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.

The post We need to abolish state-sanctioned poverty appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.

The finance industry now controls significant parts of the UK economy. It extracts wealth, destroys jobs and weakens economic resilience. Governments go to extraordinary lengths to promote and protect the finance industry, whilst neglecting other productive areas, such as manufacturing.

Obsession with Finance

Not so long ago, finance industry was mainly about loans, overdrafts, debit/credit cards, insurances and pensions, which we are all accustomed to. But investors wanted more. So, banks gambled on financial horses and committed frauds. The result was a secondary banking crash in the mid-1970s. The state bailed out banks, insurance and property companies. Governments remained besotted with the finance industry. The UK had a banking crisis in every decade since the 1970s with entities such as Johnson Matthey, Barlow Clowes, Barings, Bank of Credit and Credit International and British & Commonwealth Bank making headlines.

In 1986, the government deregulated finance. People continued to be ripped-off by mis-selling of endowment mortgages, investment bonds, split-capital investment trusts, precipice bonds, interest rate swaps, self-invested personal pensions, payment protection insurance, pensions, and other products. Reckless lending, speculation and low capital requirements became the mantra for rejuvenating the economy. Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns led the stampede. Building societies such as Alliance and Leicester, Bradford & Bingley, HBOS and Northern Rock joined the chase for easy profits and converted to banks. All collapsed and in 2007-08 the crisis rapidly spread to the entire economy.

The state provided £1,162bn (£133bn cash and 1,029bn guarantees) to rescue banks, and £895bn of quantitative easing to stimulate financial markets. The economy is yet to recover. The average real wage has hardly changed since 2008. Between 1995 and 2015, the finance industry made a negative contribution of £4,500bn to the UK economy, effectively wiping out 2.5 years of gross domestic product. 

After the crash some reforms were introduced, including higher capital requirements, closer monitoring by regulators, ring-fencing of retail from speculative banking and a cap of bankers’ bonuses. This was not accompanied by any attempt to rethink finance even though some 40% of the world’s dirty money is laundered through London and UK Crown dependencies. Governments permitted unregulated shadow banking, which includes private equity and hedge funds, to expand and devour the economy.

Devouring the Economy

Private equity takes over existing businesses with finance from banks, insurance companies, pension funds and wealthy individuals seeking higher returns. It acquires control but injects little share capital. Takeover targets are loaded with the secured debt, often routed through opaque offshore entities, and are expected to pay it off. Financial engineering, asset-stripping, staffing and wage cuts, dumping liabilities and tax abuse are key elements of the business model. When businesses are collapsed, private equity and banks, as secured creditors, walk away with most of the proceeds from the sale of the business assets, leaving little for unsecured creditors and pension schemes.

The list of private equity victims is long, and includes entities such as Bernard Matthews, Body Shop, Byron Burger, Casual Dining, Cath Kidson, Claire’s, Comet. Debenhams, Flybe, Four Seasons Health Care, Homebase, HMV, Maplin, Monarch Airlines, The Original Factory Shop, Payless Shoes, Poundworld, Silentnight, Southern Cross, Thomas Cook, TM Lewin and Toys “R” Us. Thousands of jobs have been lost, creditors have not been paid, supply chains have been destroyed, workers have lost some of their pension rights, town centres have been decimated and the country’s tax base has been eroded.

Private equity now controls large swathes of the UK economy including AA, ASDA, Bella Italia, the Blackpool Tower, Center Parcs, Legoland, Morrisons, Travelodge and Zizi. It has extensive stake in UK airports, seaports, hospitals, care homes, law and accountancy firms, football teams, housing, GP surgeries, veterinary services, dental services, motorway service stations, energy networks and water companies. 

Thames Water never recovered from its 2006-2017 ownership by a private equity consortium led by Macquarie Group. It extracted annual returns of between 15.5% and 19% a year by dumping raw sewage in rivers and by neglecting investment. To date, Thames Water has paid out £10.4bn in dividends since privatisation in 1989. Despite inflation-busting price rises, it has not built a single new reservoir since 1989. Despite changes in ownership, Thames Water continues with the extractive business model. It is deeply embedded in the water industry. Private equity also has a stake in Northumbrian Water, Southern Water and Yorkshire Water, and the entire sector survives by exploiting customers.

