After the suicides of young people and the endless racist and fascist messages, the latest social media outrage is encouraging foolish young men to drive the wrong way down roads. At least, this was the suggestion of the Prime Minister after two policemen and seven young men died in a crash.

The crash was caused by a young man driving his car the wrong way along the A66 near Middlesborough, where he collided with a police car.

I have a simple question: why doesn’t the government use its power to stop social media causing so much damage?

Instead we hear ineffectual bleatings. Luke Pollard told the Today programme that ‘social media companies could take the content down easily and adjust their algorithms to stop it being distributed’ and the PM followed up by condemning the sharing of such content as ‘truly reprehensible’.

This reminded me of Lisa Nandy’s decision, shortly after becoming Culture Secretary, to take her department off X, stating that ‘isn’t healthy for our democracy or our communities and I don’t want to support it’. That was it: no suggestion that Ofcom might use the powers our government has accorded them to stop the attacks on our democracy.

For good, democratic, reasons, Nandy doesn’t have any power to directly regulate media but the government has given powers to Ofcom under the Online Safety Act  to remove illegal content and protect users from ‘harmful’ content. We should expect to see urgent action against TikTok, although the desultory past record of Ofcom enforcement suggests that we won’t.

The lack of action against X has set a pattern of ‘learned helplessness’ on the part of this government, failing to use its massive majority to protect the public and our democracy. It’s been clear for several years now that Musk has been using his platform to instigate race-based violence and encourage the rise of fascist forces. 

Ministers hide behind legal interpretations suggesting that the Public Order Act, which does outlaw incitement of this kind, requires the threat of provoking ‘immediate unlawful violence’. If that is not sufficient to prevent Musk’s dangerous hate speech, then the law needs strengthening—and this government has the power to do it.

Let’s compare the action taken by Brazil’s Supreme Court, which banned X when Musk ignored a court order requiring it to remove accounts that were spreading lies about the 2023 election, attempting to instigate a protest similar to the January 6^th putsch in Washington. Musk caved and the ban was lifted. If Brazil has the courage to take action to protect its democracy, why doesn’t our government?

Other robust actions could be to require the licensing of all digital communication platforms, with licences being issued by a socially representative citizens’ panel based on their positive vs. negative impact on the public good; to assign to social media platforms the status and responsibilities of a publisher; to ban all encrypted and secret communications channels that are not prepared to allow open regulation by public bodies charged with defending the public interest.

Not just in the UK but across the western democracies, politicians have adopted a fawning, subservient attitude towards the tech oligarchs who are dominating not just our economy but our minds and now our politics. 

Could we imagine politicians taking the same hands-off approach to the aviation or automotive industries? Or even conventional press or broadcast media? Is it that there’s something different about digital products or is it that our politicians have become used to handing away their power and performing helplessness rather than doing their duty of protecting citizens?

Their failure to act is the culmination of several decades of grooming by oligarchs and corporate bosses, until they believe that such action is beyond their powers. As well as enabling profiteering by the world’s most wealthy, this supine attitude has also undermined our faith in democracy, as those we elect seem to side with the powerful few against the interests of the many.

This abdication of responsibility dates back to a deliberate handing away of power by politicians like Clinton and Blair under a series of pro-globalisation trade treaties around the turn of the century. Extending the power of the WTO so that corporations could use ISDS clauses to overrule national democratically elected governments was the apotheosis of this betrayal.

We must demand that our politicians stop believing the myth of their own helplessness and start using the power we have given them to defend us against the destruction being wrought by the oligarchs. Because transnational corporates and off-world oligarchs are hard to constrain by democracies that operate at nation-state level, we will also need we need politicians who are still committed to democracy and the rule of law to work together to reclaim their power. If not, I fear for the future of democracy.

