the time it would take by train.

A single man told one of our researchers of how he had had a cleaning job in Zone 1. To start work at 7.0 am, he caught a bus from SE18 at 5.0 am, got off in Zone 2 and walked the rest of the way.

A single mother of two daughters explained how she takes three buses to work, from SE9 to Piccadilly. She described herself as “struggling to make ends meet – doing a balancing act”, and having to limit her daughters’ weekend outings due to travel costs.

Another respondent commented: “Every time I step out of the house, I spend more money on travel than even groceries. It disconnects me from seeing my family as well as my friends.”

The briefing urges the Greater London Authority and the Mayor’s office to consider how the impact of high fares affects policy goals including those in the Mayor’s Transport Strategy and policies on tackling social inequality.

It urges that these issues are included in discussions about the funding basis of Transport for London, to “consider how this can be changed, to reduce and eventually abolish reliance on fares income.” 

More information at farefreelondon.org.

Image: 1967 Stock train at Finsbury Park in 2010. Creator: Tom Page  Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

HubMP2012

A catalogue of Tory disasters – but how much is changing under Labour?

 October 2, 2025

Mike Phipps reviews What Went Wrong with Britain?: An Audit of Tory Failure, edited by Steven Kettell, Peter Kerr and Daniela Tepe, published by Manchester University Press.

The sense of frustration and despair about the state of modern Britain shared among the editors of this book was such that they originally thought of calling it WTF is Wrong with Britain? The publisher persuaded them otherwise, but the premise retains its urgency.

Everything you would expect is here and quite a bit more. Matthew Watson charts the collapse of the Conservative Party – under Johnson of course, but also his successors – into populist crowing about British exceptionalism to mask governmental  incompetence, most infamously during the Covid pandemic.

James Morrison catalogues the years of denial about the UK’s structural and ever-widening levels of inequality, rooted in “moralising neoliberal narratives that individualise responsibility for poverty.” Claire Thompson, Dianna Smith and Laura Hamilton highlight Britain’s food poverty – among the worst in Europe.

The chapter on the NHS is particularly telling.  Allyson Pollock, James Lancater and Louisa Harding-Edgar highlight how the Covid-19 Inquiry showed how services for managing communicable diseases were undermined by the abolition of the Public Health Laboratory Service, a loss of public health expertise and the fragmentation and part-privatisation of services. The closure of 100,000 beds in the last fifteen years alone, leaving the NHS with a quarter of the number it had when it was founded, meant the service was completely unprepared when Covid hit. This led to the Government spending £220 million on Nightingale hospitals and awarding contracts worth £2 billion to private healthcare companies.

Neil Carter examines years of dismal under-achievement on climate policy. Leaving aside the unexpected improvement in air quality resulting from Covid lockdowns and the more long-term benefits of increased working from home, the issue has been largely neglected by successive Tory governments reeling from one crisis to the next.  The author describes their approach to energy efficiency in buildings, for example, as “calamitous”. At the root of the failures was a reliance on market-led solutions and the influence on policy of corporate interests.

Johnna Montgomerie argues that the politics of debt is a key aspect of the neoliberal state. As the 2008 crisis showed, when markets panic, the state uses public debt freely to restore ‘confidence’, whereupon financial institutions use their new liquidity to pass on debt to private households. Global asset markets benefit at the expense of the rest of us and the crisis continues, fuelled  – as other authors argue here -by worsening inequality.

It should not be forgotten that there was real opposition to this catalogue of disasters. David J. Bailey reminds  us of the anti-fees protests, the direct action of UK Uncut, the growth of independent unions, anti-fracking protests, civil liberties and rent campaigns – movements which fed into the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership.

The book covers the impact on women and minoritised communities. Yet there are also some curious omissions: nothing on Britian’s failing education system or the impact of national decline on young people.

Can Labour do better?

It may have been too early, when this book went to press, to speculate whether the incoming Labour government could turn the tide, but most contributors were not optimistic. Here are Frankie Rogan and Emma Foster who wrote a chapter on gender relations: “The inability of Starmer’s Labour to produce even the illusion of sustained hope and optimism in the UK is indicative of the long-standing consequences of austerity and permacrisis, and the inability of most politicians to imagine a world beyond it.”