Financialization of Humanity

To appease the finance industry, governments have financialised humanity. Care and compassion have become profit centres and commodities.

Instead of expanding the capacity of the National Health Service (NHS), governments have handed contracts for eye-care to private equity-controlled entities, making profit of between 32% and 43% from NHS work.

With the NHS dentistry in disarray, people are turning to the private sector. Private equity is making inroads into the £8.4bn sector. The initial consultation fee has increased by 23% in the last two years, and the price of a simple tooth extraction has increased by 32%. Gross profit for private equity-owned My Dentist, PortmanDentex and Rodericks Dental, and Bupa Dental Services, rose by 20% year-on-year between 2023 and 2024. Profit margins are in the range of 20%-30%.

84% of children’s homes and over 80% of adult care homes in England are run by for-profit entities, increasingly controlled by financial investors. Private equity is a key player in the sector. Around £1.5bn is extracted  from the care home sector each year in the form of returns to investors. The quality of care is poor.

Since 2015, over 40 fostering agencies in England providing homes for vulnerable children have been taken over by private equity companies. The fees are double the cost of local authority placements. Profit margins for these private agencies average around 21%.

Six companies backed by private equity control 60% of the UK’s £6.3bn pet-care market. Average vet prices rose by 63% between 2016 and 2023, well above the rate of inflation. Vets working for large companies are under pressure to hit profit targets by offering repeat appointment and unnecessary treatment at exorbitant prices.

Gifts from the State

Governments bend laws to support the finance industry. Most of the post-2008 banking reforms have been reversed. Shadow banking remains unregulated and almost everything is financialised.

Millions of motorists have been mis-sold car purchase loans. As the case for possible £44bn compensation reached the Supreme Court, Chancellor Rachel Reeves made an unprecedented intervention. The Treasury sought the Court’s permission to contribute evidence to argue that high compensation could “cause considerable economic harm.” Such lobbying was rejected as the Supreme Court is solely concerned about interpretation of law. Undeterred, the Chancellor considered emergency legislation to shield lenders from claims. Ultimately, the court judgment was not severe.

Tax laws are bent to appease the finance industry. Wages are taxed at marginal rates of 20% to 45%, and earners also pay national insurance. In opposition Chancellor Rachel Reeves said that these arrangements should apply to private equity bosses too. However, the promised reform has not been delivered. The income of private equity bosses continues to be taxed as a capital gain, with maximum tax rate of 34.1%. No national insurance is charged.

Banking frauds are swept under dust-laden carpets. HBOS frauds, dating back to 2002-2007, provide an example. The Financial Conduct Authority, the Serous Fraud Office and the City of London Police were unwilling to prosecute.  In February 2017, the Thames Valley Police and Crime Commissioner decided to prosecute and secured six criminal convictions, including a senior ex-HBOS banker. Despite that there has been no detailed regulatory investigation. The Commissioner said, “I am convinced the cover-up goes right up to Cabinet level. And to the top of the City.” In this vacuum, Lloyds Bank (owner of HBOS since 2008-2009) appointed former High Court judge Dame Linda Dobbs to investigate and publish a report by 2018. No report has been published and ministers dodge questions in parliament. Victims await compensation which could run over £1bn.

The Financial Services and Markets Bill now weakens the role of the Financial Ombudsman Service to secure redress for complainants and imposes a ten-year limit within which complainants can secure redress. Compliance with rules rather than whether companies acted reasonably and fairly is the proposed rule.

Finally …

The above is brief indication of the capture of the UK state by the finance industry and its consequences. The economy has been devoured. Low wages and tax abuse have been normalised. Town centres have become economic deserts. Wealth extraction is prioritised. Unprecedented resources are devoted to financial engineering and tax abuse. The UK has over 405,000 professionally qualified accountants, the highest per capita in the world and more than the rest of Europe combined. Inevitably, other sectors are denied graduate talent.