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Water companies have recently modelled the use of ‘dynamic pricing’, also known ‘surge pricing’, to charge higher prices during shortages. On an island surrounded by water, crisis has been manufactured by water companies. Dynamic pricing is another strategy to make bigger profits. In a slick PR move, the plan is presented as a water saving tactic. Following critical public reaction and intervention by the Prime Minister, the regulator said that “water companies can’t “surge price” during a drought” and any “new charging structures must strive to make bills fairer and more affordable while encouraging water efficiency”, whatever that means. The retreat does not mean that the idea won’t be resurrected.

To secure emancipatory change, people need to resist the short-sighted policies of the water industry by citing counter evidence and arguments. This article presents a few examples.

Profiting from a Manufactured Crisis 

Since privatisation, customer bills have increased massively in real terms. Instead of investing in infrastructure, companies have paid more than £88.4bn in dividends to shareholders. Billions more have been extracted through intragroup transactions such as management fees, royalties and debt interest paid to affiliates. By 2025, the industry borrowed nearly £83bn. Around 35% of customer bills cover financial and related costs.

The UK’s water network is among the oldest in the world. A large part was installed 130 to 150 years ago. Infrastructure at Thames Water has an average age of 79 years, compared to the industry average of 56 years. 40% of Thames Water assets are over 100 years old. Its IT systems date back to the 1980s.

The required level of investment has not materialised. Around a trillion litres of water a year, 20% of all water pumped, is lost through broken pipes. Hosepipe bans save around 577m litres of water a day. Since privatisation, over 41.4 trillion litres of water has been lost through leaky pipes. At the current rate of investment it will take 700 years to replace the water network.

Despite population increase and climate change, no new water reservoirs have been built since privatisation between 2009 and 2013, the storage capacity of the Abberton reservoir was expanded from 26bn litres to 41bn litres. Most of the reservoirs are shallow and lose water through evaporation in hot weather.

Companies dump untreated sewage into rivers, lakes and seas. In 2025, raw sewage was dumped in rivers for 1,8m hours, threatening marine life, biodiversity and human health. Major companies don’t even have a full map of sewage networks, making remedial action difficult. Only 14.3% of England’s rivers are in good ecological health, severely restricting the ability to extract drinking or agriculture water from them.

To manage public opinion fines are announced, but then quietly waived or deferred. Despite over 1,200 criminal convictions, no director is prosecuted and no company had its operating licence withdrawn. The legislation empowers the regulator to ban unjustified executive performance bonuses. Water companies escape regulatory action by reclassifying executive bonuses as “retention payments” and “signing-on fees”. Payments are also routed through parent companies rather than through the directly regulated entity.

Arguments Against Dynamic Pricing

The logic of dynamic pricing is that higher prices during times of scarcity (e.g. droughts) would force people to use less water and therefore conserve it.

Dynamic pricing by theatres and airlines may persuade customers not to buy products or shop around, but the same logic cannot apply to water which is an essential resource. Unlike airlines and theatres, water companies do not face competition and there are no alternatives. People need water for drinking, cleaning, showering and flushing toilets. The usage depends on circumstances. For example, a family with young children or people with medical conditions can’t easily reduce water usage. Dynamic pricing would penalise the poor and vulnerable.

Some discounts are already given to low-income and vulnerable households, and in principle these could be expanded. However, the cost of discounts is not borne by water companies. It is passed on to other customers in the form of higher prices.

The super-rich could afford to pay higher price for filling their swimming pools, but a vast majority of the people can’t and would end up paying more. In the absence of compulsory smart water meters, it would be hard monitor usage during droughts.

The dash for extra profits has social consequences. By using less water for daily essentials people may face health hazards leading to greater pressures on the healthcare system. Absenteeism at work may increase. Higher water bills would reduce disposable incomes, forcing people to spend less on other things. 

There are also consequences for businesses. Farms, cafes, steelworks, pubs, restaurants, hotels, care homes, hospitals, datacentres and more reply upon steady availability of water. Dynamic pricing would increase business costs, hit jobs, and increase poverty. Higher prices and profits from captive customers do not provide the water firms incentives to mend leaks or be efficient.

