Chancellor John Healey is set to present his first budget. Like his recent predecessors, he wants to see sustained economic growth which has remained elusive. The UK economy grew by an annual average of 3% between 1993 and 2007. The growth rate shrank to 1.5% between 2009 and 2023, 1% in 2024; 1.3% in 2025, and is forecast to grow by 1.1% in 2026

Depleted Purchasing Power

Sustained economic growth can’t be achieved without a major boost to the purchasing power of the bottom 50% of the population. Economic statistics show that in the absence of state intervention wealth has not trickled-down. After 50-years of economic growth workers’ share of gross value added has declined from 71.9% in 1975, to 59.7%. The average real wage has hardly grown since 2008. In August 2026, the median gross pay of a payrolled employee was £31,884, resulting in take-home pay of £26,476 after paying income tax and national insurance. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that single working-age adult needs to earn £31,500 a year to reach a minimum income standard and live a life with dignity. A lone parent with 2 children needs £67,600 a year, while a couple with 2 children needs to earn £77,400 a year between them. Unsurprisingly, 25.3m people, including 14.9m working adults and 7.7m children, live below minimum income standards and are not in a position to play a significant role in economic revival.

A large proportion of the population can’t dip into a savings buffer to support consumption and economic growth. 1 in 6 UK adults (16% or 8.9m people) have no savings. 2 in 5 Brits (39%) have £1,000 or less in savings.

At the same time, the richest 1% of Britons owns more wealth than the bottom 70% of the population combined. Just 50 richest families hold more wealth than the poorest half of the population, comprising more than 34m people. The concentration of wealth in fewer hands has not provided the necessary economic stimulus.

The tax system should be used to boost the purchasing power of the bottom 50%, but it has done the reverse and hit the poorest the hardest. The poorest 20% pay a higher proportion of their income in direct and indirect taxes than the richest 20%. In 2021, the personal allowance was frozen at £12,570 a year and 26.6m people paid income tax at the basic rate of 20%. By 2026-27, due to the freeze, 31.4m people became liable to pay income tax at the basic rate. If personal allowance had risen in line with the rate of inflation, it would have been around £16,070 for 2026/27. Due to frozen income tax thresholds, a minimum wage earner in England will pay additional £980 in income tax and national insurance in 2026-27 alone. Without change, it will be worse in 2027-28.

Pensioners have been particularly hit hard. In 200-21, 6.47m pensioners paid income tax. In 2026-27, 9.58m pensioners became liable to income tax. Nearly 2m pensioners live in poverty.

Increasing Personal Allowance

A substantial increase in tax free income tax personal allowance is the quickest way to boost people’s purchasing power. The tax cost of each £1,000 increase in personal allowance is around £10bn a year though the real cost would be considerably less as higher household spending would increase government yield from VAT and other indirect taxes.

A, immediate £3,000 increase in personal allowance to £15,570 would cost around £30bn and boost gross domestic product by around 1.2%. Neoliberals don’t ask any questions about the resources for bank bailouts and corporate welfare programmes, but they always ask ‘how is it going to be paid’ whenever redistribution is mentioned.

The £30bn cost would be met by ending subsidies to highly profitable commercial banks. Since 2006, the Bank of England has paid interest on central bank reserve deposits to commercial banks. Central bank reserves are deposits held by commercial banks at the Bank of England (BoE) and are used to settle payments between banks. They are also used by the BoE to manage interest rates through tools such as quantitative easing. The interest payments accelerated in 2009 as quantitative easing took hold. As interest rates rose, payments to commercial banks increased. The EU had similar arrangements but in 2023 virtually eliminated the practice, saving about £5.2bn a year. The Swiss central bank also stopped paying interest on minimum reserves.  The UK continues to pay and has paid £100bn in the last three years alone, which is an average of more than £30bn a year. 

Currently, the government hands subsidies to banks and then seeks to clawback a tiny portion by levying windfall taxes. 

A £3,000 increase in personal allowance would be worth £600 in cash to 31.4m basic rate income taxpayers. However, higher personal allowance would disproportionately boost the post-tax income of the higher rate (40%) taxpayers by £1,200 and even more for additional rate (45%) taxpayers. However, there are clawback arrangements. In general, currently personal allowance is reduced by £1 for every £2 of income above £100,000. The net effect is that personal allowance is zero for incomes of £125,140 or above. That said there would still be higher benefit to people in the 40% and 45% income tax bracket, which will increase inequalities. 

The government can tackle such effects by addressing tax anomalies mainly benefitting the wealthy, which in turn would generate even more resources for redistribution. For example, gains arising from the sale of second homes, buy-to-let properties, shares, art, antiques, businesses and cryptocurrencies, generally accrue to wealthy individuals. Capital gains are normally taxed at marginal rates of 18% to 24% (there is an additional rate of 32% for City fund managers who are exempt from paying income tax) and are not subjected to national insurance contributions. In contrast, wages are taxed at marginal rates of 20% to 45% and are subject to national insurance payments. By taxing capital gains at the same rates as wages, around £12bn – £14bn could be raised. More, if national insurance is levied. 

So who would be impacted? The capital gains tax regime benefits less than 1% of the population. In 2024-25, 584,000 people paid £24.2bn capital gains tax (CGT) on gains of £127.3bn, an effective rate of just over 19%. Most CGT comes from the small number of taxpayers who make the largest gains. In 2024-2025, 45% of CGT came from those who made gains of £5 million or more. This group represents less than 1% of CGT taxpayers each year. They paid ultra low rates of tax. According to HMRC, 52% of gains for CGT-liable individuals came from the 17% of individuals with taxable incomes above £125,140, the additional rate threshold for income Tax.

The benefit of lower CGT is spread unevenly. 234,000 individuals in London and the South East of England benefitted, compared to 33,000 in East Midlands, 34,000 in Yorkshire and 18,000 in Wales. Lower CGT rates widen regional inequalities. The alignment of capital gains rates with those applied to wages would also reduce regional inequalities.

There are also additional ways of clawing back gains from the rich. For example, dividends are taxed at marginal rates of 8.75% to 39.35%. Around £6 billion a year could be generated if dividends are taxed at the same rate as wages, and even more if national insurance is also charged. The wealthy are major recipients of dividends. The Institute for Fiscal studies (IFS) reported that the top 1% of income tax payers receive more of their income in the form of partnership income or dividends. Some self-employed and owner-managers pay themselves in dividends instead of a salary to take advantage of lower tax rates. The government states that over “90% of UK taxpayers do not receive taxable dividend income” and majority of pensioners do not receive dividends outside the tax-free ISA wrapper. 

Altogether, the Chancellor needs to make a political decision but can easily increase personal allowance by £3,000 a year by ending bank subsidies. This would lift millions out of poverty, increase spending power of the less well-off, lighten the cost-of-living crisis and boost economic growth. He can go further and restore the real value (since 2021) of personal allowance by aligning taxation of capital gains and dividends with wage rates. This change would also end tax avoidance schemes designed to convert incomes to capital gains. It would nullify strategies for concocting dividends to enable some to avoid income tax and national insurance contributions.

The above proposals transfer wealth from the wealthy to the less well-off. They do not require any increase in the rates of income tax, VAT or corporation tax. Unlike the Reform UK proposals, they do not call for cuts in spending on social security, public services or the state pension. 