Appeasement of the finance industry hasn’t delivered the promised investment in productive assets. For the last 30 years, the UK has languished at or near the bottom of the G7 and OECD league of investment. When the financial bubble bursts, large tracts of the economy will be washed away and there won’t be enough money to bailout the infected sectors.

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Abortion has always involved deeply-held personal, ethical and religious beliefs. But for decades there has been a broad political consensus in the UK that decisions about pregnancy belong to women, their families and their healthcare providers, not politicians looking for a new culture war battleground. That non-partisan consensus is now under pressure.

Recent reporting has revealed a growing effort by Reform UK figures, anti-abortion campaigners and far-right activists to make abortion a new frontier in Britain’s culture wars. The language is becoming increasingly familiar: inflammatory rhetoric, misinformation, moral panic and attempts to portray established reproductive rights as somehow radical or extreme.

We should not dismiss this as political noise. Many people look at what has happened in the United States and assume it could never happen here. They point to our different political traditions and our strong public support for abortion rights.

But rights are rarely lost overnight. More often, they are gradually politicised before they are challenged.

The rollback of abortion rights in America did not begin with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It began years earlier, with a deliberate effort to make reproductive rights a political dividing line. Issues that had previously been treated as matters of healthcare or personal opinion became tools in a broader political ideological campaign. That should serve as a warning.

Only recently, Parliament voted overwhelmingly to decriminalise abortion for women in England and Wales – the biggest step forward for reproductive rights in six decades. I was proud to support that change. The reform was not about expanding access to abortion or changing time limits, it simply recognised that women should not face criminal investigation, prosecution or imprisonment because of circumstances surrounding their own pregnancies.

Since 2020, around 100 women have been investigated by police following pregnancy loss or suspected abortion offences. Some investigations involved women who had suffered miscarriages. Six women faced court proceedings and one woman was imprisoned under legislation rooted in the Victorian-era Offences Against the Person Act 1861. No woman experiencing pregnancy loss should have to fear becoming the subject of a traumatic criminal investigation.

Yet even before decriminalisation has had time to take effect, there are already calls from some Reform UK figures and their allies to reverse it.

What worries me is not simply disagreement over policy – healthy democracies will always contain disagreement – it is the deliberate attempt to import the tactics and language of America’s abortion wars into British politics.

Open Democracy reported that the UK arm of The Alliance Defending Freedom, an organisation closely associated with anti-abortion campaigning in the United States, has received more than £2 million in funding from its American parent organisation while campaigning against abortion clinic safe access zones.

Its analysis also found a significant increase in abortion-related content among Reform-linked and far-right social media accounts over the past two years. These posts generated hundreds of thousands of interactions and frequently relied on inflammatory language designed to provoke outrage rather than inform debate.

The objective is not simply to oppose abortion, it is to make reproductive freedom politically toxic again. Once that happens, rights that once seemed secure become negotiable. The lesson we need to learn from America is that complacency can be dangerous. 

That does not mean every disagreement about abortion is an attack on women’s rights, nor does it mean Britain is on the verge of following America’s path where 17 states enforce near-total bans. But it does mean we should be alert when politicians seek to reopen settled questions, import foreign culture wars, and turn women’s bodies into political battlegrounds.

One of the most striking features of this debate is how far it appears to be driven from the top down, rather than from public demand.

Polling consistently shows overwhelming support for access to abortion in the UK, including among Reform voters. In fact, around 86% of Reform voters support a woman’s right to choose. The public understands that these are deeply personal decisions. They understand that criminalising women does not solve difficult situations. They understand that healthcare works best when it is guided by evidence, compassion and clinical expertise, rather than political ideology.

That raises an obvious question: if this is the settled view of the electorate, why is it being reopened as a political battleground at all?

The answer lies in the growing influence of a small but organised network of politicians, media figures and campaigning groups who have made abortion a central cultural and ideological cause.