Climate change would affect the supply of water. New homes and industries cannot be built without water security. By 2055, England’s households are likely to face a shortfall of 5bn litres of water a day, and a further 1bn litres a day deficit for wider economy. Therefore, conservation and efficient use is vital. Investment is needed to fix leaks; build better reservoirs, desalination plants; restore wetlands and rivers, recycle water and make all homes and businesses water efficient. 

The Need to Nationalise Water

For 37 years, privatised water companies have fleeced customers, prioritised shareholder returns and underinvested. There is an increasing public consensus that water industry needs to be brought into public ownership though the Prime Minister advocates “public control”. The two are not the same.

Mutualisation of the water industry is an example of public control. Under this, the control would pass from shareholders to a not-for-profit co-operative of stakeholders. Monies due to shareholders would be converted to interest-bearing bonds, eliminating the need to pay dividends. The £83bn debt owed to lenders would be transferred to the new entity in the form of repayable bonds. Effectively, the new mutual would pay for the abuses by previous owners. In addition, new investment would be funded entirely out of customer bills and borrowing. Compared to the government’s cost of borrowing, the mutual entity would incur a considerably higher rate of interest. Removing shareholders does not end financial extraction and lenders would de facto control the entity.

The mutual model is used by Welsh Water. It loses 41% of its annual revenues to meet financial costs. Despite rising bills, this leaves less for investment and the company has faced penalties for sewage dumping.

Public ownership through nationalisation is the better alternative. There would be no shareholders and the £88.4bn extracted as dividends would have gone into infrastructure investment. As a state-owned enterprise, water industry cost of borrowing would be much lower than the equivalent for commercial and not-for-profit entities, creating a potential for higher investment. However, public ownership has been opposed by successive governments.

The industry claims that nationalisation would cost £144bn even though major investors consider their shareholding to be worthless. A large part of the fantasy figure is based upon what Ofwat calls Regulatory Capital Value (RCV). How is the RCV calculated? It is akin to buying a car in 1989, and a year later multiplying the price by the rate of inflation, adding new investment and deducting depreciation during the year. This calculation is then repeated every year. The arithmetical answer cannot give market value of anything. The RCV is also inflated through financial engineering as companies have capitalised portions of interest payments and repair and maintenance costs.

The road to public ownership requires that the operating licences of water companies be revoked as they have engaged in illegal and abusive practices. Following the Water (Special Measures) Act 2025, companies need to be placed into special administration. In most cases, shareholders would recover little, if any, value. In the event of bankruptcy, lenders would recover little. So, the government would be able to buy companies at a knock-down price, possibly by borrowing, and give the industry a debt-free restart.

However, neoliberals object to government borrowing. The neoliberal model of national debt emphasises borrowing but totally ignores the assets acquired with that debt. If both were considered, the impact of nationalisation on government debt would be little or none. In public ownership, investment would be boosted as no dividends would be paid and financing costs would be much lower. Surpluses from customer bills would go into infrastructure investment, which can be topped-up from the public purse.

The article has sought to empower people by offering counter accounts and show that water companies are benefiting from the crisis that they themselves have manufactured. Public ownership is the only effective way out of the crisis.

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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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Most people would be able to identify anyone asking this question as someone who has left reality behind. Yet, this is what one of the co-founders of Restore Britain – Charlie Downes – appears to have implied, as part of an escalating split between the Britain’s two leading far-right parties, around questions about Jews and their involvement in far-right politics.

Debate about Jewish inclusion has a long history on the far-right.

For the National Front, or British fascist groups which existed before 9/11, Jewish inclusion was a non-starter. While there was a diversity of opinions regarding the strategic usefulness of expression of open neo-Nazi sentiment, it would have been beyond the pale to suggest that the far-right include Jews. Their views of Jewish people were along the lines traditional for neo-Nazis, that they were a threat to white Christendom. Support for Israel would have again been a non-starter, as it was seen as representative of international Jewish capital.