Image credit: Simon Dawson / Number 10 – Creative Commons

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What should our high streets look like, and who should get to decide?

Across the country, I believe people want high streets that are thriving, welcoming and built around the needs of the local communities who live there. But for too long, local councils have faced rules that make it extremely difficult to say no when gambling venues are proposed.

That is why, after years of campaigning, the Government’s recent announcement that it intends to scrap the outdated “Aim to Permit” principle is such an important moment. It means communities across the country will have a greater say over what happens on their high streets.

Under the Gambling Act, councils currently have a legal duty to aim to permit gambling venues where it is reasonably consistent with the licensing objectives. This shapes how they approach decisions and can make it harder to respond to the concerns of local residents.

One consequence has been the concentration of betting shops, casinos and adult gaming centres on our high streets. I’m sure readers will attest to seeing a number of them within a small radius.

For me, this has always been about something bigger than licensing rules. It is about whether local people should have a meaningful say over the future of the places they call home.

I first identified the problem in 2021, after listening to residents in Brent and producing a report for the Government’s Gambling Review. In my borough of Brent, gambling premises outnumber supermarkets in 17 of 22 wards, and there are 81 licensed gambling premises across the borough.

But Brent was not the only community raising concerns. Across the country, residents and councils have raised concerns about the concentration of gambling venues and associated harms.

I am also concerned by how gambling premises are disproportionately concentrated in economically deprived areas. That is why I began my campaign to scrap Aim to Permit and put power back into the hands of councils and our diverse communities.

I have taken that campaign from the high streets into Parliament and back again. I took a Minister to Brent to see the reality on the ground. I launched a petition so residents could make their voices heard, raised the issue at Prime Minister’s Questions, led a parliamentary debate and repeatedly pressed Ministers for change.

My cross-party letter to Government was backed by 280 MPs, councillors, mayors and gambling reform advocates, including then-Mayor Andy Burnham. Last summer, I also toured boroughs across London, speaking directly to residents about what they wanted to see in their local areas.

Not one person told me that they wanted to see more gambling venues. The message was clear: people want cafes, bakeries, gyms, florists – high streets that work for them.

Throughout the campaign, I have worked with Brent Council, councillors, elected representatives, campaigners and people with lived experience of gambling harms, alongside organisations including Gambling with Lives and Gambling Harm UK.

Their experience and expertise helped make the case for reform and highlighted the real impact on people. After all, the consequences of gambling-related harm can be devastating. A 2023 Government evidence review estimated that between 117 and 496 deaths by suicide in England each year could be associated with problem gambling or gambling disorder.

So, this campaign was about health, community safety and the kind of places we want to live in.

I have also seen first-hand how B3 gambling machines – found in various gambling premises – generate significant revenue for operators. The question I consistently ask is whether the interests of these establishments should outweigh the voices of the communities in which they operate.

Now, the Government intends to remove Aim to Permit.

I am delighted that the Government has listened and committed to removing it. This campaign is a major victory for London and communities right across the UK. But the job is not done. The Government will consult on the changes before legislation is brought forward, so the work is not finished until they are properly implemented. I urge everyone with views to take part.

But the work doesn’t end there.

As we approach the Autumn Budget, I’m calling for gambling taxes to be increased, to better reflect the wider social harms associated with gambling. I believe those who profit from gambling should pay a fairer share towards addressing the harms it can cause. Our high streets should serve local people, so we must do more to address the harms associated with gambling.

This campaign showed what can happen when residents, elected representatives and campaigners come together, organise and refuse to give up. At its heart was a simple principle: decisions should be made as close as possible to the people affected by them. Our high streets are used by communities every day and those communities should have a genuine say in shaping them.

I said I would fight for London’s high streets. I am proud that, after years of campaigning, this victory will help give communities across the country a greater say over theirs.

The post Dawn Butler MP: How we can put our high streets back in local hands appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.

A NEET-eye view:

“To say that my adult life didn’t shape up how I thought it would is an understatement. I have been out of work for just over a year and it’s tough. It has been the single most soul crushing experience of my life so far.

“Sites that I was told are good and reliable places to look, such as LinkedIn and Indeed, are now riddled with scam postings. [There’s] listing after listing where you spend hours perfecting the cover letter, rewriting the CV, giving them a picture off you, the blood of your first-born child and a lock of your hair, and they never get back to you.

“It no longer feels like getting a job is possible, even one that’s not perfect or just something to pay the bills. It’s like being employed is something that happens to other people. Meanwhile, one has to go onto benefits just to survive while you send application after application after application.

“It feels like there’s no longer anything I can do to fix the situation I’m in.”

The toll on young people’s lives from these struggles, and from our aggravating culture of mindless carping, is enormous.

The game terrain

‘NEET’ officially refers to 16 – 24-year-olds. But the tribulations experienced by young people seeking employment frequently extend beyond into their late 20s and early 30s.

UK unemployment is at a 5-year high of 5.2%. Job applications are heavily oversubscribed, with 2.4 jobseekers for every vacancy and graduate jobs typically receiving up to 140 responses per advert.

Young job seekers are caught in a catch 22. Employers now seek an average of 2.5 years’ experience for many entry level jobs. As a result, 33% of applicants are rejected because they lack sufficient experience.

Being a UK graduate NEET: “Exposes a common lie about our education system which we … hear from parents and teachers – that a degree in the right subject, or from the right institution, or with the right grade is a recipe for success.”

The employment Hunger Games have also shifted fully online. As our first NEET above observes, days are filled with endless applications in an anonymous screen-world, devoid of face-to-face human interaction and with rejections deduced through silence.

Businesses won’t touch real paper CVs and buildings that say ‘Job Centre’ are not actually job-finding centres.

Additionally, large language AI has triggered a fall in demand for human input, with the UK’s service sector concentration leaving us particularly exposed to large-scale job displacement.

AI constitutes a double insult to NEETs. It not only adjudicates their online applications but is also soaking up swathes of NEET employment opportunities.

Limbo

The NEET job-seeker’s challenge currently looks overwhelming. Instead of reaching the traditional milestones of adulthood, they find themselves in an unstable limbo, endlessly performing the “humiliation ritual” of chasing work that has the seeming rareness of hens’ teeth.

Aspiration is deeply strained – only 48% of young people believe anyone can succeed in Britain if they work hard enough.

Alan Milburn’s recent NEETs report distinguishes between NEETs actively looking for work, (39%) and inactive NEETs (61%). A proportion of ‘inactives’ have never worked, but it’s worth noting that others in this cohort may have been active but eventually gave up precisely because there’s a limit to human endurance.

Try harder

As NEETs wake to face another round of application checking, the continuing online silence is broken only by the steady thrum of government and society urging them to try harder – ‘you just need to get more savvy at working the system’; ‘your problem was that you didn’t put enough freelance projects and student society leadership positions on your CV’; ‘try doing (yet) more volunteer work to stand out’ (assuming you can find it), ‘tell AI what’s special about you’ (even if you don’t feel special after months of failure).

This thoroughly undermining ‘advice’ tells NEETs they aren’t doing quite the right thing, as if the right thing can somehow even be done – anymore. It’s a grotesque pantomime testing the endurance of even the wiliest.

Getting work, rewarding or otherwise, is now random, rare, and has very little to do with how hard you try.

