As we marked the seventh anniversary of the revocation of Articles 370 and 35A, Kashmir once again stands at a crossroads.

For millions of Kashmiris, including my own constituents in Bradford East, and families all across the UK, the principles of freedom, dignity and human rights remain painfully out of reach. For far too long, the international community has looked away from one of the world’s longest-running and most overlooked human rights crises.

If we are serious about defending universal human rights, Kashmir cannot continue to be the exception.

For more than a decade, I have consistently spoken out against the persecution, oppression and injustice endured by the people of Indian Occupied Kashmir. Their calls for justice have too often gone unanswered. Their fundamental human rights have been violated, and their right to self-determination has been repeatedly denied.

The right-wing Modi Government’s decision on 5 August 2019 to revoke Articles 370 and 35A marked a watershed moment. It stripped Jammu and Kashmir of its special constitutional status and was followed by mass detentions, unprecedented communications blackouts, severe restrictions on civil liberties and the further erosion of democratic rights. It is no surprise that many Kashmiris remember that day as a dark day for Kashmiris

Seven years on, the promises made by the Indian Government have proved hollow. Political leaders, journalists, human rights defenders and ordinary civilians continue to face arbitrary detention and intimidation. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, the Public Safety Act and other draconian legislation continue to grant sweeping powers with little meaningful accountability. Independent human rights observers remain barred, while the voices of Kashmiris themselves are too often ignored.

For decades, successive Indian Governments have sought to suppress not only dissent but the legitimate aspirations of the Kashmiri people. The struggle for dignity, justice and self-determination has not disappeared. It has simply been met with increasing repression.

I have raised these issues repeatedly in Parliament because silence is not neutrality. When fundamental rights are denied, remaining silent simply allows injustice to continue.

It is precisely because I have spent years challenging the systematic human rights abuses in Indian Occupied Kashmir that I am deeply concerned by the recent developments in Azad Jammu and Kashmir.

There is no comparison between the long-term, systematic repression in Indian Occupied Kashmir and the recent events in Azad Jammu and Kashmir. The scale, duration and nature of the repression remain fundamentally different. But this distressing situation must be addressed.

Recent reports of live fire against peaceful protesters, resulting in deaths and injuries, are so deeply troubling. Reports of an increasingly heavy-handed response to demonstrations, communications restrictions and a breakdown in dialogue raise an important question: what message does this send to the international community? Political disagreement must never be met with violence.

It must always be resolved through dialogue.

The recent escalation has also caused enormous anxiety here in the United Kingdom. More than one million British Kashmiris have close family ties to the region. In recent weeks, many constituents have contacted me desperately seeking news of parents, children and relatives they have been unable to reach. For them, this is not a distant foreign policy debate. It is a deeply personal human tragedy unfolding before their eyes.

That is why I, as chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Kashmir, recently coordinated a cross-party letter, supported by more than 65 Parliamentarians, calling on the Foreign Secretary to respond urgently to the deteriorating situation. The growing support across Parliament reflects an increasing recognition that the United Kingdom cannot simply stand on the sidelines while tensions continue to escalate.

I have urged the Government to take five clear steps.

First, it should provide a full assessment of the humanitarian situation in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, including the reported use of live fire against protesters, deaths, injuries and wider security concerns.

Second, it should ensure that British nationals in the region, and British citizens with family members there, receive the support they need and are able to maintain contact with their loved ones.

Third, it should use every appropriate diplomatic channel to press for the immediate lifting of communications restrictions and the restoration of normal communications.

Fourth, it should actively encourage the immediate resumption of peaceful dialogue between the relevant authorities and representatives of the Joint Awami Action Committee.

Finally, it should continue to monitor developments closely while using every diplomatic lever available to promote restraint, prevent further escalation and support a peaceful resolution.

I urge the Government to continue using all appropriate diplomatic channels to support immediate de-escalation, encourage restraint by all parties, and promote a peaceful and lasting resolution with Kashmiri human rights at the heart of it.

Because the United Kingdom has a unique responsibility. Our historic role in the region cannot simply be ignored, nor can the voices of more than one million British Kashmiris whose families continue to live with the consequences of decisions taken thousands of miles away.