The authors of the chapter on health agree: “The incoming Labour government has given us little cause for hope.” Likewise on social care, Juanita Elias, Ruth Pearson and Shirin M. Rai doubt whether the new Labour government have either “the capacity or willingness [to] bring about significant reforms to the sector that might end decades of policy drift.”

Most alarmingly, the author of the chapter on debt believes that the incoming Labour government has no coherent economic plan or strategy, adding, with some foresight: “Starmer and the new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will repackage austerity measures and urgent and necessary interventions to the large public debt caused by austerity – a circular argument.”

The Government’s defenders would refute these interim verdicts. They would point to some significant successes: the Employment Rights Bill, the return of the railways to public ownership, private schools now paying VAT on fees, free school meals for 500,000 more children and increased NHS spending.

But it’s the big stuff on which the Government is failing and which explains its dire poll ratings.  A recent poll placed Keir Starmer as the most unpopular Prime Minister in history, with a lower approval rating than even Liz Truss. It’s not just that he has failed to spell out a coherent vision: just 16% of people polled by YouGov think Labour have a clear sense of purpose.

It’s working within a self-imposed fiscal straitjacket, which has resulted in some deeply unpopular policy choices – from the winter fuel payments fiasco, through a refusal to abolish the two child-benefit cap, despite clear evidence that doing so is an easy way to reduce child poverty, to disability benefit cuts.

In their zeal to reassure investors and the bond market, Starmer and Reeves seem “prepared to hurt poorer people while apparently leaving the wealthy largely untouched,” noted one commentator recently.

Meanwhile, too many people still feel squeezed by soaring energy bills, supermarket price gouging and housing costs. The Chancellor’s tax and spend plans look like tinkering, rather than the radical change promised, and with no bold moves on wealth taxes, amid rising inequality and patchy growth, her whole approach smacks of maintaining managed decline. The complacent reliance on ‘market-led solutions’ to the housing crisis, the problems engulfing the NHS and even natural monopolies like the water industry underline that this Government, like its predecessors, is putting failed ideology before practical solutions.

These are deep-rooted failings, not just weaknesses in messaging or spin. If Keir Starmer does not change course, inexorable pressure will mount on his leadership -sooner than many might imagine.

Such scenarios are beyond the scope of this book, whose great strength is in charting how we got here. But, despite last year’s election promises, there’s little sign that Starmer’s leadership is going to get us out of this mess.

HubMP2012

Speeches from the dock by Russia’s political prisoners

A new book published this week showcases ten people who were jailed for opposing Putin’s war on Ukraine.

 October 5, 2025

Voices Against Putin’s War: Protesters’ defiant speeches in Russian courts, edited by SImon Pirani and published this week by Resistance Books, brings the spirit of anti-war resistance to an international audience.

The book includes speeches in court by ten people who opposed Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, and were arrested, tried and handed long jail sentences for doing so. Two protesters who appeared in court, and made statements outside court, are also featured.

One of the protesters, Ruslan Siddiqi, derailed a train carrying munitions to the Russian army in Ukraine. Three firebombed military recruitment centres or security services offices (out of hours with no danger to persons). Others did no more than criticise the war, and the Russian government, on social media – or, in the case of the youngest protagonist, 19-year old Darya Kozyreva, laid flowers at a statue to Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko.

Voices Against Putin’s War also includes a summary of 17 other anti-war protesters’ speeches in Russian courts; letters and interviews by the protagonists; and a survey of political repression in Russia, Belarus and the occupied territories of Ukraine, of which these jailings are part.

John McDonnell MP writes in his Foreword: “This stubborn refusal to be silenced is what brings down dictatorships, secures human rights and gives us all the hope that freedoms can be won. For that we all owe these courageous advocates for justice a depth of gratitude.”

The European Network for Solidarity With Ukraine is supporting the book’s publication as a way of strengthening its campaign for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine and an end to the illegal occupation of Ukrainian territory.