Stop slacking

When society isn’t delivering ‘advice’, it’s busy caricaturing these Hunger Gamers as snowflake scroungers. Since their brains, it’s presumed, have been melted by social media and ‘me’ culture, they lack the ‘gumption and fortitude of their forefathers and allow themselves to fall lazily into the pernicious habit of exploiting our hard-pressed benefits system’.

Here, NEETS again fall under society’s mindless sledgehammer: ‘If that kid is fiddling the system, you must all be’. But it’s the critic’s reasoning here, not ‘youth’, which is lazy where it slithers, as it so often does, from ‘one / a few’ to ‘most / all’ without reflection or hesitation.

Waking up on day X of your dogged ‘job seeker’ marathon to hear that you’re a ‘feckless loafer robbing the state’ is just the ticket for compounding pre-existing mental health issues, or, frankly, even creating them.

PIP

The growing number of youngsters claiming Personal Independence Payments (PIP) for neurodevelopmental or mental health disorders has only amplified society’s indignation. But are these PIP claims surprising? Applying for PIP is a notoriously stringent, protracted and demanding process. But, after failing repeatedly to find employment, plenty start feeling they don’t fit into society, that there might be something wrong with them. ‘Neurodivergence’, if nothing else, floats an explanation to NEETs and their judges for ‘feeling dysfunctional’ and for a predicament they feel helpless to change.

Of course, PIP is sometimes exploited by the work-shy. But, again, we should pause before making assumptions since the reasons are nuanced.

Some NEETs use PIP as protection against the caprice they experience in the world of Universal Credit. 20–24-year-olds are twice as likely to experience a benefit sanction as 30–34-year-olds. And the reasons can feel unfair. Perhaps it was because they missed a UC meeting as their bus was cancelled; or because they couldn’t face attending a job interview for nightshift work cleaning toilets a 1.5 hr train-ride away. Sometimes reasons for sanctions are too buried in red tape to discern.

Harried by the government’s shrill promise to ‘make life (even) harder for UC receivers’, NEETs live under the constant threat of waking up skint. And, in our atomised society, they don’t invariably have a ‘bank of mum and dad’ as last resort. So, who can blame them for seeking a PIP safety net that protects them from mercurial UC decisions, and provides certainty about their next meal, in a world where ‘if you work your socks off, you’ll gain security’ is a promise that simply never materialised?

The future

Andy Burnham plans to reduce NEETs by revolutionising education in ways that help engage young people with work. But this is only a solution if there’s work to be had.

There is a fundamental contradiction in our NEETs narratives – we believe people’s lives should be orientated around work and that young people should be encouraged with carrots and sticks to find it. But we are simultaneously moving towards a world where employment opportunities are disappearing.

In one school of thought, the AI revolution, as per past tech revolutions, will ultimately generate sufficient alternative forms of human employment. But this assumption is hotly contested. The National Foundation for Educational Research, together with Mustafa Suleyman, the head of Microsoft’s AI division, Geoffrey Hinton (Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist) and prominent economist, Daniel Susskind, all argue that we’re moving, at the very least, towards a world of dramatically reduced human labour, with AI “creating massive unemployment”.

Plumbers and electricians look safe. But Susskind predicts that “task encroachment will displace workers” from a wide range of jobs across most blue- and white-collar sectors. Economics and employment are de-coupling, creating the novel spectre of “jobless growth”.

Beyond the work gospel

We aren’t preparing young people for this fast-approaching new world of significantly reduced work. Instead, we’re foisting an old model on them that they can see withering before their eyes. 

There’s a parallel here between NEETS and Thatcherite deindustrialisation. In neither case was the promise of life-long, regular work and security honoured, or preparation made for the consequences of trashing those promises. Then and now, the neo-liberal assumption was that market forces will kick in, driving people to find other work, by relocating, if necessary.  This ‘try harder’ diktat no more fitted reality then than it does now. Are Thatcher’s lost northern towns, still stuck in poverty and disillusionment, a metaphor for our future youth?

So much is premised on the value of work as life’s provider of structure, meaning and security. Yet young people are facing a future where this prop is shrinking. Faced with precarious, unfulfilling jobs and the prospect of their Hunger Games only getting harder, NEETs are losing faith in the “gospel of work”, disengaging wholesale from the point of it. Depression, suicide, crime and drug use will all increase unless we give young people aspirations for worthwhile lives that are no longer noosed to employment.

To this end, education will need to build the kind of value, purpose and meaning into young people’s lives that enables them to cope in a ‘work-lite’ world. We may need a universal basic income; but education must also cultivate stronger moral and societal responsibility, together with other specifically human endeavours such as creativity, physical life, and the rewards of human interaction.

Instead of looking backwards to an obsolescent model of work, making empty promises to young people, and feeding the NEET mental health epidemic, we must equip them with the skills, confidence and imagination to flesh out this potentially exciting and culturally advanced new world for themselves as adults.

Claire Jones writes and edits for West England Bylines and is co-ordinator for the Oxfordshire branch of the progressive campaign group, Compass.

Image credit: HelenCobain – Creative Commons

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From broadcast to broadsheet, podcast to print, an attempt is being made to convince you that the two-party system is coming back. Labour’s bump in the polls, at the expense of Reform, has led some commentators to announce the death of multi-party politics – at least in England.

These reports, as Mark Twain didn’t quite say, have been greatly exaggerated. It mistakes small movements in the polls for the reversal of a transformation decades in the making.

In the 1950s, Labour and the Conservatives between them won an average of 93% of the vote. By the 1970s, that had fallen to 80%. At the 2024 election, the two parties received just 57% between them – their lowest combined share on record.

The same story can be seen in the share of the vote needed to win an election. Between 1945 and 1970, the party winning the most seats averaged 47% of the vote. From 1974 to 1997, that fell to 41%. Since 2001, it has fallen again to just 38%, and it’s hard to see the next election bucking that trend. Even the most favourable recent poll for Labour has them nowhere close to that figure.

Diminishing vote tallies reflect a deeper shift in voters’ relationship with the two main parties. In the 1950s heyday of the two-party system, party allegiance was closely bound up with class: Labour drew heavily on the working class, while the Conservatives dominated among the middle class. Both parties had distinct social roots, with voting often an expression of social identity, as much as a judgement on competing manifestos.

Those ties have steadily weakened. By the 2024 election, support for Labour and the Conservatives varied remarkably little by social class. Age and education were much stronger demographic dividing lines, while divisions over Brexit and cultural values continued to cut across the traditional left-right divide.

The old marriage of class and party has, in other words, given way to something resembling a ‘conscious uncoupling’. In 1987, 46% of people told British Social Attitudes (BSA) that their identification with a political party was very or fairly strong. Twenty-five years later, that had fallen to 31%. In 2020, BSA found that just 7% felt “very strongly” attached to a political party, a joint record-low.

The result is an electorate less firmly anchored to either of the two main parties, and more willing to move between a wider range of alternatives.

True, the process has not been linear. The 2017 election briefly looked like a return to the past, with Labour and the Conservatives taking 82% of the vote between them. But that revival proved short-lived. Their combined share fell to 76% in 2019, before collapsing in 2024.

That should caution against treating short-term poll improvements for the two traditional parties as evidence of a structural revival. The social foundations that underpinned two-party politics are no longer there.