Open Democracy reported that Paul Marshall, the co-owner of GB News, which has paid Nigel Farage nearly £370,000 since he became an MP, is on the board of the anti-abortion ARC forum alongside JD Vance’s “intellectual mentor” James Orr and Reform MP Danny Kruger. Farage has himself spoken at events in the United States where restrictions on abortion were being promoted, and has previously described the UK’s 24-week time limit as  “ludicrous”.

None of this reflects a clear public mandate to change the law. Instead, it reflects a process of political agenda-setting in which minority positions are amplified through social media platforms and transatlantic alliances until they begin to appear more mainstream than they are.

Rights are not usually removed in a single dramatic moment. They are eroded gradually through the normalisation of once-fringe arguments, the reshaping of political debate, and the steady expansion of what is considered reasonable to question.

That process is already clearly underway. We should have the awareness to say so, and the vigilance to ensure it goes no further.

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This right-wing ascendancy has been further boosted by the GB News “soapbox” which, together with the usual suspects (the Express, Sun and Mail), provide Reform mouthpieces. There’s also been a shift further right in previously more neutral publications, notably the Telegraph and Times. 

Adherence to standards of impartiality and scrutiny is now often token and in “power struggles over our ears and eyeballs” shared by influencers like Mr Beast. 

Unsurprisingly, the UK now ranks a rather shameful 18th in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index with uncomfortable similarities to Orban’s Hungary. Around 70-80% of UK press media is owned by right-leaning wealthy oligarchs, as was Orban’s. Journalists have been censured using SLAPPS, regulatory appointments, digital surveillance and smear campaigns. And just as Hungary’s media became promotors of Orban’s party, Fidesz, so IPSO’s infamous toothlessness has hastened the corrosion of editorial neutrality, paving the way for the RWM to become ‘left-bashing’ Reform cheer leaders.

The heavily concentrated ownership of our news media by right-wing oligarchs is well documented. But we should look closely at how the RWM manipulates social attitudes and how we should respond.

Playtime and construction industries

The leading social media platforms (X, Facebook and Tiktok) enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the RWM in which news is mutually amplified and mediated. But despite algorithmic tailoring, much online content still flows from what the RWM decides to headline. It’s a primary, more authoritative lens through which we experience our political world on a day-to-day basis. We understand politicians not so much through what they do in the raw, or through social media noise, but through how the RWM frames them. 

Framing is central to the RWM’s gladiatorial “sport” of making or breaking politicians their audacious profession renders them ‘fair game’. 

This nihilistic modus operandi is common amongst the political commentariat. It’s perhaps inevitable though in a culture whose contributors, often from the same privileged education stables, are relegated to the side-lines. If their professional purpose is to comment rather than act, what’s left except to gameplay, exercising their tribal power over the actions of others? 

This sport isn’t confined to the RWM, but the effects are proportional to its considerably greater reach; furthermore, its pernicious influence spans the RWM spectrum from the more subtle Times to the explicitly rage-baiting Daily Mail. 

A good kicking in the name of scrutiny 

RWM framing is powerful where we lack independent experience for comparison. We are generally dependent on the media for shaping our understanding of figures like Andy Burnham, Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski. With a clean slate, the RWM is largely free to construct political reality around these figures. 

Polanksi’s popularity, like Burnham’s, is a RWM ‘red flag’. Their popularity is an excuse to set them up as able to ‘take the hit’. It affords a licence to discredit them under the guise of ‘extra hard-hitting scrutiny’, i.e. Trevor Phillips style ‘rottweiler attacks minus balance’. 

Such grillings, delivered to a public who know little about either man, create impressions, piece by suspect piece, strongly predisposing them to negative evaluations. 

Display stand labels

RWM framing relies heavily on labelling. ‘Hypnotist’, used as an early identifier for Polanski, formed a basis for further understanding, solidifying into beliefs about ‘untrustworthiness and inauthenticity’ through repetition and familiarity, and attracting other consonant labels which together formed a consistent mental ‘Polanski’ map.

Related high frequency descriptors used were: ‘actor, tax dodger, antisemite, drug legaliser, ‘narcissist’. This spicy wordplay assembled a mesh of attributes, lodging itself within social discourse and further shaping ‘Polanski’ as a faulty political type. Even as a debate, seeds were successfully planted. Such labels, splashed daily across supermarket and garage forecourt display stands, are the only prompts for some people on how to vote.