For too long, successive British governments have treated Kashmir solely as a bilateral dispute between India and Pakistan. That approach has too often allowed the voices of Kashmiris themselves to be marginalised. Kashmir is, and has always been, an international issue rooted in international law and the inalienable rights of the Kashmiri people.

The world has looked away from Kashmir for far too long.

The United Kingdom must now show the moral courage to act. Above all, it must ensure that the inalienable human rights of Kashmiris remain at the heart of any lasting and peaceful resolution.

Image credit: Alisdare Hickson – Creative Commons

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My parents live in Rutland and Stamford, and in all the years they have been there, no political party has ever seriously asked for their vote. Not the Conservatives, who don’t need to. And not Labour, or the Liberal Democrats, because they long ago worked out that they weren’t going to win, and stopped pretending otherwise. At general elections, the campaign reaches them as something occurring on social media, on radio talk shows, in other people’s constituencies. Nobody knocks. The seat – under various names – has returned a Conservative MP at every election since 1918.

I mention this not to complain about my parents’ postal district, but because it is the part of the argument about power that the Labour Party keeps leaving out.

Labour has spent a decade rightly saying that Britain is too centralised, that Westminster hoards decisions it has no business making, that whole regions have been governed as an afterthought by people who have never lived in them. Andy Burnham has made that case more forcefully and more consistently than anyone in Labour politics, and he now gets to act on it. No 10 North is not window dressing if it means officials, budgets and authority physically leaving SW1. Deeper devolution to mayors and combined authorities is worth doing on its own merits.

But you cannot devolve your way out of a problem that begins at the ballot box.

On his first day in Downing Street, the Prime Minister promised to take power out of Westminster and carry it into every postcode in the land. Four days later, opening No 10 North, he said it again: “power in every postcode”. It’s a good line. It also happens to describe the precise thing First Past the Post prevents. Under our voting system, the value of your ballot is determined by where you happen to live. Move a voter forty miles into a marginal and their vote acquires a weight it simply does not have in Oakham or Stamford.

In 2024, more than 27,000 people in Rutland and Stamford voted for someone other than the winner, and as at every election before it, not one of them got the representation they had asked for. Nationally, the Electoral Reform Society found that 21.2 million votes, nearly three quarters of all those cast, made no difference to the result, either because they backed losing candidates or because they were piled on top of majorities that were already safe. 

The individual unfairness is real, but the structural damage is worse. Parties are rational organisations with finite money and volunteers, and they spend both where seats can move. Everything else follows from that: which town gets the visit, whose hospital gets the pledge, whose cost-of-living story survives into the manifesto and whose concerns are deemed safe to ignore. Labour has institutionalised this, and then acts surprised when people conclude that politics is something done at them rather than with them, and grow resentful.

Here is the part the party has to face squarely. The usual objection to Proportional Representation is that it would hand Reform a large bloc of seats. That is probably true. But look at where we actually are: Reform, Labour and the Conservatives are separated by two or three points in most polls, with the Greens and Liberal Democrats taking another quarter of the vote between them. MRP models are producing hung parliaments. First Past the Post does not protect us from that. It converts it into a lottery. In 2024 the split on the right handed Labour 411 seats on 34% of the vote; a split on the left, would hand the right a majority just as undeserved. Defending the current system on tactical grounds now means betting the country’s future on which side happens to fracture more.

The good news is that this argument has already been won inside the party . Conference passed a motion for PR in 2022. Roughly two-thirds of members support it. Ninety-six Labour MPs, more than a quarter of the parliamentary party, signed Alex Sobel’s amendment to the Representation of the People Bill calling for a National Commission on Electoral Reform, alongside nearly 200 parliamentarians from across the House. And the Prime Minister himself has argued for years that people in all places will never be equally represented until every vote counts, that the current system funnels the votes of millions into the hands of a small Whitehall elite, and that his own experience of running under a preferential system taught him a more collaborative kind of politics.

He is the first Labour leader, and the first Prime Minister, to hold that view openly on entering Downing Street. He did so without a general election, which makes the question of democratic renewal more urgent for him, not less. A National Commission on Electoral Reform, established within his first hundred days (by the end of October) would demonstrate that the analysis he has been making since 2021 was a programme rather than a positioning exercise.

