Chancellor John Healey has delivered his first budget statement as he seeks to reset the UK economy. Amidst trade and military wars, there is an urgent need to make the economy and households more resilient.

Successive governments have sought to increase economic growth but the economy remains sluggish. It is expected to grow by about 1.2% in 2026. One of the reasons is that people lack good purchasing power. Some 25.3m people (37.5% of the population) live below the Minimum Income Standard. Their ability to fuel economic growth is also hampered by regressive tax system. The poorest 20% pay a higher proportion of their income in direct and indirect taxes than the richest 20%.

For over 30 years the UK’s investment in productive assets has been low. As a percentage of GDP, it is the lowest among G7 countries . It has ranked at or near the bottom of the OECD investment league. Manufacturing sector has propelled economic growth in China and elsewhere. However, the UK manufacturing sector has shrunk from 30.1% of economic output (gross value added) in 1970 to 8.3% in 2026. Infrastructure woes are all too evident in potholed roads, crumbling schools, NHS queues and universities in crisis.

Neoliberal economics has squeezed households and failed to deliver beneficial economic growth.  Redistribution of wealth and investment are key requirements. However, the Chancellor’s ability to carve a new path is severely constrained by self-imposed constraints. These include subservience to fiscal rules which limit government borrowing, and Labour’s 2024 election manifesto pledge to not increase national insurance, the basic, higher, or additional rates of income tax, VAT, and corporate tax rate. In addition, successive governments have been keen to appease corporations and the super-rich.

Against, the above background, the budget is disappointing.

The Budget

Corporations will be pleased. Water companies won’t be nationalised. There is no windfall tax on energy companies and no curbs on profiteering which is pushing millions into poverty.

The increase in surcharge on bank profits from 3% to 6% is less than the 8% expected hike. Over the next 15 months a total of £1.5bn is expected to be raised. There is an increase in machine games duty from 20% to 25% and could raise about £720m. The gambling industry was expecting the increase to 40%. Around £2bn will be raised from additional taxes on landlords and rental income. There are no rent controls or other measures to prevent the rise to be passed to tenants.

Redistribution is mostly absent and the super-rich remain largely unscathed. Wages will continue to be taxed at marginal rates of 20%-45%. Earners will also pay national insurance. Capital gains accruing to less than 1% of the population will continue to be taxed at 18% to 24%. Dividends, mostly accruing to the richest, will continue to be taxed at marginal rates of 10.75% to 39.35%. The Chancellor chose not to align the dividend and capital gains tax rates with wages, preferring to tax labour at higher rates than return on wealth. A new Founders’ Relief offers a 10% rate on life time capital gains of up to £10m. The tax avoidance industry must be salivating at how it can exploit this.

The biggest tax rise on households is through continuation of the freeze on income tax thresholds. The personal allowance was frozen at £12,570 in 2021. If it had risen in line with inflation, then for the current tax year it would have been £16,070. Due to the freeze, a minimum wage earner is paying additional £980 in income tax and national insurance in 2026-27. Assuming an inflation rate of 3.5%, the personal allowance for 2027-28 should be £16,632. However, because of the freeze someone on minimum wage will pay additional £1,137 in income tax and national insurance in 2027-28.  This is the cost of appeasing the rich.

Due to the freeze, millions more would become liable to pay income tax. One such group is pensioners. The state pension is due to rise by 3.9% from April 2027. The full post-2016 state pension, received by a small number of pensioners, will be £13,036.40, which is above the personal allowance of £12,570. The government has announced that pensioners with income of £13,036 (state pension plus other income) there would be a new Pension Tax Allowance i.e. pensioners will not pay income tax, a concession worth up to £94. To prevent a cliff-edge, for pensioners with income between £13,037 and £13,319 there would be a taper. For every £3 of income above £13,036, Pension Tax Allowance will be reduced by £1. The net result is that pensioners with incomes between £13,036 and £13,319 will effectively be paying tax at a marginal rate of 53%. 

This is complicated and divisive. A worker with income of £13,036 would pay income tax and national insurance. It would have been far better to increase the personal allowance for everyone.