With ‘Polanski’ thus sculpted, counter-information can’t then land. Humanitarian concerns about Gaza or wealth inequality can legitimately be discussed by bodies like the UN. But out of Polanski’s mouth they are dangerous rantings. 

Similarly, the Times’ strenuous efforts to portray Burnham as an unprincipled shapeshifter, minimally sows doubt amongst voters whose beliefs about him are less than rock solid.

Both politicians are ‘press clay pigeons’ – brittle flyers projected high into the political arena ready to be shot down. 

Artistry

Other key tactics are reinterpretation, information suppression, selective exposure and normalisation.

The Times and others present the self-confessed ‘sexism’ of Robert Kenyan, not as the outright disqualification for becoming an MP it should be, but as showing he’s the ‘kind of normal bloke we need in politics’. 

Similarly, the RWM’s interpretive dance around Farage’s alleged antisemitic behaviour and dodgy donations as ‘boyhood japes’ and ‘innocent gifts’ presents him as a blameless victim hounded by the left. 

Meanwhile, behind the staggering level of voter ignorance about Reform’s ‘‘Great Repeal Bill’ is the RWM’s wilful determination not to spell out its implications for worker’s and women’s rights. 

In covering the recent stabbings in Southampton and Ireland, the RWM ignored the data on ethnic crime rates and differential policing. Instead, the stabbings were presented as damning proof of the dangers posed by non-white ethnic groups, woke 2-tier policing and immigration controls, with the Mail, amongst others, treating Farage’s call for “cold rage” as a fair. These incendiary RWM narratives act like instruction manuals, shaping social comprehension about what the stabbings signify.

All the portrayals outlined above are just a tiny sample of the relentless brush strokes via which impressions of key politicians and events are drip fed and fleshed out.

Some consequences

The riots triggered by the stabbings were incited by Tommy Robinson and Musk-led online rhetoric. But the RWM fomented the violence by using its own more authoritative voice to ratify, rather than challenge it; also by attacking critics who ‘condemn the valid tinderbox of public rage’ as themselves the ‘real danger to society’.   

Similarly, whilst the RWM’s response to Farage’s £5mn donation from Christopher Harborne was sluggish, they feasted on Raynor’s minor tax issue for months. The “tax scandal” caused a “tangible fall” in her popularity. Despite being found not guilty, the damage was done – the media assault worked.

It also worked against Polanski. Even if repeatedly kicking someone in the head is police protocol, Polanski’s reaction, if politically hasty, was probably natural, humane concern about brain-damage. But the RWM instead briskly spun it as ‘anti-police’ and, by initially omitting the other Muslim victim, absurdly, also as ‘antisemitic’. The ‘antisemite’ and ‘anti-police’ tags then caused Polanski’s approval to plummet 14 points, shifting from positive into the red overnight. 

The RWM spots attack fissures in the left and leap in with the zest of piranhas.

The doorstep fallacy

The RWM can’t claim to mirror political reality since it constructs chunks of the content in the first place that it then allegedly ‘reflects’. Much of the doorstep Corbyn hostility it ‘found’, for example, was its own regurgitated narrative. Starmer has, in reality, made serious mistakes that aren’t simply conjured from press manoeuvres. But the RWM sets the agenda. 

Starmer’s sticky ‘lame duck’ persona was consolidated by prioritising negative labels (weak, indecisive) and by pointed silence on positive achievements: knife crime down 10% in the last year, the stock market outperforming the US, NHS waiting lists lowest in 3.5 yrs, GDP up every quarter since 2024, the new Renters Rights Act, 30 hours weekly of funded childcare.

This suppression is why voters, when asked to list good Labour policies, famously stare blankly, struggling to answer.

Doorstep antipathy is also because Starmer has made monumental mistakes (and, arguably, should go). But ruthless RWM manipulation of success and failure narratives have massively intensified voter contempt. Labour’s 2026 local election performance would have been poor anyway. But media puppeteering turbo-charged the preposterous fall of Starmer’s popularity below Trump’s, and the catastrophic election results.