If it doesn’t happen, “power in every postcode” will take its place alongside levelling up: a phrase that moved attention around the country without ever moving power. And in my parents’ village, the next election will arrive exactly as every other one has.  As something happening somewhere else.

If you agree, add your name to our open letter here.

Image credit: Lauren Hurley / Number 10 – Creative Commons

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The United Nations estimates the cost of reconstruction to be approximately $37 billion (around $24 billion in damage to buildings – homes, businesses, schools, hospitals and public facilities – and another $13 billion in infrastructure.  This is equivalent to around 33 per cent of Venezuela’s GDP. Venezuela’s economy was already facing serious challenges due to decades of brutal sanctions: Mark Weisbrot of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) has documented a 74 per cent decline in GDP between 2012 and 2020 – a loss of income three times larger than what the United States experienced during the Great Depression.

The world has reacted with great shock and sympathy to the devastation caused by this earthquake, and countries around the world have sent aid and technical support. Rescue teams from multiple nations have been deployed, with 2,278 foreign rescue workers now on the ground. 

While this immediate assistance is necessary and useful, what Venezuela really needs is to be able to access its own resources and trade normally with the rest of the world. This is impossible with the wide-ranging sanctions (only a fraction of which have been temporarily lifted) and asset freezes that remain in place.

The most glaring example of this injustice is the 31 tonnes of Venezuelan gold sitting in the vaults of the Bank of England. 

Worth approximately £3.5 billion at current prices, this gold has been frozen since 2019, when the British government followed the US’s failed attempt at a coup in Venezuela by recognising Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s president. 

British courts have repeatedly rejected the Venezuelan government’s requests to access its own reserves.

Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, has now formally requested the release of the gold. Her message was simple: “That gold belongs to our people. We need this gold to deal with the consequences of the earthquake.”

Venezuela also has around $4.5bn in assets frozen by the IMF, and billions more frozen from the earnings of CITGO, the US-based branch of its oil company PDVSA as well as in various other international accounts. Meanwhile, the total offered in aid is well under $1bn. The gap between what Venezuela is being offered as charity and what it has been denied is obscene.

This is an issue of sovereignty as well as humanity. Six months after US forces illegally attacked Caracas, killed around 100 people and kidnapped Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump is using both military threats and economic levers to pressure Venezuela. At this critical time it’s vital that those who stand for sovereignty oppose these threats and support Venezuela having access to its own assets so it can stand on its own feet.

More than 14,000 people have now signed a petition demanding Britain return the gold. MPs including Richard Burgon, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell have all spoken out. Burgon, who has also initiated an Early Day Motion on the issue, said that “at a time of such profound human suffering, every available resource should be directed towards humanitarian relief and reconstruction in Venezuela”. McDonnell called returning the gold “one of the most effective measures the UK government could undertake” to help Venezuela. Abbott said Britain “continues to illegally withhold the country’s gold reserves when all its resources are urgently needed”.

They are right.

This is not a complex issue. A country has been devastated by its worst natural disaster in decades. It has billions of pounds of its own money sitting in a British vault. That money could be used to fund vital reconstruction. Instead, it sits there while Venezuela grapples with both the earthquake and decades of cruel sanctions.

The British government under the leadership of Andy Burnham has a choice. 

It can continue to play politics with other people’s lives, or it can do what is right and the decent thing and give Venezuela back what is rightfully theirs to aid what is massive humanitarian crisis.

Tony Burke, is the Chair of the UK Venezuela Solidarity Campaign.

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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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Just two years after Labour’s landslide general election victory, when the applause that wrapped him tight, lifted him high and carried him over the threshold of No.10 was so deafening, he should really have been wearing ear defenders, Starmer’s time as Prime Minister, is over. 

Now, that applause, though congenial, respectful and polite, was noticeably a decibel or two quieter, serving only to let him go, drop him to the ground and to remind him to make his own way out.