First Past the Post will continue to obscure this fragmentation. By converting small changes in support into dramatic swings in seats, it may again hand a single party overwhelming parliamentary power without anything approaching majority public support. 

But it’s an illusion. We saw, following the 2024 election, how quickly Labour’s parliamentary dominance ran up against lukewarm support among the public. The long-term trend towards multi-party politics is unmistakable.

The two main parties once commanded support from almost the entire electorate, reinforced by social loyalties that made voting behaviour comparatively predictable. Both have eroded. The question is not whether the two-party system can briefly reassert itself in the polls. It is how long an electoral system built for that vanished political world can continue to survive without it.

Image credit: Oatsy40 – Creative Commons

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Burnham has inherited an economy in which 25.3m people, including 14.9m working adults and 7.7m children, live below minimum income standards. With median employee wage of £31,584 (take home pay £26,260) owning a home is impossible, and millions barely manage. Profiteering is rife. Some 6.16m individuals are waiting for 7.28m hospital appointments. Social care is in disarray. Most of the infrastructure, including water, energy, ports, airports, telecommunications, auto, steel, shipbuilding, internet, artificial intelligence and railway rolling stock are in private hands, leaving the government with fewer economic levers to deliver growth or alleviate poverty. Political parties are funded by the super-rich and dance to their tunes. Party members have little or no say in policy development. Trade unions are weak, civil society is struggling, and the left is too fractured to mount a challenge to the tide of neoliberalism.

Against the above backdrop, Burnham has promised to bring “forward the biggest changes in the last forty years”. This populist slogan may reassure some but can’t be delivered without abandoning neoliberalism. At the same time, Burnham, a former Minister in the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown governments, has promised continuity.

Andy Burnham has pledged to lead a united Labour government free of infighting and factional politics, but that isn’t evident from his cabinet appointments. He has side-lined leading Keir Starmer supporters, but his first his first cabinet consists entirely of neoliberal foot-soldiers. They all supported privatisation of the National Health Service by stealth, greater role for private equity, private finance initiative (PFI), benefit cuts, higher taxes on the poor, erosion of jury trials, appeasement of corporations and super-rich, destruction of universities, degradation of social care and highly damaging fiscal rules,

No one from the left of the party has been given any ministerial role, not even a junior role. One of the problems of the Starmer government was that the cabinet was essentially an echo-chamber, hailing neoliberalism and deaf to the cry for emancipatory change. In the absence of internal critique, Starmer started with disastrous macho policies such as the winter fuel payment cut, disability benefit cuts and continuation of the two-child benefit cap. All were subsequently reversed after backbench revolts and poor showing in local elections. Public trust was never regained.

Burnham may be a smarter politician and would no doubt be accessible to the left but the left won’t be present at the genesis of policies, disturbing capitulation to the City of London and the super-rich. The factionalism embedded within the cabinet does not sit well with the promise ‘the biggest changes in the last forty years’.

Perhaps, the never-ending woes of England’s water industry will provide an early test for the Burnham government. In 2010, when seeking leadership of the Labour Party, Burnham called for “aspirational socialism“. In June 2026, whilst fighting a parliamentary bye-election to return to the House of Commons after a nine-year gap, Burnham said, “If you look at water as an industry as a whole, it’s run predominantly in the private interest rather than the public interest, or in other words, it’s an industry where the shareholders can never lose and the bill payers never win … Public ownership is absolutely an option …. I would say for Thames Water, that is what should be done.” After becoming Prime Minister, he reverted to his previous position of ‘more public control’. A spokesperson for Burnham said he wanted “stronger accountability and better standards … Andy is exploring all possible options for giving the public more control over essential services like water and energy. Note the careful shift from ‘public ownership’ to ‘public control’ which could be stronger regulation, a new regulator, temporary nationalisation or something else. We will soon know.

Burnham has promised to “build a new economy where we put life’s essentials back under stronger public control” … “re-industrialising Britain, using public procurement to back British industry” and “build more council homes”. All of this calls for financial resources. Burnham won’t embrace the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and create money. That leaves tax as an option. However, the tax option is severely constrained by his decision to stick to Labour’s 2024 manifesto, which promised no increase in the rate of income tax, employee national insurance and VAT. Such rash promises dogged the Starmer administration and prevented redistribution, recalibration of the tax system, alleviation of poverty and state investment in infrastructure. It raised tax revenues through higher employer national insurance and stealth taxes e.g. frozen income tax thresholds, which fuelled discontent. Burnham could consider wealth tax and eradication of tax anomalies. For example, capital gains and dividends are taxed at lower marginal rates than wages. Or will he be cutting social security to increase defence spending.

With the tax options severely limited, Burnham could consider additional borrowing, but he seems to have boxed himself. He said, “we’ll stick to the fiscal rules and by that I mean the existing fiscal rules and use, obviously, any flexibility within them. But we will stick to the existing rules.” He has promised to look at “any flexibility” within the government’s existing fiscal rules to help borrow billions more to invest in infrastructure”. 

Fiscal rules are useful but why a veneration of the straitjacket of current rules? They have neutered the state and delivered potholed roads, crumbling schools, poor hospitals, banking crisis, austerity, record NHS queues, poverty, deindustrialisation, reduced healthy life expectancy, low investment in productive assets and hence low productivity.

The current self-imposed fiscal rule(s) require that day-to-day costs be met by revenues, borrowing will only be used to invest (numerous issues about what the government means by investment), and a cap on certain types of welfare spending. The UK debt is about 95% of GDP. In sharp contrast, the UK’s post-war construction was facilitated by government debt of 270% of GDP. This built the welfare state, infrastructure and new industries to revive the private sector, boost prosperity, employment and tax revenues.

Since 1997, governments have followed restrictive arbitrary fiscal rules but suspended them on numerous occasions. Most notably during the Covid pandemic and the 2007-08 banking crash to enable the state to provide £1,162bn (£133bn cash and 1,029bn guarantees) to rescue banks, and £895bn of quantitative easing to stimulate financial markets. The fiscal rules are not accompanied by any economic targets such as achievement of full employment, reduction in poverty, reindustrialisation, or public ownership of vital industries. 

One consequence of the fiscal rules has been to side-line public investment. Vast tracts of the economy, such as healthcare, social care, education, dentistry, social housing and defence have been handed to the private sector. The Starmer government’s refusal to bring water into public ownership was framed by its adherence to the fiscal rules, a policy that has inflicted immense harm to human health, marine life and biodiversity, and transferred vast amount of wealth from customers to water company shareholders. Instead of creating money (as quantitative easing did), borrowing or levying higher taxes on the rich the Starmer government opted for expensive PFI for building homes, health centres, schools, hospitals, roads and infrastructure. On average, the state guaranteed £6 repayment for every £1 of private investment. The costly terms guaranteed corporate profits, hiked public debt and left the state with fewer levers to manage the economy. There is little sign that Burnham would abandon PFI. The adherence to fiscal rules will appease corporations and the City of London, and further neuter the state.