Any proceeds will be donated to Memorial: Support Political Prisoners, Russia’s largest organisation – now based abroad – that gives legal and practical support to political prisoners.

The book has received endorsement both from prominent Russian opponents of Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine, such as Darya Serenko, coordinator of the underground network Feminist Anti-War Resistance, and from Oksana Dutchak, co-editor of the leading Ukrainian progressive journal Commons.

Simon Pirani, honorary professor at the University of Durham, who edited the book, said: “There are now more political prisoners in Russia than at any time since the post-Stalin ‘thaw’ of the 1950s. And the war has turbocharged the repressive machine.

“These protesters who used their ‘final word’ in court to denounce the dictatorship stand in a tradition that goes back to the populists who defied tsarist autocracy in the 1870s.”

The statements in Voices Against Putin’s War are by Alexei Gorinov, Igor Paskar, Bohdan Ziza, Mikhail Kriger, Andrei Trofimov, Sasha Skochilenko, Aleksandr Skobov, Darya Kozyreva, Alexei Rozhkov, Ruslan Siddiqi, Kirill Butylin and Savelii Morozov.

A launch event for Voices Against Putin’s War will be held in London on Thursday 20th November, at Pelican House, Cambridge Heath Road, at 7pm, featuring “Try Me For Treason”, a semi-staged reading by actors of excerpts from prisoners’ speeches.

Copies of the book can be ordered from Resistance Books here. It will also be available soon as a free-to-download pdf.

HubMP2012

Scaling up Seattle

OCTOBER 7, 2025

Jonathan Rosenblum introduces his new book, published today.

Anyone with a shred of humanity and a degree of political engagement must be wondering today, “What’s the way forward? How do we fight in the political arena?”

In my country, Trump and the billionaires control the levers of power, our neighbors are being kidnapped, imprisoned, and deported, and bosses are gleefully busting unions while Elon Musk and his confederates loot the public treasury. In your country, the head of government, leader of a putative working-class party, is doubling down on Farage’s racism and xenophobia, criminalising anti-genocide activists, and demanding yet more austerity from working people. Labour’s leadership is driving the country straight into the arms of your own Trump.

Socialists everywhere need to chart a new political path forward: Break free of the establishment parties that have brought us to this parlous crossroads, and build new political movements, ones that fight for our interests and are democratically accountable to working people.

I live and work in Seattle, Washington, a city of 800,000 residents in the continental northwest. I am a union organiser and writer, and I drive part-time for Amazon delivering packages. I’ve just published a new book about our socialist struggles in Seattle. We’re Coming for You and Your Rotten System: How Socialists Beat Amazon and Upended Big-City Politics (OR Books, October 2025) is remarkably timely as it answers that urgent question, “What’s the way forward?”

Over the course of a full decade, on the strength of a single socialist seat in our City Council, we won transformative victories – a first-ever tax on Amazon to build social housing; the first big city to win a $15 an hour minimum wage; breakthrough renters’ rights; abortion and mental health funding; a ban on caste discrimination; funding for LGBTQ youth services; and more.

We did not win by trying to change mainstream political parties from within; we built our own independent political movements, outside of the parties and in direct opposition to them.

Our movement was led by Kshama Sawant, a Marxist, and the political organization she belonged to, Socialist Alternative (SA). In recent years we’ve had a number of self-identified socialists win political office in the US. But Sawant and SA stand as a sharp counterpoint to reformist socialists like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders. Those politicians sought to work within the Democratic Party, our rough equivalent of Labour, hoping that they could reform it to meet the needs of working people: a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, a rise in the pathetic national minimum wage, strengthened labour laws.

They failed – not because they are bad people, but because they did not appreciate that the party they were trying to work within was implacably opposed to the sort of change they were proposing. It was not built to accommodate socialist politics. As Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, our own Keir Starmer, famously said eight years ago: “We’re capitalist. And that’s just the way it is.”