Surely, not even in his worst of all nightmares could he had imagined his July 2024 bubble, so full of the public’s air of hope would deflate so quickly or that the ear-splitting applause that once threatened to deafen him, would have become a slow, if gentle, hand clap imploring him to go.

To have been the leader of a party that won 411 out of 650 parliamentary seats, (that’s 63.23% of them by the way), in a general election, and then just two years later to be the same leader who felt they had no other option but to resign, is really quite astonishing when you think about it.

But I guess, when many of those seats had been, metaphorically speaking, ‘ripped from the green benches’ and were being ‘hurled in the leader’s direction’, then better to resign and take refuge than to stand out in the open and be hit by one from row Z; does anybody remember Luton vs. Millwall from 1985?

Starmer made many a mistake, of that there is no doubt. 

But he also made many an achievement, particularly on the international stage, a stage it always seemed to me he was more comfortable performing on.

The history books will be kinder to him than his political opponents, some in the media and even some in the Labour Party itself, have been.  

The worst prime minister ever?  

No, not on your nelly.  Just look back at recent political history and take your pick.  

The most unpopular prime minister ever?  

Well, if the measure of unpopularity were based solely on the football team you support, in Starmer’s case Arsenal, then maybe so.  But it isn’t.

Being popular and unpopular cycle through time, you will always end up being both.  And if you’ll allow me to stick with a footballing analogy to make my point, just think of David Beckham against Argentina in World Cup ‘98 and the same David Beckham against Greece when qualifying for the World Cup of 2002.  

Chalk, cheese and a magnificent 93^rd minute equalizer.  The same player at a different time.

Would there have been a different time when Starmer was more popular?  Possibly. Probably. Almost certainly.  

The truth is we’ll never know and so, it will be left to a chat with your mates down the pub to decide.

Now wearing the ear defenders to protect against the thunderous applause, being held tight and lifted high across not one, but two thresholds: No.10 and No.10 North, is Andy Burnham.  

The King of the North has become the King of the Kingdom, a prime minister who wants to bring hope to every heart and good growth to every postcode.

In making those pronouncements he has set the high jump bar, high.  

Just a matter of months ago Burnham was Mayor of Greater Manchester and was blocked by the same Labour Party he now leads, from even being considered as a candidate, let alone standing to be an MP.  

Politics shifts fast and self-evidently; blockages can be shifted faster.  

Burnham has a vision and a direction for the country; a vision he will unfurl in the hope the country will like what they see and a direction he hopes the public will follow as he points the way ahead. 

His first instruction to end rough sleeping was authentically Labour and also authentically him. 

Removing VAT from energy bills and capping bus fares to help families, just a little bit, with the cost of living are indications as to which way he will move and signs as to whose side he is on, even if there were some snipes from the sidelines over whether or not it’s all been fully funded.

Change comes from making changes.

And when it comes to his cabinet, whilst many of the Starmer cabinet faces still remain, many more have had their cabinet seats removed.  Make no mistake, this is a Burnham cabinet, but there are still questions left searching for answers.  

Can this cabinet really change things for the better and quickly?

If familiar faces just appear in different places and with new job titles, will the public perceive them as being any different from what went before?

After all, even after the Titanic had hit the iceberg the band still played on.  And even if the musicians had decided to tune their instruments to improve the quality of their sound, the ship would still have sunk. 

And so, Burnham has to manage public perception through constant public delivery whilst at the same time looking out for icebergs dead ahead, no easy task and especially if you’ve forgotten your binoculars.   

When it comes to clearing that high jump bar, he’s got off to a promising start.

The crowd are encouragingly clapping as he runs in, his speed quickening and his stride lengthening as he prepares to launch himself over the bar.  

Let’s just hope he doesn’t fluff his Fosbury Flop.

The post Can Andy Burnham turn the government around? appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.

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.

The post 948 comments of hate show why Pride still matters appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.

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.

The post Starmer’s Lords legacy is his leadership in microcosm appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.

For years, women who have experienced immigration detention have been telling us the same thing: detention deepens trauma, damages mental health, and separates them from the people they love. Too often, those testimonies are dismissed as anecdotal or exceptional rather than recognised as a direct consequence of the system.