So Burnham’s predicament is already emerging. Sticking to the 2024 election manifesto and fiscal rules will make it harder for him to deliver the headline promises and the change that he has paraded. Faced with neoliberal constraints, Burnham has so far made small concessions. These include a £45 a year (86p a week) cut in the household energy bills, £2 bus fare cap and £1,100 a year business rate cut  (£21.15 a week) for the hospitality industry. These will be welcomed by many but won’t make a lot of difference to shrinking household budgets. 

Within the iron grip of neoliberalism, Burnham may tinker at the edges and try to present a humane face of neoliberalism, but wholesale changes are unlikely. How he deals with water, energy, housing, profiteering, healthcare, regressive taxation, public investment and inequitable distribution of wealth will define his period in office. Corporations and the super-rich and their control of media and the means of production will continue to be a huge barrier to a new social settlement. We will have some answers soon as the date of the autumn budget approaches.

Prem Sikka is an Emeritus Professor of Accounting at the University of Essex and the University of Sheffield, a Labour member of the House of Lords, and Contributing Editor at Left Foot Forward.

Image credit: Lauren Hurley / Number 10 – Creative Commons

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Women who reject these roles are “meddlesome and quarrelsome” (Scott Jener), “miserable cat ladies” (JD Vance), and  “sterile” ‘spinsters’, incapable of succeeding in professional life. Simultaneously, they are “evil“, traitors, and sex toys.

Alarmingly, this unvarnished hatred is being actively mainstreamed and is exerting an ever-expanding cultural pull across Western society.

Misogyny is an ancient mindset that isn’t exclusive to Western Judeo-Christian culture. But this culture is my focus here because it’s where misogyny was supposed to diminish but has instead been shockingly re-vitalised.

It’s now embedded in a wider extreme right mindset according to which the great, white Judeo-Christian male is inherently superior, and rightfully presides over all other religious creeds, genders, and races. For brevity I’ll call this mindset ‘masculism’.

Masculist pushback

Masculism is currently pushing back. Pushback is a group’s desire to assert its dominance over other groups to protect its identity and efficacy against a perceived shift in norms and values. This process plays out across history, from Irish Protestantism vs Catholicism, the Crusades and 19th US nativism vs ‘papism’ to modern-day assaults on positive action policies.  

Masculist pushback is, I’d argue, best understood as an emotional response. Pathological fear of weakness triggers visceral hatred of, and an urge to control, objects which are perceived as potential sources of debilitation. These emotions drive pushback across diverse parts of the masculist agenda, from race, religion and gender to theories of the natural order, aesthetics, tech, governance, and modernity.

As the framework for a comprehensive extreme-right ideology, funded by a behemoth of super-wealthy global investors, masculism is an exceptionally powerful and ubiquitous instance of cultural pushback.

Why now? Arguably, Western endorsement of liberal values on human rights grew in the 1990s and early 2000s to a critical ‘unacceptable threat’ level, a crisis snapping point for a subset of ‘the right’. Enter powerful actors like Trump, Theil, Musk, Miller and co. who seized their moment. A co-ordinated major fightback project unfolded, using governmental powers, tech, social media, global blackmail, propaganda, and financial networking to subdue the threat.

Displacement in a zero-sum world

Pushback is a zero-sum perception – ‘your gain is my loss’. One group’s opportunities, improved rights and life chances are felt to detract from those of another group on the same pitch. Masculist anxiety about these losses is primarily psychosocial and focussed, not on material scarcity, but on “cultural displacement”,  loss of status, competence, and hegemonic power.

We see zero-sum pushback permeating incel thinking – they perceive women, and the positive discrimination they are perceived to enjoy, as the cause of their feeling diminished and displaced. In their heads, they’ve become oppressed second-class citizens whose efficacy and meaningfulness as males has been usurped.

In line with the Christo-misogynists quoted above, and Andrew Tate’s manosphere, the incel solution to this ‘corrosive weakening of maleness’ is to disempower the ‘hateful offenders’ by re-inventing them as traditional objects for subordination and exploitation.

Replacement horror

Masculist fear of weakness is equally evident when anxieties about positive discrimination and racial ‘replacement’ combine. Charles Q Brown held a distinguished military position as a US Airforce Chief of Staff. But he was fired by Trump in 2025 on the presumption that, since he was black, he must have obtained the post illegitimately via the DEI programme.

This is one instance in a constant flow of masculist fortifications of white identity – a ‘2-in-1’ pushback seeking to control non-whites and policies which advantage them. Musk speaks the masculist angst aloud when he argues that white dominance is necessary for self-protection since, if non-whites get the upper hand, they’ll use it to ‘destroy us’.

Masculism also fuels seething contempt for LGBTQ communities precisely because they threaten the prized purity of ‘maleness’. The US and UK extreme right, assisted by their media, fought against this perceived threat by transforming LGBTQ rights from a low public interest issue into a crisis. This shift worked because LGBTQ rights are such strong masculist fear-hate triggers.

The transphobic, racial, misogynistic hatred above is captured in Trump’s call to straight white men to get compensation for discrimination. Written all over this call is the zero-sum threat to white males, victimhood, and angry paranoia.

Mainstreamers and killers

Masculist narratives are formulated within organisations like the Heritage Foundation, ARC, CPAC, MEF, then pumped (via WSI, Tufton Street, IEA, Advance UK, etc) through Europe’s and the UK’s online arteries. The tech broligarchy’s shouty social media and AI pundits are mainstreaming inequalitarian narratives. Data analysis indicates that misogynistic objectification and sexual harassment of women on TikTok, for example, recently jumped from 13% to 56%.

Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, “the world’s scariest company”, argues for tech and state power mergers and fast-track AI expansion. Advantages, he claims, include our ability to build killer robots before our enemies do, and a significant reduction in the power of women. This echoes Yenner’s view of women as dangerous “backbones” of the ‘left world view’ needing restraint. Again, paranoid fear of being weakened is all over these narratives.

Within the masculist agenda there’s considerable cross-fertilisation. Tommy Robinson’s improbable foray into Christianity isn’t because he ‘got religion’ but because, like others, he spotted its value as a weapon in the masculist armoury, serving as a handy ‘sanctimony shield’ and a further tool for oppressing groups against which he’s pushing back. The Judeo-Christian arm of masculism can attack Islam and the ‘outrage’ of women’s desired bodily autonomy in one convenient hit.

Longing for super-strength

Meanwhile, Charles Cornish-Dale laments that the alienation and emptiness of contemporary life thwarts masculinity by hollowing out virility, risk, and vitality. Modernity replaces these ‘virtues’ with nanny statism, over-regulation, conformity, and anti-individualism. Masculists look to an alternative world of male inviolability and perfection through dominance, efficacy, and mental and physical prowess.

This masculist longing travels in two directions: backwards as far as a ‘Bronze Age’ when men were potent, and simultaneously forwards to a tech world where the weakness of feminised flesh is replaced by the digital muscularity of super-intelligent robots.

Musk and co retreat to, and preside over, this virtually post-human world as transcendent half-machine superheroes. Naomi Klein views this slide into ‘dark MAGA’ as a derangement caused by extreme wealth. I see it as a fight against the horror of frailty.

Perfection and nature

Either way, this two-directional hankering offers ‘barricades’ against the forces of disintegration.  So, too, does the masculist ideal of perfection driving the current male fetish for extreme body aesthetics: enter the looks maxxers and protein bodybuilders. These aspirations inoculate against weakness whilst providing online highways to the manosphere and extreme right politics.