Sawant was elected to the nine-member City Council in 2013, beating a long-term incumbent with a clarion call for a $15 an hour minimum wage. On the council dais, she sat alongside eight Democrats, a few of whom billed themselves as left-leaning reformers, but all very much a part of the political establishment. We organized and waged legislative fights over the course of a decade and won three re-election battles against the combined forces of the political establishment, Amazon, Starbucks and other major corporations that call Seattle home. Though never a member of SA, I worked for several of those years in Sawant’s council office and organized alongside the movements we built.

We approached political struggle differently from how reformist socialists worked. In the book I describe the three pillars of what I call Marxist insurgent struggle.

First, we recognized that political struggle is class struggle and that our main responsibility therefore was to use the City Council office to build mass street movements to press demands and thereby force the politicians to make concessions. What we won, and where we fell short, would be entirely determined by the balance of power between us and our opponents, not by our ability on the dais to enlighten and persuade the other City Council members.

We recognized that in advancing our bold demands – a 58 percent rise in the minimum wage, breakthrough renters’ rights, the tax on Amazon to build social housing, bans on police weapons – we would be putting ourselves in direct conflict not just with big business, but also with the modern state. By “state” I mean the full range of institutions that establish, maintain, and enforce capitalist order – the executive and legislative branches of governments, the bureaucracy, the courts and the police, along with adjacent institutions such as the media and both mainstream political parties, the Democrats and Republicans.

That movement that Sawant and Socialist Alternative led was guided by the foundational recognition that the political arena in capitalist society – yours and mine – is not an open ground for the freewheeling contest of ideas. Rather, political institutions and the rules they establish for conducting legislative and other affairs are specifically designed to uphold and reinforce the capitalist status quo. So in taking on these fights, we would be going up against all of the institutions of state power. We saw ourselves – and were seen by our opponents – as a socialist beachhead within the enemy’s camp.

This basic power analysis has eluded most progressive movements, including reform-minded socialist movements that have foundered on the naïve belief that they can bend to popular will an institution of state power – such as a mainstream political party – when in fact that institution exists to uphold the capitalist status quo.

Our second principle of Marxist insurgent politics was advancing bold material demands that are explicitly connected to the call for broader societal change. We know that working people alienated by mainstream politics will get engaged when they see a movement that speaks to their material needs, explains the underlying systemic problem, and provides a course of action. Conversely, you can’t build a movement if the demands are vague or modest.

We also advanced bold demands to demonstrate capitalism’s inability to meet our most basic needs and, therefore, why we must build movements for systemic change. This is essential if we are to build a truly socialist political movement.

Too many reformists on the left move from one campaign to another, taking aim at the maladies of capitalism without parsing why these problems persist. But you can’t properly treat a cancer without first having a correct diagnosis. Without that root-cause analysis, bold policy proposals begin with lofty slogans but – once they enter the political battlefield – crumble into modest change that only attenuates injustice and fails to meet the basic needs of working people. We’ve seen this in both of our countries on myriad issues in the last generation, including minimum wage, climate and racial justice and basic labour rights.

The third principle of Marxist political insurgency that we practiced was popular movement democracy – the ongoing engagement of community members in setting demands and in deciding strategies for how to wage the struggle.

Popular movement democracy as practiced by Sawant and Seattle movement activists, with a particular focus on involving people from marginalized communities, is much broader than the customary definition of “democracy” in capitalist society. Sawant invited community members into forums where they would discuss and decide what demands to place before City Council and how to wage the fights. The $15 minimum wage strategy was developed through neighborhood and citywide meetings. The decision to push for a ballot initiative as a backstop to the legislative fight – a tactic that proved decisive – was debated and approved at a mass meeting of hundreds of workers.

This participatory democracy became a feature of our approach to movement work in the subsequent battles for tenants’ rights, the tax on Amazon to build social housing, and in the annual city budget. Time and again during Sawant’s tenure I would hear community members marvel about how wonderful it felt to be able to express their views, how for the first time, they felt like genuine participants in the political arena, rather than just subjects.

One might understandably think: “That’s all well and good. But Seattle is a single municipality of less than a million people. It’s not a country.”

That is true. But the region is also home to some of the largest global corporations – Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, Boeing, Weyerhaeuser – making it an excellent laboratory for testing out the clash between a socialist-led movement and the commanding heights of capital.