The latest report from HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, Women’s Experience of Immigration Detention, makes clear that those experiences are all too common.

The report paints a deeply troubling picture of a system that routinely ignores women’s vulnerabilities and fails to safeguard some of those most at risk of harm. It identifies failures at every stage of detention: from the decision to detain, to conditions inside detention, through to transfers and release.  

Many women in immigration detention are survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, including, rape, domestic abuse, trafficking, forced marriage, and torture. The Inspectorate found that four in ten women held in detention were recognised as ‘Adults at Risk’. More than half of the women whose cases were reviewed at Dungavel and Derwentside detention centres had documented histories of domestic or sexual violence.

Yet Home Office officials repeatedly failed to identify or properly consider evidence of mental ill-health, pregnancy, trafficking, sexual abuse, and other vulnerabilities before authorising detention. In some cases, women were detained even after the Home Office’s own Detention Gatekeeper had refused permission.

One example highlighted in the report is particularly shocking. A woman experiencing an acute mental health crisis was incorrectly recorded as having no vulnerabilities and spent almost three months in segregation before being transferred to hospital. It is difficult to read that finding without asking how many opportunities there were to intervene – and how many were missed. These are not isolated incidents. They reveal a system that repeatedly places administrative convenience above women’s safety, dignity, and wellbeing.

Women describe exhausting transfers, including late at night, even when pregnant, elderly, physically unwell, or at risk of suicide. Women were routinely handcuffed during hospital and centre transfers without adequate risk assessments. One survivor of abuse was so distressed by being handcuffed that she later avoided reporting pain because she feared being handcuffed again.

The report also highlights women’s profound isolation. Only 22% of women surveyed at Dungavel and Derwentside had received a visit from family or friends. Many were separated from children and support networks, yet inspectors found little proactive support to help them maintain those vital relationships. Language barriers compounded that isolation, with interpretation frequently unavailable for everyday communication. One woman described detention as ‘living in a cage.’ 

Perhaps most revealingly, the report exposes the inherent problems with mixed-gender immigration detention.

Women have repeatedly raised concerns about being detained alongside unrelated men, particularly when many have survived male violence. In centres primarily designed for men, inspectors found that women’s needs were often overlooked.  Instead of creating environments suitable for women, the system restricts women’s movement and access to services.

At the same time, responsibility for these failures is shifted away from the Home Office and private companies that run these centres onto men in detention. Rather than recognising detained men as individuals, many of whom have themselves experienced persecution, trafficking, torture or trauma, the system treats detained men collectively as a ‘risk’ to be managed.

Let us be clear: this approach protects nobody and dehumanises everyone. It denies women the safety and dignity they deserve, while reinforcing damaging stereotypes about men that are increasingly common in toxic public narratives about migration. It also distracts from the decision made by those with the power to change the system. The problem is not the people in detention. The problem is the detention system itself.

Our respective organisations have long argued that immigration detention is fundamentally incompatible with women’s rights and wellbeing. This report adds to an overwhelming body of evidence. The question is no longer whether detention causes harm. The evidence is clear that it does. The question is what the Government is prepared to do about it.

The answer cannot be another set of recommendations that are allowed to gather dust. Meaningful change requires a shift away from detention and towards community-based approaches that enable people to resolve their immigration and asylum cases while living in the community. Evidence from alternative to detention pilots has repeatedly shown that this is possible, and that people maintain contact with the immigration or asylum system. 

This report should be a turning point. It lays bare a reality that women have been describing for years: immigration detention is not simply failing to protect women from harm – it is actively causing further harm.

The Government must listen. And to the next Prime Minister: we invite you to meet with women who have lived through immigration detention and the organisations that have stood alongside them for years. Listen to the evidence. Listen to the lived experience. Then act. End mixed-gender immigration, stop holding women alongside men, and protect the rights of trans women and men and non-binary people, stop detaining survivors of violence and trafficking, and invest in community-based alternatives that uphold safety, dignity, and humanity.

Anything less would be an acceptance of a system that we know is failing women at every stage.

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Those words were uttered by a colleague, so long ago now that I had a full head of hair, heatwaves occurred once every fifty years, not every fifty minutes and my beloved West Ham United had finished 18^th in the Premier League….at least some things don’t change!