Inevitably, masculists also revile disability as a key symbol of weakness, antithetical to physical perfection. Disabled people, like women, belong in the subhuman’, ‘loser’ domain as carriers of intolerable mental and physical infirmity. Trump’s alleged refusal to have disabled vets in his military parade epitomizes this abhorrence as does the cancellation in June 26 of the ceremony commemorating female vets.

Eugenics, another masculist preoccupation, seeks to overcome weakness by creating a master race where vulnerable groups (society’s ‘weakness carriers’) are strictly controlled. Trump’s obsessive admiration for handsome pilots and Hegseth’s super-fit, weight-controlled, testosterone-primed military aren’t just adolescent fixations, but masculist gestures towards eugenic control of the pernicious spread of deadly enfeeblement.

Testosterone Ubermensch

Male aesthetic perfection, as “the pinnacle of nature”, also links to masculist views of nature as inherently unequal. This imbalance provides a biological justification for patriarchal dominance, for equality as illegitimate, and for empathy as harmful where it weakens civil society by reifying the useless underdog.

True civilisational progress, then, requires a return to command and obedience models of gender and the re-emergence of the unfettered Nietzschean ‘Übermensch’. Here masculism offers a kind of extreme libertarian, testosterone ‘Christianity’, releasing white males from religion’s traditional ‘soft’ responsibilities and virtues.

Democracy for girls

As a system of governance based around pluralism, tolerance, compromise, and protective regulation, democracy is reviled by masculists as a ‘feminised’ poison within western society. Pushback is crystal clear in the US mission to save us from ‘civilizational erasure’.  After Vance’s Munich 2025 presentation, it gained momentum with Musk and co stepping in to boost support for the UK’s extreme right fraternity, including Restore Britain.

The US now parades the UK as a disgraced exemplar of the fate of systems that reject masculist governance. Apparently, we are a culturally crippled hellhole, enfeebled by woke policies on immigration, abortion, and DEI, infested with wandering ethnic grooming gangs and knife-wielders, and just too dangerous to visit.

Lashing out

Masculist pushback against weakness is a unifying principle in that it explains the great white Judeo-Christian male’s paranoid response to feeling encircled by usurpers (women, non-whites, LGBTQ, disabled people, Muslims, modernity, democracy, etc) all positioned to subvert his power and destroy him.

And he is lashing out, in all directions, all at once, with an overarching regressive, sometimes violent, agenda to restore his historic sovereign inviolability and dominance. Managing this fear is, for him, a dynamic process, requiring constant re-iteration of the narrative.

Masculism is ultimately pathetic – a grotesque case of pre-adult arrested development. Yet it’s gaining control of much of the planet’s key infrastructure. To respond effectively, turning off its financial taps won’t be sufficient. We must also tackle the emotional drivers that make it so compelling and so lethal.

Claire Jones writes and edits for West England Bylines and is co-ordinator for the Oxfordshire branch of the progressive campaign group, Compass.

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On 1 June, I posted on my Facebook page to mark the start of Pride Month and highlight the ongoing need to stamp out discrimination faced by the LGBTQI+ community. The post was met with an outpouring of abuse. At the time of writing, my post has garnered 948 comments — the vast majority of which are hateful, shocking and cruel. Many of these describe LGBT+ people as “sick”, “mentally ill”, or “perverted”. Others simply dismiss Pride Month altogether, writing “no one cares”.

Thankfully, that is not true. Across the country, people care deeply about Pride Month and what it represents. Throughout June, Pride events brought together communities, families and businesses to celebrate and show their support. Yet the cesspit that my comment section has become does reflect a shift in recent years, where discussions around LGBT+ rights and representation have grown increasingly toxic and divisive, threatening to erode the progress we have made. This shift has been fuelled in particular by populist right‑wing politics, both here in the UK and abroad.

Since returning to power, Trump has enacted sweeping anti‑LGBT+ legislation in the United States as part of his crusade against “wokeness and gender ideology”. He has moved to cut funding for gender‑affirming care, HIV services, and grants for universities and nonprofits supporting LGBTQ+ people, as well as continually attacking DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). These actions are being felt in the UK, with LGBT+ charities seeing donations collapse as corporate funding is withdrawn. Stonewall, the UK’s biggest LGBTQ+ charity, revealed corporate donations had more than halved in the last financial year. 

Meanwhile, in UK politics, Reform has increasingly taken steps to reduce LGBT+ visibility, including banning the Pride flag from buildings owned by Reform‑run councils. Flying a flag is a simple and harmless act, but one that is deeply important as a symbol of acceptance and belonging. Its positive impact is clear in a YouGov survey which found that 67% of LGBT+ people feel safer when seeing a Pride flag displayed in a small public setting such as a café — proving how visibility like this really does matter. Reform removing these flags sends a clear message: LGBT+ people are not welcome or supported. In Durham, the Reform‑run county council went further by axing Pride funding entirely. The event only survived because trade unions stepped in to cover the costs.

Reform figures have also allowed anti‑LGBT+ rhetoric to creep into their speeches. Reform MP Danny Kruger warned against left‑wing parties forming what he called an “appalling Hamas‑supporting, LGBT‑supporting nationalist party,” saying these are “all the things the British people have rejected time and again.” This is a shocking statement not least because it directly condemns the idea of an LGBT+ supporting government, but also because of the implication this is something undesirable and dangerous.

Meanwhile, Nigel Farage has previously claimed that children with two “stable parents” have the best chance in life, arguing that the most stable relationship tends to be between a man and a woman. Such a claim is backed by no meaningful evidence. Children do benefit from having a stable home but the gender of their parents is irrelevant to this. Comments like this indirectly challenge the legitimacy of gay marriage and adoption, and further fuel anti‑LGBT+ attitudes. They form part of an effort not to openly oppose these rights openly, but subtly undermine and question them. 

And to top it off, Reform wants to scrap the 2010 Equalities Act — vital legislation that protects LGBT+ people and other minorities from discrimination and harassment. 

This pushback on progress is deeply alarming. In Parliament, I have fought for LGBT+ rights, including long calling for a trans‑inclusive conversion therapy ban to finally outlaw the traumatic practice of trying to force people to change their sexuality or gender identity. Conversion therapy is just one example of how discrimination persists: these practices are still not illegal. I am glad the Government has finally released a draft bill to end this practice, but they must move quickly to put it into law, because every day leaves people at risk of this vile abuse.

The backsliding of LGBT+ rights in the UK is clearly illustrated by the Rainbow Map, which now ranks the UK 22nd — a damning contrast to 2015, when we topped the list. Reform’s actions and rhetoric will only worsen this. Already, at a local level, we’re seeing their approach in action: stripping back funding, reducing visibility, and signalling that LGBT+ identities are something to be hidden. This reduction of services and visibility will erode tolerance and support for the LGBT+ community. When people see politicians express these attitudes towards LGBT+ people, they feel emboldened to repeat them; increasing discrimination, decreasing safety, and creating an environment where rolling back rights is a feasible next step. 

I’ll keep fighting for LGBT+ rights and representation because the hatred that my post received online shows how desperately important this still is. We must be visible in our support, loud in our opposition to Reform, and clear that we stand with the community. And in times like these, we should not underestimate the simple act of flying or displaying a Pride flag. It’s a powerful symbol that shows  LGBT+ people they are supported, they are celebrated, and they belong.