Certainly scaling up the Seattle experience represents an enormously daunting challenge. But what is the alternative today? The present course of affairs – in your country, and also mine – lead us straight to fascism. It is a trajectory driven not just by Trump and Farage, but also by the Democratic and Labour Party leaderships. Both parties are absolutely committed, in their symbiotic relationship of contesting-yet-colluding with their nominal political opponents, to the policies of genocide, xenophobia and austerity. They are implacably committed to uphold capitalism. These political establishments screw workers, kill the human spirit and, unchecked, will snuff out life on this planet.

It is not easy to break from the political institutions that capitalism has given us. It is not easy for political activists to break years of habits and relationships. But in 2025, it is necessary if we hope to advance the socialist project.

Seattle has shown on a municipal scale that we can effectively take on and beat some of capital’s most powerful adversaries. Seattle offers not a formula or a recipe, but a set of principles and methods, ideologically grounded and diligently applied, that point to a hopeful outcome, a different path from our present disastrous trajectory.

Jonathan Rosenblum is Activist in Residence at the Center for Work and Democracy (Arizona State University). He is a member of the National Writers Union, the author of We’re Coming For You And Your Rotten System: How Socialists Beat Amazon and Upended Big-City Politics (OR Books, October 2025), and a part-time delivery driver for Amazon.

UK

Last Saturday’s mass arrests of peaceful protesters – an eye-witness report

HubMP201

OCTOBER 6, 2O25

A Hackney Palestine Solidarity Campaign (HPSC) supporter joined a “witness circle” at Trafalgar Square on Saturday afternoon 4th October as police arrested 488 people for holding placards declaring opposition to genocide and support for the proscribed group Palestine Action. This is an account of what they witnessed during the first two hours of the fourth such London protest, organised by Defend Our Juries (DoJ).

Eight of us travelled together from Dalston to Trafalgar Square, arriving shortly before 12.30pm. Three had indicated their willingness to face arrest for displaying placards deemed in breach of Section 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000. I was among the other five who had volunteered for the first shift of HPSC-organised “witness circles” that would continue through the afternoon and until after 8.30pm. The Trafalgar Square protest was the first DoJ action I had seen first-hand.

Though the official start time wasn’t until 1pm, a very substantial police presence had assembled in and around the Square. Officers had cordoned off the steps at the northwestern end, near the Square’s fourth plinth. I couldn’t help but think of our proximity to the increasingly notorious Charing Cross police station, the subject of a damning Panorama documentary aired only days before.

Meanwhile, protesters armed with pieces of cardboard and marker pens began to filter in slowly and then very quickly as 1pm approached. A group of fifteen or so “Quakers for Peace” staked out a distinct spot at the northeastern end, a few metres below our group, which stood at the top of the Square nearest to the National Gallery. A smattering of trade union (NEU, UCU and UNISON) banners and the odd union flag had appeared nearby. Palestinian, Irish and a few other national flags fluttered and sometimes jerked in the winds generated by the remnants of Storm Amy. Those who had attended previous DoJ protests in Parliament Square told me that the atmosphere was more sombre than in August or September.

Soon after 1pm we started to see Metropolitan Police officers move into action and make arrests. Some individuals chose to walk flanked by cops; others went “floppy.” Sometimes the police took notable care to minimise the risk of injury to those protesters, though on other occasions they appeared to be carting so much unwanted luggage. Many of us applauded as those under arrest disappeared from the Square, with occasional chants of “Free, Free Palestine” ringing out and periodic booing of the police.

Media reports indicated that the Met had deployed some 1,500 officers. Some others had come from the City of London force. Previous DoJ protests had seen a substantial presence from South Wales, but they were not evident on 4th October. I only learned the following morning that some officers had been reassigned to duty in the Square from the Police Service of Northern Ireland!