9/11 led to a centring of Muslims within international far-right thought. While the British National Party (BNP) embraced open neo-Nazism, European far-right parties took a different trajectory. The success of Islamophobic political parties like Geert Wilders’ PVV party in the Netherlands and Jorg Haider’s FPÖ triggered a change in outlook for some in British far-right, who sought to emulate their success. These parties rejected street violence and neo-Nazism and embraced token diversity. For European fascists, Israel became seen as a European bulwark against Islam, and as a potential ally of far-right movements. Some Jews were seen potential allies in the broader fight against Islam and symbols of their more modern and socially acceptable outlook.

The English Defence League (EDL) was amongst the earliest British far-right organisations to embrace Israel and token Jews. Support for Israel was a symbol that they had transcended their roots as an offshoot of the BNP and significant of Israel’s new place within the global far-right. However, their mainstream success was limited by their activists’ passion for taking tremendous amounts of cocaine and rampaging through town centres like angry bulls.

The rise of Farage vehicles; UKIP, Reform and the Brexit party were very much in the tradition of the new European far-right parties, like the Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France. They reject overt neo-Nazism and antisemitism and have built a political coalition with factional exiles from the mainstream right Conservative Party.

A key part of this is based on the rejection of overt antisemitism and explicit biological framings of racist ideas, instead preferring a euphemistic rhetoric of ‘legitimate concerns’. Unlike the EDL, they also don’t tend to engage in street violence. The inclusion of token Jewish people within Reform, including the Reform Jewish Alliance (nothing to do with Reform Judaism, a liberal religious movement) is part of this. It signifies that they are a mainstream party.

The development of Farage parties doesn’t mean that antisemitic currents have died within the far-right. Smaller antisemitic and neo-Nazi factions, such as the now banned Patriotic Alternative and Generation Identity rejected modernisation, alliances with mainstream conservativism, support for Israel, and Jewish inclusion.

Since 2022, overtly antisemitic groups and individuals have found a patron and a mainstream outlet in Elon Musk. The US political environment has also been sympathetic, as some on the far-right have grown disenchanted with Trumpism and critical of US engagements abroad. Figures like rumoured 2028 presidential candidate Tucker Carlson, neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes and Turning Point alumnus Candace Owens see Trump’s project as being compromised by support for Israel and Jews.

It is these US-centric international political networks that seem to inspire Downes and other younger members of Restore, who – with their large number of members from older neo-Nazi formations – appear to want to see an explicitly Christian white society. They see Reform as having sacrificed too much to a multi-cultural society, and their attitude to Jewish people is symbolic of this.

The politics of both Reform and Restore sees Jews as outsiders to British society. Reform connect Jews to Israel, which it sees as an ethnostate on the model it seems to want to create, and an important strategic ally in what the director of the Reform Jewish Alliance director described as a civilisational war against Islam. For Downes at Restore, being British is ‘more than anything is about Christian faith’, with those who don’t have ‘Christian principles’ being ‘less British’. Jews, therefore cannot be fully British, because by definition they do not fit that category.

Both Reform and Restore are a threat to the maintenance of a healthy and thriving Jewish community in the UK. Their members have brought white supremacist politics into the political mainstream, and their debates about Jewish questions – although ultimately coming up with different answers – demonstrate this.

Right image credit: Owain Davies – 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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Manchester – birthplace of the first industrial revolution – is now poised to help shape the course of the fourth. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has committed his political economy of “Manchesterism” to “putting more power in people’s hands” – defying a four-decade settlement in which “political power was centralised and economic power was privatised”.

Burnham has only begun to articulate what this means for technology policy. He inherited a government that made important progress in unleashing technology’s potential for the economy and public services, but never arrived at a coherent vision of how this should feel in people’s everyday lives.