President George W Bush, (it’s Walker by the way), backed by our very own Prime Minister Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, (Tony to his mates), had just embarked on a ‘shock and awe’ bombing campaign of Iraq in what proved to be a futile quest to find weapons of mass destruction, mainly on account, shock, awe and spoiler alert, that there weren’t any.

We were discussing the wrongdoing of others and whilst when it came to the fish, he may well have meant to say rot instead of stinks, and those words had little to do with WMD, (or who knows, maybe they did), just like the US artillery in Iraq, they hit their target, exploded with a deafening thud and sent the shrapnel carving them into my memory.  

And whilst that carving has become barely legible, eroding with each passing heatwave, it was whilst watching Nigel Farage tell the world he was so angry that he would resign as MP for Clacton, so that he could then stand to be MP for Clacton, that for some unbeknown reason, those fishy words surfaced from the depths bringing with them a hammer and chisel. 

I have long since felt Labour have spent too much time and energy on what to do about Nigel Farage and Reform and that the more Labour say that only they can beat them, the more Farage and Reform believe that they are unbeatable.  

And so, what to do? My advice; learn five lessons.

1. Stop feeding credibility

Don’t mention Farage and Reform (too much) because it gives them the credibility they crave and the publicity they pursue. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, there’s only publicity. Don’t give them any.

2. Don’t play cards when your opponent’s got one up their sleeve

Don’t shadow Reform’s policies, especially on immigration, because frankly, it seems to me that’s the only card they’ve got to play. The more Labour nudges closer to Farage and Reform’s positions, the easier it becomes for them to deceive through sleight of hand.

3. Don’t worry about polls or lettuce

Farage and Reform have been leading in the polls for longer than the lettuce that outlasted Liz Truss as Prime Minister. Polls are a snapshot in time, they don’t last for all of time. Even that lettuce eventually went rotten. 

4. Be proud. Be loud. Be louder.

Labour have achieved some incredible things in the two years it’s been in power which is all the more remarkable given Morgan McSweeney’s admission that Labour wasn’t prepared enough to govern.

Reduced NHS waiting lists: lifting the two child benefit cap: strengthening employment rights: free breakfast clubs: higher wage growth: protecting renters rights: increasing the minimum wage and I could go on.

Labour should be unashamedly proud.  Get a megaphone, find a rooftop, start shouting.

5. Labour should just be Labour

Should Labour tack right in the hope former ‘red wall’ voters will climb back over and into the forgiving arms of the family they once fled?  

Should Labour should tack left to place clear blue (red?) water between itself and Reform so that Reforms’ policies look obscure and outlandish?

Or should Labour stay in the centre, do as little that’s controversial as possible, and just keep on delivering?  

Agreeing to disagree amiably is the greatest of Labour’s political strengths because it reminds those who disagree on what it is they agree, namely, to leave a more progressive, more equal and fairer society.

And so, Labour should just be Labour.  It’s not about tacking this way or that, it’s about being anchored to Labour values.

And finally…

There can often come a time when your greatest political asset becomes your greatest political liability.  When overhearing someone not long ago refer to Nigel Farage, rather unkindly I thought, as ‘toad face,’ could it be that time has begun?

Farage is often portrayed as being a man of the people and as anti-establishment.

Well, if being a man of the people and anti-establishment involves being privately educated, working as a commodities trader in the City of London, owning multiple homes, earning (in addition to being paid as an MP) in excess of £1M in other work and receiving a £5M gift from a crypto billionaire, (which then ends up being investigated by the parliamentary standards commissioner as to why it wasn’t declared), then I suppose he is. 

There will now be a by-election in Clacton and the main political parties have decided not to join the circus.  

Rachel Reeves has said the people of Clacton deserve better, she’s right but she’s also said that she wouldn’t stop Farage ‘arguing with a bin.’  

On 13^th August 2026, Clacton will face up to a by-election face-off: Toad Face vs. Binface.

The question though, once the circus rolls out of town, is will Nigel Farage have saved face?

The post Five lessons Labour needs to learn to deal with Farage and Reform appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.