In contrast to the earlier Parliament Square gatherings, previous participants told me that policing had more of a military air. Mini-platoons of fifteen to twenty marched in formation with senior officers issuing instructions to halt and eventually to enter the crowd. At the opposite end of the Square near Nelson’s Column, a far-right sympathiser, draped in a Union Jack inserted himself briefly into one of the Met’s platoons. He appeared to withdraw untouched by officers. There was the occasional comic moment as when the police arrested and the swiftly released a man carrying a placard that declared support for “PLASTICINE ACTION.” Overall, though, boredom combined with increasing tension, as some cops became undisciplined, forcefully shoving photographers and others wearing tabards clearly marked “WELFARE.”

Of course what I and fellow witnesses saw on a blustery Saturday afternoon in Trafalgar Square was a far cry from the brutal crackdowns the Trump administration has unleashed in US cities, but there’s also no doubt that Saturday 4th October was another example of blatantly political policing – at times faintly ridiculous and yet no less sinister, not least under a Labour government led by a man who first made his name as a “human rights” barrister.     

Images c/o author.

HubMP2012

Thatcherism Today

Mark Perryman calls time on the forthcoming Thatcher Centenary.

OCTOBER 6, 2O25

Margaret Thatcher’s 13th October 2025 centenary is a moment to reflect on how she, or more accurately ‘Thatcherism’, so decisively shaped the 1980s – and for ever more too, the post-war consensus she deconstructed and to date never to return.

The Labour historian Jim Fyrth describes what framed this consensus that had previously so decisively shaped British society and economy 1945-79: “A mixture of Socialist, Labour, Keynesian, Fabian/Liberal and anti-Fascist ideas that was strongly anti-establishment and anti-capitalist, and was hostile to those who were held responsible for poverty and unemployment and for appeasement of the Fascist dictators.”

Wow! It was this combination that was the basis of Labour’s 1945 strength, what Fyrth admiringly dubs a ‘popular front of the mind’ the plurality of influences and ideas, the breadth of support. And it is this which produced an historically unique moment: “It looked as though Conservative supremacy in society might be quite overthrown and a new hegemony of the Left be established.”

But despite the populist idealism of Aneurin Bevan – “We have been the dreamers, we have been the sufferers, and now we are the builders” – any likelihood of a ‘ hegemony of the left’ was replaced by the early 1950s, and thereafter by a consensus between right-wing Labour and progressive conservatism. It was popularly known as ‘Butskellism’ fusing Hugh Gaitskell, Labour leader 1955-63, with Tory Cabinet Minister Rab Butler 1951-64, and better than what followed when another ‘-ism’, Thatcherism, dismantled that consensus – but by no means as good as it might have been.      

Stuart Hall prefaced the entrenchment of Thatcherism that would commence with her leading the Tories’ rout of Labour in the May 1979 General Election with an essay for the January 1979 edition of the magazine Marxism Today. It was this essay ‘The Great Moving Right Show’ that would spark a wide-ranging debate not only on Thatcherism but what Hall argued facilitated it, a deep-seated structural and ideological crisis of the left.

As Hall developed his description of the Thatcherite project it became more and more terrifying, but inspiring too. Terrifying in terms of what Thatcher was able to achieve, inflicting defeat after defeat on her opponents, most spectacularly the miners’ strike of 1984-85. Inspiring, in terms of what Labour, and the wider left, could achieve with a hegemonic project on the scale of Thatcherism.

Hall listed those elements required for a hegemonic project to succeed: “The attempt to put together a new ‘historical bloc’; new political configurations and ‘philosophies’: a profound restructuring of the state and the ideological discourses which construct the crisis and represent it as it is ‘lived’ as a practical reality; new programmes and policies, pointing to a new result, a new sort of ‘settlement’.”   

Of course, none of this appeared in the Tories’ manifesto nor in Thatcher’s campaign speeches and broadcasts. And no, I’m not suggesting that because they didn’t appear on Blair’s 1997 pledge cards nor in and amongst Starmer’s 2024 missions that this is the damning evidence required that ‘The Great Moving Right Show’ has never been superseded by ‘The Great Moving Left Show’. But read through Hall’s list and ask yourself: is this what Blair(ism) and Starmer(ism)’s politics amount to? 