Weaving social understanding

Starmer is just another in the latest round of left-winged clay pigeons. This isn’t a Starmer endorsement, just an observation that our media could have played it very differently. 

Starmer’s opponents, Johnson and Farage, are notorious censure escapologists. But it was the RWM that carefully curated the unscrutinized, charming, Teflon personalities we’re familiar with, and who orchestrated their success by cultivating fear narratives that shoved immigration to the top of the social issue league table. 

The key point is that Like Orban’s media, our RWM shapes political understanding by labelling, redefining, insinuating, and quietly eviscerating whatever it wants to obliterate. 

RWM narratives like those outlined here penetrate our social consciousness daily. By entrenching certain views whilst undermining others, they widen the right-wing demographic and hence work supremely well in furthering Reform’s trajectory as the new preferred political tribe. 

This isn’t information delivery, or even ‘mildly politically biased’ news. It’s social engineering – on a massive scale, with deeply dysfunctional consequences.

Stop the sane washing 

Yet we continue excusing our media because we assume it must somehow be working in our interest. Consequently, we despair when it keeps failing, as it does, every day.

It took Hungary 16 years to remove Orban, a process greatly assisted by their independent media. For UK politics to start functioning, we must turn away from our dominating RWM towards independent political journalism. 

This largely Impress-regulated ecosystem, though economically fragile, speaks truth to power with integrity, producing responsible, exacting investigation and analysis. We must start fostering this vital independent voice because it belongs to us, not oligarchs, and has our human rights and our democracy as its lode stars. 

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: Alex Muller – Creative Commons

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Big money donations to political parties are doing huge damage to trust in our politics. 

And when a politician claims that the donor expects nothing back for their millions, it simply doesn’t pass the sniff test for the average voter. When Unlock Democracy polled the British public on this last month, fewer than 1 in 14 voters believed the donor didn’t expect anything in return.

Despite Labour’s election promises to clean up politics, the Government is refusing to implement a cap on political donations from individuals and companies in the UK. 

While it might be Reform UK’s mega donors grabbing the headlines right now, all of the major British parties, with the exception of the Green Party, have benefited from multi-million pound donations.

In the first quarter of 2026, three individuals gave over £8 million. Those three people were responsible for £2 out of every £5 received by political parties. 

To the public it looks like our politics is for sale and that the interests of ordinary voters come in a poor second place.

Which brings us to Steve Reed, the Minister in charge of the Representation of the People’s Bill. Amendments calling for the implementation of a cap on donations have been submitted, but the Government seems likely to whip Labour MPs into voting them down. 

We wonder what the voters will make of that? 

Steve Reed himself has said some interesting things on this subject. The Government has at least accepted the need for a cap on donations from overseas voters following the recommendations of the Rycroft Review into foreign interference in our politics. 

Steve Reed described the overseas donations cap of £100,000 as ‘pretty generous’. He went on to point out that Rycroft had said that UK voters living overseas shouldn’t be allowed to make ‘game-changing donations into British politics’.

Which then begs the question – why should anyone be allowed to make game-changing donations to British politics?

That’s something Steve Reed is yet to answer.

The Government’s donation cap on overseas voters has already been exposed as hopelessly ineffective – one billionaire Reform UK donor who lives overseas has already said he’ll move back to the country so he can keep on giving to Reform UK.

It’s not even clear if the Government’s new rules on company donations will prevent Elon Musk from making the kind of mega-donation that’s been threatened in the past. 

The only solution to this is a cap on all political donations. 

There is overwhelming public support for this and very little public opposition. YouGov polling in December showed that barely 1 in 8 voters support the current system of allowing unlimited donations to political parties. 

Yet that’s where Steve Reed and the Government currently stand. 

We hope he and they will think again. 

The lack of trust in our politics is corrosive. Capping donations is a concrete measure that will show the public that things are changing. 

Politics should not be for sale – let’s get big money donations out of our politics once and for all.

The post It’s time for a cap on donations: Will Steve Reed and the Government act? appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.