Risk-averse individuals tend to put their savings in banks and building societies, the resulting interest income is taxable. £1,000 of interest is tax free for basic rate taxpayers. The limit is £500 for higher and additional rate taxpayers. After that and the £12,570 personal allowance, the amounts are taxable at the appropriate marginal rates. That is set to change. From next April, a 2% extra tax will be levied to interest income. Form April 2028, this will rise by another 2% i.e. there will be 4% additional income tax on savings income. So, a basic rate taxpayer will pay 24% income tax on taxable interest income, higher rate taxpayers will be taxed at 44% and additional rate taxpayers at 49%. This is expected to raise around £2.4bn by 2031-32. Perhaps, the change is intended to encourage people to put savings into ISA accounts. Nevertheless, many don’t want their cash tied for longer periods. Meanwhile dividends will be taxed at rates between 10.75% and 39.35%, capital gains at 18% to 24%. Is this part of a government plan to push people into gambling on stocks and shares? Why are cash savers penalised?

There is some relief for savers. The chancellor has reinstated the limit of £20,000 on cash ISAs. This will do little for 39% of adults with savings of £1,000 or less.

Form April 2027, the headline rate of the national minimum wage for workers age 21 or over will increase by 3.9% to £13.21 per hour. The acceleration of wage rate for younger workers towards £13.21 per hour has been halted even though they pay full rent, food, travel and other costs, and the output of their labour is not sold at a discount.

There is some relief for households in the form of £100 energy bill discount for people living in homes in council tax band A to D. Gas standing charge would be absorbed into the main unit price, which would help light users of energy. The average household bill is expected to rise by 16%-27% in January, adding £276 to £469 to the cost. The Chancellor is looking at the energy contracts, pricing and possibilities of moving levies out of bills on to general taxation.

The Chancellor has provided extra £1.5bn for the Social and Affordable Housing Programme to build 10,000 new home skin England, taking the council housing commitment to £40bn.  Some 1.3m households are waiting for a social home. Successive government have failed to hit housebuilding targets as the UK lacks the infrastructure to provide materials and skilled labour.

£190m extra is provided to NHS England to manage the winter pressures. Another £100m is provided to accelerate the adoption of robotically assisted surgery. It will do little to reduce the backlog of 7.37m hospital appointments. There is a £17.3bn maintenance backlog, including £3.7bn of work classified as “high risk”. The NHS budget is also being squeezed by the deal with the US on drug pricing that will strip £44.7bn out of the NHS budget between now and 2036.

Reform of business rates would be welcomed by small businesses, but they will continue to be buffeted by high energy and water costs, poor infrastructure and low consumer purchasing power.

The government continues to guarantee corporate profits. The Chancellor said “we will expand our defence industrial base by getting the maximum amount of private investment into defence, including through public private partnerships”. This confirms a deeper role of private finance initiative (PFI) now rebranded as public private partnerships. For PFI every £1 of private investment resulted in £6 payment from the public purse. Such indulgence is the inevitable result of fiscal rules which constrain direct state investment.

The budget is a missed opportunity for the government to loosen the shackles of neoliberalism. Corporations and the super-rich have been appeased. The spending power of most households will be further eroded. Regressive tax policies continue to penalise workers. This does not provide a good basis for fuelling economic growth. Within the neoliberal logic, the forthcoming spending, Milburn and Timms Reviews are expected to herald cuts. Maybe the new Chancellor is saving good news for households until 2028/29, just before the next general election. 

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The increase will take place against a background where the average real wage has hardly moved since 2008.  Some 13.4m people, including 4m children, live in poverty.  25.3m people, including 14.9m working adults and 7.7m children, live below minimum income standard. Healthy life expectancy is shrinking and around 300,000 people a year die prematurely whilst waiting for a hospital appointment. 

The Sovereign Grant covers the cost of maintaining royal residences, official engagements undertaken by the King and other members of the Royal Family acting on his behalf, and employment costs for Royal Household staff supporting the King as head of state. This is in addition to around £370m spent on refurbishment of Buckingham Palace via higher Sovereign Grants in the last 10 years. The revenue from Buckingham Palace tourism goes to the King. A book by former Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker stated that the royal family utilizes 21 properties officially categorized as royal residences, alongside 13 additional properties. Inevitably, there are questions about why the royals need 21 properties to fulfil their royal duties. Are any rented out? Where does the income go?

Comparison with other European monarchies is not always straight forward but the royal family seems to receive very generous public funding. It is around £42m in Norway,  £52m in the Netherlands, £18m in Denmark, £13.5m in Sweden, £7.1m in Spain, and zero in Liechtenstein.

In the UK, individuals receiving public money are frequently means-tested. For example, anyone with lifetime savings of over £16,000 is generally disqualified or severely restricted from receiving Universal Credit, Housing Benefit, or Income Support. Such tests do not apply to the royal family which is estimated to have wealth of £21bn.