And if they don’t, is it enough when Labour achieves the kind of landslide victory Blair did in 1997 and Starmer in 2024? Hall’s argument was that Thatcherism had all the makings of success: her utter destruction of a post-war consensus that had lasted since 1945. In contrast, there is the complete failure of Blair, and Starmer, to replace Thatcherism/neoliberalism. Helpfully Hall detailed what elements would be required for such a break: “These do not ’emerge’: they have to be constructed. Political and ideological work is required to disarticulate old formations, and to rework their elements into new configurations.”

Blair’s legacy, Starmer’s prospects, should be judged precisely by how far they fulfil this task. For all the good, and there was a lot, that Blair did, and all the good that Starmer will do, which I entirely expect there will be, this surely is the least we can expect of Labour governments. But to use a now favourite word in Labour’s lexicon, ‘change’, without that construction, disarticulation and reworking, no new consensus will be established. What a waste. 

Following the 1979 General Election, in his essay ‘Thatcherism: ‘The Impasse Broken?’, the editor of Marxism Today, Martin Jacques, mapped out why the Thatcherite hegemony was as much a product of a crisis of what the 1945 Labour vision, ‘Now Win the Peace’,  had turned into, as a victory of the right.

Jacques described this shift as from a project of transformation to an ever-increasing emphasis on modernisation. Sounds still familiar? The newly elected Labour leader, Harold Wilson, had prefaced this change in his speech to the 1963 Labour conference: “In all our plans for the future, we are re-defining and we are re-stating our socialism in terms of the scientific revolution. But that revolution cannot become a reality unless we are prepared to make far-reaching changes in economic and social attitudes which permeate our whole system of society. The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry.”

Jacques set out what this produced in turn: “The strategy of modernisation it sought to carry through – aimed at a major transformation of the economy and society – proved not only completely inadequate relative to the nature and scope of the problem but, crucially, it also involved a new kind of attack on the position of the unions and, more widely, the working class, that is on its own social base.”

The effect wasn’t immediate. Labour’s 1945 election-winning vote share of 47.8% was still as high as 47.9% when Harold Wilson won in 1966, an impressive holding of the electoral ground. But after that the decline was non-stop, coming to a shuddering halt on 36.9% in 1979 (note Starmer’s ‘landslide’ was an even lower Labour share of the vote,  33.7%.) Likewise, Labour membership reached a post-war high of 908,000 in 1950 but after 1964 fell every year to 676,000 in 1978. The current 2025 figure is under half that, 333,235.

The reason for the decline and Labour’s defeat in 1979?  Jacques argued: “Labour has become identified with the increasing use of the state in an administrative, impersonal, bureaucratic and even authoritarian manner.”

He described the implications as “profound”: “The Labour Party for many people, especially young people, is no longer seen as an effective oppositional, anti-establishment force; on the contrary, for many it has become an establishment party, partially incorporated into the state structures….

“Inevitably, this has undermined the position of the Labour Party as a party, rooted in society, enjoying a popular activist base, and committed to reforming society.”

The post-war consensus which Labour had founded in 1945 followed by Labour’s 1960s flirtation with a technocratic modernism was ignominiously ended by the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent. It was an outpouring of angry strike action as layer after layer of low-paid workers resisted the poverty imposed on them by Labour’s state-sanctioned programme of wage restraint.

Be careful what you wish for? Sure, but own a crisis that was every bit Labour’s making as Thatcher’s windfall. Statism that was once the glorious shock of the 1945-new was replaced by an alien, bureaucratic, inefficient state that was no match for the right to buy your own home, become a shareholder in an unfettered public utility, bring bright, shiny, new management practices to a failing NHS.

This was modernisation, and then some. To which Labour had no effective answer because it had helped create the need for such drastic, if disastrous, action, in the first place. What a gift, the consequences of which we’ve been living with ever since. Time to wish Happy Birthday Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! With the inevitable Out! Out! Out!

Thatcher Centenary Steve Bell design is exclusive to Philosophy Football and available as a mug, tea towel, T-shirt and framed print from here.

Mark Perryman’s new book The Starmer Symptom is published by Pluto Press.