His new government appears to be taking a fresh look at assumptions that have been entrenched since major technology platforms emerged two decades ago. These assumptions are: that innovation will unlock abundance; that this is best achieved through the economies of scale and scope characteristic of technology markets; and that the resulting concentration of wealth and power is an unavoidable price of progress.

Over the past year, progressives on both sides of the Atlantic have embraced elements of this ‘abundance’ narrative. They argue that technology can eliminate artificial scarcity – that by building infrastructure and accelerating innovation, governments can grow the economic pie and make everyone better off. Often, they suggest, the state simply needs to get out of the way and let the market deliver.

This philosophy has merit but neglects something important. Technology, adopted inclusively and productively, could bring prosperity and power to every postcode. But this depends on who controls what is produced, who captures the benefits, and who determines the terms of access. 

The current risk is that artificial scarcity is traded for artificial subjugation. Power is flowing away from people, communities and elected representatives, to companies and governments beyond UK democratic control.

This challenge is often described as “technology sovereignty”. But the term can mask what is at stake: the government’s ability to act independently in citizens’ interests, and the ability of people and local businesses to act for themselves and their communities. More than an academic argument about ownership, it has real consequences for the security and resilience of our economy and public services, and our ability to make technology a force for good across the UK.

The UK relies heavily on a small number of large international technology suppliers. These companies can stifle domestic innovation and raise prices to protect their commercial interests. And recent geopolitical tensions have exposed more serious risks. Last year, Donald Trump sanctioned British International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan in retaliation for arrest warrants against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant. Khan reportedly lost access to his Microsoft email account as a result. 

Losing access or control over foreign-owned technology products could prove catastrophic for the UK economy, public services and national security. The recent loss of 300 jobs at Jaguar Land Rover, following cyber security failures, shows how essential technology is to the economy.

This power imbalance also constrains domestic policy and limits governments’ ability to address technology’s wider harms. In June, President Trump threatened to impose 100 per cent tariffs on imports from countries imposing digital services taxes on US companies, and platforms themselves have withdrawn services from countries to protest regulation. Companies are driving labour-market disruption while bearing few of its costs, and their platforms continue to amplify harmful content and misinformation.

Breaking out of this dependence will not be easy. Britain cannot realistically build or own every part of the technology supply chain. It must instead pursue strategic autonomy: developing domestic strengths while building leverage to use foreign-produced technology on its own terms. 

Manchesterism could breathe new life into this agenda. Some of this is already underway through the Industrial Strategy and Sovereign AI Unit. But now technology production, backed by strategic public investment, could support reindustrialisation – bringing opportunity to every region Democratic accountability and profit-sharing could help ensure AI Growth Zones and citizen data benefit local communities, not just technology companies. Stronger ownership rules and technical standards could rebalance power in public services. Britain could influence globally and benefit locally by forging stronger relationships with middle powers, including the EU.

The new administration has made an excellent start – announcing government backing for chip production in its first week.  But delivering on this promise will require renewed focus. The government must now define a technology sovereignty strategy, backed by clear priorities and incentives, so people across the country have a say and a stake in their digital future.

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In the end, he didn’t even show up to the count. At a cost of some £250,000 to the taxpayer, Nigel Farage’s re-election in Clacton – at a by-election he called by resigning as the area’s MP in a rambling televised address railing against journalistic scrutiny – might just prove to be the most expensive bin day in history.

The Reform UK leader appears keen to claim the result (of one of the most surreal exercises in democracy of recent times) as an uncontestable triumph; a resounding victory of the supposed will of the ‘people’ over the nebulous ‘establishment’.

Speaking overnight, at an event dubbed ‘Farage Fest’, he thanked the supporters he termed “my beloved people’s army” and declared that the voters of Clacton had “stuck two fingers up to the entire political establishment”.