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Tom Brake is the Chief Executive of Unlock Democracy

Keir Starmer’s approach to House of Lords reform tells you almost everything you need to know about his premiership.

He came into office having promised to abolish the House of Lords. Peerage appointments would be taken out of the hands of politicians, he said. An elected second chamber would replace a House of Lords stuffed with “lackeys and donors.” All this was needed to “restore trust” and to “fix our politics.”

Labour’s manifesto echoed those positions, albeit in more guarded language. It pledged only vague “reform [to] the appointments’ process”, and stopped short of the overhaul Starmer had endorsed, less than two years earlier. Nevertheless, it reiterated Labour’s commitment to reconstituting the Lords into “an alternative second chamber that is more representative of the regions and nations.”

That vision has shown no sign of materialising.

All we have had is the expulsion of the remaining hereditary peers. The principle behind that reform was sound enough. Hereditary legislators are impossible to defend in a modern democracy. Their presence rested on a pre-democratic constitutional settlement that had long ceased to hold.

But removing them was supposed to be only one piece of a much larger puzzle.

Changes to the appointments’ process have been entirely cosmetic – it remains in the Prime Minister’s lap. Meanwhile ongoing efforts to reduce the size of the Lords (by introducing a retirement age and participation requirements) have been undermined by Starmer’s own actions. He has appointed peers at a faster rate than any previous Prime Minister (other, of course, than Liz Truss). Depending on your measure, Starmer has averaged between 66% and 100% more appointments per year than the next most prolific PM, David Cameron. These have also been strikingly partisan. Before buying off opposition to the Hereditary Peers Bill by bestowing 26 life peerages on predominantly Conservative former hereditaries, Starmer had appointed more peers of his own party as a share of total appointments than any previous PM.

What message does this send? Starmer’s manifesto – emblazoned with his picture on the cover – tells the country the Lords “has become too big”, then he sets about expanding it at record pace. Starmer promises to reduce prime ministerial patronage, only to make unprecedented use of it.

The net result of Starmer’s inconsistency presents Andy Burnham with an awkward inheritance.

Burnham has reiterated his support for replacing the Lords with a ‘senate of the regions and nations’, with seats reserved for elected mayors. The idea draws inspiration from Germany’s Bundesrat, and reflects Burnham’s broader desire to strengthen devolved voices in the governance of the UK.

Yet importing that model into the British constitution is not straightforward. The Bundesrat is not the principal chamber of legislative scrutiny, the role into which the House of Lords has evolved. And with the devolution settlement still decidedly uneven, how would such a chamber be populated? Neither problem is irresolvable, but the details take time.

Following the well-trodden path of previous Prime Ministers, Burnham is reported to have concluded that substantive Lords reform is therefore best left for the next term. 

Which brings us back to Starmer’s legacy.

Big announcements, but no sense of a coherent path or destination. Partial follow-through and disjointed results. There’s no doubt the hereditary peers were democratically indefensible. Nonetheless it would be difficult to construct a democratic or constitutional defence of the second chamber their expulsion leaves behind.

Come the next election, the House of Lords will be an entirely appointed chamber in which the government’s principal electoral rival has little or no representation. Should Reform UK secure the 30% vote share that could, under First Past the Post, deliver a Commons majority, Danny Kruger MP has made clear how a Reform UK government would seek to push its programme through the Lords. Peers aware of their own illegitimacy would be reluctant to resist, the shadow of two hundred new Reform UK peers looming overhead lest they overstep.

Starmer’s plan for the House of Lords was always tentative, lacking in clarity or coherence. A bit of this and a bit of that. So perhaps it’s fitting that removing the hereditary peers is just another isolated item in a patchy legacy. The Lords, meanwhile, staggers on as incoherent and bloated as ever.

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There is much talk of ‘Manchesterism’ at the moment. I have witnessed it on my own doorstep – the cranes in the sky, the growing population, the revival of the city centre, and a palpable sense of growth and optimism. But even here, with a strong record of housebuilding, the housing crisis is stretching renters beyond what they can afford.

The city itself has prioritised good growth, growing the economy and furthering inclusion side by side. This Manchesterism centres on a muscular local state intervening to build a fairer economy. 

Housing is no different, where the city has focused on expanding housing supply and making it more affordable and accessible. When I chaired the Council’s Economy and Regeneration Committee, I saw first-hand how Manchester built record levels of social and affordable homes last year, alongside novel work to boost the supply of homes.

Manchester is the UK’s most renter-heavy city but there is little that even Manchester can do locally to protect private renters when landlords hike market rents. These problems the city faces are reflected across the country too as a major cost-of-living problem.

There are 12.9 million Britons living in private rented homes who need decisive change and protection from hardship. Market rents are stretching renters’ finances beyond what is affordable while there is some evidence to suggest landlords are routinely overpricing their properties. This means rents are absorbing ever higher shares of household income. 45 per cent of private renters have unaffordable rents (above 30 per cent of their income), and forecastssuggest increasing rents will eat into any growth in average wages into the 2030s. 

The government is right to pursue building more new homes, but the effect of this on prices will be longer term. Renters face pressure now, particularly with the war in Iran stoking inflation risk.

That’s why, at the Fabian Society, we are investigating how to make renting more affordable. In recent weeks, we have talked with groups of renters from across the country, including Manchester. They described high rents as part of an interlocking affordability crisis across energy, food, and transport costs.

One Manchester resident told us that their rent was over half their wage every month, and they cannot realistically afford all their bills let alone the nice things in life. Their son has been ‘dying to move out’ but cannot afford to move locally because rents are outstripping wages. Meanwhile a homeowner in Harlow spoke of their adult children living at home too, unable to move onto the next stage in their lives. They simply cannot see how they will save up for a mortgage if they start renting. The disconnect between market rents and earnings is placing enormous pressure on people and stopping young people getting on in life.

Renters expect the government to act, but want intervention to work effectively, protecting them from unintended consequences, matching previous Fabian Society research. They doubt new housebuilding or policy change will benefit them, and lack trust in politics to improve their lives.

The Government has already taken meaningful steps to protect renters, though they are often overlooked. The Renters’ Rights Act limits rent increases to once annually and allows renters to challenge rises beyond local market rents at tribunal – arguably a soft form of rent control. This will improve renters’ lives and the people we spoke with welcomed it, especially the end of no-fault evictions.

Even before the Renters’ Rights Act, renters who took their case to tribunal were £1,140 on average better off, winning 71 per cent of cases. But these challenges were barely used. Few of the renters we spoke with had heard of the Rent Tribunal and most lacked the trust and confidence to challenge a future rent increase when asked.

The direction of travel on renters’ rights remains right. Affordability needs to be taken further, responding to renters’ concerns. Well-thought-through, short-term protection for renters’ living costs now, should sit alongside increasing long-term housing supply to reduce housing costs.

Government efforts to tackle the cost of living must include further action on rents. Renters expect more, the evidence supports more, and the political cost of inaction is rising. A muscular state willing to intervene in a problem is one of many things the government can learn from Manchester.

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No one is ever born poor. They are condemned to poverty by societal policies which prevent millions from realising their full physical, mental, and intellectual capacities potentialities. Governments covet economic growth but millions lack the spending power to facilitate it. Little attention is paid to systemic causes of poverty.