The Sovereign Grant is meant to cover only the ‘official’ expenses of the Sovereign. However, official’ and ‘personal’ expenses are not easy to distinguish. Are support staff, palaces, various residences, servants, kitchens, chauffeurs for personal or official purposes? Whatever is personal should not be funded by the public purse. During the parliamentary debate Ministers were asked to clarify but did not respond.

The Royal Household does not submit a transparent annual Budget request to the Treasury, detailing what is needs and how it will spend. Instead, the Sovereign Grant is based on a formula linked to profits of the Crown Estate. The amount of the Grant is frozen against losses when profits fall, yet fully open to the upside when they surge. 

The Crown Estate is essentially property and businesses owned by the royal family. Their legal status is contested. Do the Crown Estate, the Crown Jewels, paintings, artworks, antiques, the Duchy of Cornwall and the Duchy of Lancaster belong to the nation and held in trust by the royal family or are they private property? If they are held in trust for the nation, then all revenues must go the public purse, and parliament must then decide what the royal family needs to discharge its public duties. But that is not what happens. If they are private property, then those assets and the related income streams must be taxed in the same way as any other private property is, and the beneficiaries must pay income tax, capital gains tax, corporation tax and inheritance tax. That doesn’t happen either.

The Duchy of Lancaster and the Duchy of Cornwall are major sources of income and wealth for the King and Prince William but are not legally liable to pay income tax, capital gains tax or inheritance tax. However, the King pays income and capital gains tax on a voluntary basis on his assets, a practice started by Elizabeth II in 1993. 

The Sovereign Grant doesn’t count as income for tax purpose but if normal individuals receive money from the state to enable them to make ends meet, such sums are taxable. For example, the state pension, carer’s allowance, contribution-based jobseeker’s allowance, and contribution-based employment and support allowance are all taxable.

To address public concerns, in June 2026, Buckingham Palace announced that “the amount of tax payable by His Majesty since Accession is more than £30 million. In the two full tax years since becoming King, His Majesty’s tax bill was £11.7 million in 2023-24 and £12.9 million in 2024-25 respectively”. 

The Prince of Wales also pays tax voluntarily on his income from the Duchy of Cornwall to the extent that is not used to meet official expenditure. The Prince of Wales declared that he paid £7.76m tax over the same period.

This does not amount to transparency and does not tell us anything about the tax that should or could have been paid. Little is publicly known about the royal family’s total income, wealth, gifts, capital gains, inheritance, dividends or profits. Almost nothing is known about the King’s investments, how they are held, where they are held and income therefrom. Despite the King’s concerns about the environment, no information is provided about the environmental impact of the Royal Households, frequent domestic and foreign flights and multiple residences. Recently, royal family bought two helicopters at £8m each through the Sovereign Grant, whilst air ambulance service relies upon charitable donations.

The Duchy of Cornwall

One of the most anomalous positions in the monarchy is that of the Duchy of Cornwall. It is owned by the Duke of Cornwall (Prince of Wales and heir to the throne). Is it a public organisation, a Crown body, a corporate conglomerate or a private fiefdom?

If it is part of the Crown, then all the checks, balances, scrutiny and accountability that apply to ‘public’ assets should also apply to the duchy and its custodian (i.e. Prince Williams). Its records should be subjected to periodic scrutiny by the National Audit Office to determine whether the organisation is operating efficiently and effectively and that the public is getting value for money. None of this applies to the Duchy, as we are told that it is a private estate.

The Duchy is a giant commercial organisation. Its business extends far beyond the borders of Cornwall. It is one of the biggest landowners spread across 20 counties in England and Wales. Its operations include or have included biscuits, snacks, jam, marmalade, honey, chocolate, organic food, seeds, holiday cottages, farm produce and warehouses. It owns the Oval Cricket ground and receives public money by leasing out Dartmoor prison to the government.

Under archaic laws, the estate of deceased intestates resident in Cornwall and dying without next of kin passes or assets remaining following dissolution of a company registered in Cornwall passes to the Duchy of Cornwall. Similar law applies to the Duchy of Lancaster. The amounts, after deducting costs, are passed to the Duke’s favoured charities. Elsewhere, the amounts go to the state.

Its 2026 accounts show total assets of £1.3bn and financial surplus of £21.55m, which passes to the Duke of Cornwall. The Duchy competes with local and national businesses, but it does not pay corporation tax or capital gains tax because it claims to be a Crown body. This gives it unfair commercial advantage over all its competitors. The UK tax revenues provide for education, pensions and healthcare for workers and social infrastructure used by the Duchy to make profits. However, because of the tax exemptions the Duchy does not bear the social costs. The Duchy and the Duke or Corwall are basically having a free ride on the back of ordinary taxpayers. 