On paper and in numerical terms, Farage is irrefutably the winner of this by-election. With 22,239 votes to the 9,455 secured by his only real challenger, the self-styled intergalactic space warrior Count Binface, portrayed by comedian Jon Harvey, his majority is now more than 12,700 votes. A vote share of some 62.8%, to Binface’s 26.9%, and an increase on 2024’s 46.2%. The 32 remaining candidates (of the record 34, who lined up in a somewhat hallucinogenic array of costumes) did not hit the threshold to avoid losing their deposit money. 

But those are the numbers. The vibes? Those were entirely different. The way the contest played out suggests something else is going on here; a changing narrative emerging, blinking into the daylight over Clacton Pier.

Ultimately, with all mainstream parties – as well as Rupert Lowe’s far-right Restore Britain – declining to field candidates, Farage may have fought the election on his turf – but in no sense on his terms.

Rather than operating squarely within his comfort zone, denouncing what he so often dubs “the uniparty”, Farage was forced, as former Chancellor Rachel Reeves memorably put it “to spend the summer arguing with a bin”. His critique of this monolithic blend of progressive and centrist parties, politicians and voters, alongside a slippery sense of establishment stitch-up – a liberal-woke-BBC-academia smoothie of grievance – was so much harder to land.

It’s tough to look or sound dignified under these circumstances, as any seagull could confirm, while wrestling fish and chip wrappers out of a dustbin. But Farage may face deeper trouble yet.

Clacton, when viewed through the lens of politics as two competing blocs, is an overwhelmingly right-leaning constituency; a faded seaside resort on the Essex Sunshine Coast, and home to some of the most deprived corners of modern Britain. And the voters of this bloc, as expected, came out to back him.

What today’s result also reinforces, is that dynamic operates – equally strongly – in the other direction. As we saw in Makerfield, at the Senedd, in Gorton and Denton, centrist and left-leaning voters will coalesce – eagerly – around the candidate most likely to stop Reform UK – and Farage.

Even, and national polls suggest perhaps especially, when that candidate is dressed as a waste receptacle. With some 1 in 4 voters opting to cast their ballots for Binface, the strength of opposition, even in his own backyard, is palpable…  

Then, there was Farage’s mysterious absence from the declaration stage. His lack of attendance meant he avoided – as so many political figures before him have politely endured – the mild indignity of standing on stage and exchanging pleasantries with his array of cartoonish opponents. In a peevish show of less-than-geniality, he even derided them as “nobodies”.

In the wake of former Conservative MP turned Reform UK spokesperson Anne Widdecombe’s murder and the very real prospect of threats to politicians – on all sides – Farage’s claim of safety concerns cannot and should not be entirely dismissed. All such risks must be taken seriously. But the statement from Essex Police that no candidates had been advised not to attend prompts obvious question marks. 

What’s more, looking beyond Clacton, as Reform UK will, or should, doubtless be doing today, the picture for Farage – long viewed as the Teflon man of British politics, is shifting. As expected, the Parliamentary standards investigation into whether Farage should have declared the £5m gift he received from the crypto-billionaire Reform UK donor Christopher Harborne, has been swiftly reopened.

The resumed investigation, the prospect of a recall petition, and the potential for a second by-election. Far from a clear path across the chessboard, Farage’s way remains littered with pitfalls, and hamstrung with tripwires. He is no longer facing an unpopular, even resented, Prime Ministerial opponent in a scolding, head-masterly Sir Keir Starmer.

Instead, Andy Burnham’s honeymoon period, his easy manner, positive and relaxed communication style and the ‘Burnham bounce’ in the polls, which has seen Labour overtake Reform UK, pose a very different and substantial set of challenges, as reflected in the party’s teetering performance.

Farage’s anti-immigration narrative has long proved divisive. His financial scandals, the conduct of those around him, and the profound and instinctive questions of fairness, for his carefully construed man-down-the-pub persona, could be destructive.

The post Nigel Farage wants us to think Clacton is a victory. Here’s why it’s not. appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.

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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