Burden of poverty

In the UK, despite a social security system, 13.4m people, including 4m children, live in poverty. Some 25.3m people, including 14.9m working adults and 7.7m children, live below minimum income standard i.e. income needed to live with dignity. 

Those denied good food, housing, healthcare and are racked with poor health, anxiety, and insecurity from an early age. Many do not reach their full educational, health, employment, and earnings attainment, and are more likely to need higher access to health services, welfare, and public services. Child poverty alone results in economic output loss of around £40bn a year.

The UK has a high rate of infant mortality compared with peer countries. British five-year-olds are up to 7cm shorter than children of the same age in Europe. Last year, more than 1m children in England were referred to mental health services. A study published in Nature Human Behaviour shows that consequences of social inequality alter human biology from a very young age. Adults who endured childhood economic deprivation continue to age at a significantly accelerated biological pace later in life, even if they achieved financial security decades after their initial childhood exposures. The less well-off cannot afford private healthcare and the National Health Service has a waiting list of 7.1m appointments for hospitals in England. Around 300,000 people a year die prematurely whilst waiting for a hospital appointment.  Poverty has reduced healthy life expectancy to average of 60.7 years for males and 60.9 years for females. In affluent areas such as Richmond-upon-Thames, males have HLE of 69.3 years and females of 70.3 years. In parts of Blackpool, HLE for males in 50.9 years and 51.2 years for females. Males in deprived areas in Scotland have HLE of 44.8 years, compared to 44.2 years for females.

Periodically, to manage public anger, governments make concessions. Following a backbench rebellion, the government has abolished the two-child benefit cap. It is rolling out a program of free breakfast clubs in all state-funded primary schools in England. From September 2026, there would be expansion of Free School Meals to all children in households on Universal Credit. Such help may not be permanent. Reform UK and the Conservative Party have promised to reimpose the two-child benefit which has lifted 450,000 children out of poverty.

The corrosive effects of child poverty cannot be eradicated without addressing parental poverty, which is deepened by inequitable distribution of income and a regressive tax system.

Shrinking share of the economic pie

In 1975, at the height of trade union membership, workers’ share of gross value added (GVA) was 71.9%. From the 1980s onwards, the state attacked trade unions and weakened workers’ ability to bargain with employers. By 2025, after 50-years of economic growth and increases in minimum wage, workers’ share of GVA declined to 59%. The real average wage has hardly changed since 2008. Work does not pay enough. Some 32% of universal credit claimants are in work. 1.23m workers are on zero-hour contracts. Some 4.4m jobs don’t pay the real living wage. Worker insecurity is being increased by “dynamic pay” under which employer price for labour varies form one job or the next, one hour to the next. There are no fixed pay rates or working hours. Therefore, no idea of income that workers and their families can rely upon. Millions more are likely to rely on foodbanks and charities for their wellbeing.

In May 2026, the median annual wage of a payrolled employee was £31,512, after deduction of income tax and national insurance the take-home pay was £26,208. The median wage for women, disabled and ethnic minority workers is even lower. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that for a socially acceptable minimum living standard a couple with two children needs to earn £74,000 a year between them. With both parents working, millions can’t achieve the minimum living standard.

Low wages result in lower savings to meet contingencies. The average savings amount is £19,214. 39% of Briton have £1,000 or less in savings, and 25% have £200 or less. The 18–24-year-olds have average of just £2,699 in savings, while those aged 55 and over have an average of £33,420 in savings. Lower savings result in lower household resilience and private pensions. 

Regressive taxation

In principle, what the mode of production denies can be secured though politics. However, successive governments have adopted regressive tax policies which hurt the poorest the most.

Wage earners are taxed at marginal rates of 20% to 45% and pay national insurance. In contrast capital gains and dividends mainly accruing to the well-off, are taxed at the marginal rates of 18% to 24%, and 10.75% to 39.35%. No national insurance is levied.

Income tax personal allowance has been frozen at £12,570 since April 2021.If increased in line with inflation, it would have been £16,048 for 2026/27. As a result, in 2026/27 a basic rate taxpayer on £17,000 a year will pay additional £696 in income tax and another £278 in national insurance contributions. This erodes disposable income of the poorest households. The problems are further compounded by taxes which take no account of income. For example, paupers and super-rich pay council tax at the same rate. A modest house worth £320,000 and a mansion worth £32m fall in the same council tax band. Altogether, the poorest 20% of the population pay a higher proportion of income in direct and indirect taxes than the richest 20%. 

Low incomes affect the capacity to save for pension, but the tax system favours high earners. In 2023-24, total tax relief on contributions to private pension schemes was £78.2bn. Some 13% went to 0.9m additional rate taxpayers; 55% went to 6.03m higher rate taxpayers and only 32% went to 29.2m basic rate taxpayers. The tax system does little to help the poor.

Cost of living crisis

Poverty could be reduced by tackling cost-of-living. But rents and mortgages are not frozen. There are inflation-busting annual increases in the price of water, energy, and broadband. The average UK renter spent 41% of take-home pay on rent in 2025. Social housing would help to reduce rental cost but since the 1980s Right to Buy schemes, 2.8m UK social homes have been sold and not replaced. There isn’t much relief on the horizon. More than 1.3m households (about 4m people) are on a waiting list for a social home, but only 12,198 social homes were built. At this rate, it would take about 119 years to clear the current waiting list.

Unite examined the annual accounts of 17,000 major corporations and found that since the pandemic average profit margins have soared by an average of 30% since the Covid pandemic. Some of the biggest hikes were by electricity and gas supply companies (363%), health and social work (118%), transport and logistics (47%), water and sewerage companies (44%), and mining and quarrying companies (43%).

Public services such as dentistry, veterinary services, childcare and social care have been privatised, enabling operators to make excessive profits and erode people’s disposable incomes.

Concluding thoughts

Poverty is part of social violence that exhausts people and removes hope. The government’s focus on child poverty reduction is welcome but it is hard to discern any policy for dealing with structural factors. No major political party has any strategy for improving workers’ share of GVA. It could be improved by adopting the real living wage or universal basic income, and by strengthening workers’ bargaining power. The Employment Rights Act 2025 omits collective bargaining, which leaves workers in a weak bargaining position. In common with most European countries, the UK could give workers in large companies a say in how the economic pie is shared through employee-elected directors, but industrial democracy and equitable distribution of income and wealth are not on the political agenda.

Poverty can be reduced through progressive taxation, particularly by reducing indirect taxes (e.g. VAT) and by increasing income tax personal allowances. Governments need to tax wealth at higher rates than wages and use the proceeds to recalibrate the incidence of taxation, but in the face of opposition from the super-rich they show little appetite for it.

Many of the cost-of-living pressures arise from profiteering by privatised utilities, such as water and energy, or from oligopolies dominating the market. Governments rarely break-up big conglomerates to create competition and reduce excessive profits. There shun price controls. Higher price of essentials results in higher gross domestic product (GDP) which governments celebrate, but this also increases poverty. Governments do not examine the quality and consequences of higher GDP.

The reversal of the two-child benefit cap shows that when people can secure emancipatory change by resisting and organising to challenge established orthodoxies. More of that is needed to banish state-sponsored poverty.

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