The Duchy also enacts a royal charade. Page 92 of the Duchy’s 2026 accounts state that “Certain Duchy properties were occupied by His Majesty The King and his office staff for living accommodation or commercial activities. These were let at open market values; the total value of annual rent charged amounted to £503,711”. This is a reference to Highgrove House, the King’s preferred residence. So, the King pays rent to the Duchy of Cornwall, out of the Sovereign Grant, which is owned by his son the Duke of Cornwall. Wealth is retained within the family. Did the King really spend public money?

The monarchy is a key part of the contemporary UK state, but its financial affairs remain shrouded in secrecy. There is little transparency or public accountability of its wealth or the inflation-busting rise in the Sovereign Grant. Expenditure is not scrutinised. In the age of deference, parliament rubber-stamps decisions already made. Despite being one of the richest families, the Sovereign and the Duke of Cornwall enjoy tax exemptions whilst someone with income of £12,571 pays income tax. The Duchy of Cornwall enjoys tax advantages not available to any other business. The royals frequently claim that they wish to be treated as normal human beings. That wish should be fulfilled by removing all tax concessions.

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It builds on his speech in Manchester on good growth and devolution before he became prime minister, and the groundbreaking ‘rewiring the state’ cabinet statement after.

But Burnham’s vision for mayors demands an accompanying vision for councils too. Because only together can they deliver the change he has promised. Labour’s new agenda requires strong local government, whether devolution, the biggest council house-building programme since the Second World War, or reforming social care. 

But councils are more than delivery bodies for central ambition. They are democratically accountable, visible guardians of their localities, running crucial public services, maintaining the public realm, and shaping housing and high streets’ futures. 

The government’s model of devolution, through strategic authorities, embeds a strong role for councils. Outside of London, strategic authorities are integrated ‘combined authorities’ with formal relationships and joint decision-making between constituent councils, including their mayor in the mayoral strategic authorities.

Councils have a crucial role in strategic authority accountability, which the government rightly wants to strengthen. As Mayors become increasingly powerful, taking on fiscal powers, they will need a new local accountability architecture. This will provide strong democratic counterweights for better decisions, a culture of improvement, and confidence to the public and Parliament. Well-resourced local democratic processes, involving councils and councillors, are the right mechanism to provide this.

The Conservative government proposed a role for Members of Parliament in local oversight, but this is not the role that best suits them. Strategic authorities are a local government body, that need to be held to account by local politicians. Detailed scrutiny of strategic authority decisions will never be a primary function of MPs, who are intensely busy national legislators scrutinising national policy or serving as Ministers or Shadow Ministers. Instead, MPs’ role is strategic and system wide. They ought to design the system of local government and scrutinise its overall effectiveness.

That system needs capacity and clarity to support its potential. Structural financial problems constrain this. Over the austerity years, cuts to central grants shifted more of the funding burden onto local taxpayers while statutory duties expanded to eat more of the dwindling pie. Social care is the only category of local authority spending that rose since 2014/15, while all others fell. Funding settlements under Labour have helped, boosting funding and providing multi-year certainty. But councils still face severe pressure, and remain reeling from the Tory years of increasing council tax while cutting services. Pressure on statutory services risks deciding councils’ role by default. 

For councils and councillors alike, devolution strengthens their hands after decades of corrosion. Since the 1970s, both have had powers and autonomy eroded. Building stronger strategic authorities in which councils and councillors have active roles is a course correction. 

In Burnham’s Labour Conference speech, he showed how political control has been corroded in recent decades with the hollowing out of councils. Repairing this damage, alongside devolution, starts to put that right.

The government will soon publish a white paper on devolution. It promises fresh powers, including fiscal devolution for strategic authorities. But it is also an opportunity to set out a vision for councils, and councillors, in a more devolved system – to put councils on the same purposeful, reforming path Burnham wants for the country. 

With the National Care Service brought forward and local government reorganisation paused, now is a moment to step back and evaluate how England’s tiers of government will work, have agency, and relate to one another. 

If the government wants to rewire the state, they must not overlook councils, but back them as partners with purpose of their own and fix the funding challenge that holds them back. Good growth in every postcode requires a capable council in every postcode. 

The post Fabian’s column: Burnham’s vision for mayors needs an accompanyng vision for councils  appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.

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

The post This is how the Chancellor can increase the personal allowance and lift millions out of hardship appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.

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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