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

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

That is why, after years of campaigning, the Government’s recent announcement that it intends to scrap the outdated “Aim to Permit” principle is such an important moment.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, the Government intends to remove Aim to Permit.

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

But the work doesn’t end there.

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

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

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

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

Some time ago I had the opportunity to spend a morning on a busy building site on Rossendale Road on the edge of my constituency of Burnley. Here 87 homes for families were under construction. I met Barratt Homes, the developer, and the National House Building Council (NHBC), which insures new homes, and redistributes any profits it makes back into the industry. Building more homes is incredibly important for the next generation, but what matters just as much to many of my constituents is building homes to the highest possible standard, that will stand the test of time.

I was interested to hear that each year NHBC carries out around one million inspections for quality assurance, attention to detail, technical expertise, health and safety, and consistency when compared to the original drawings. Developers cannot simply throw up shoddy buildings; they must subject themselves to stringent inspections before they can receive a warranty.

The need for high quality has been on my mind since last month’s announcement of the first £10 billion of the £39 billion Social and Affordable Homes Programme: more than 70,000 homes, the majority at genuine social rents, with almost £1 billion in the North West. After fourteen years of selling off more than we built, that is a serious answer to a serious problem. But we must build these homes to a high standard. My constituents in need of housing deserve nothing less than a safe, warm place to live and grow.

We have the money in place. Besides the funding, the challenge comes in two parts. The homes must be demonstrably good, and building them must visibly pay something back locally. Local consent is the next challenge. When new plans for housing emerge, my constituents in Burnley, Padiham, and Brierfield will ask me: what’s in it for us?

It is tempting to dismiss that as NIMBYism. That is a mistake. Opposition to housebuilding is usually not generalised opposition to new homes, but a sense that local people will not see returns, and that new homes will be of poor quality, which has sometimes been a persistent issue nationally.

The first can be ensured by independent standards and verification from organisations like NHBC. Developers cannot just assure local authorities their properties will be well built; they must be backed up by published standards, which are verified by independent inspectors. This gives people confidence. And it works: this year’s National New Homes Customer Satisfaction Survey, verified by Ipsos, found 93% of buyers would recommend their builder and 90% were happy with their home’s quality. This is the sixth year the score has been running above 90%, showing growing confidence, which will translate into greater consent for new building.

For the second half of the challenge, the honest answer to “what’s in it for us?” is jobs, apprenticeships, and training; and here the industry is ahead of government. I heard on my visit that NHBC is investing up to £100 million in twelve multi-skill training hubs which will benefit 3,000 site-ready tradespeople every year. At these hubs, apprentices train on replica sites in 14 to 18 months, instead of up to 30, so a young person being trained up at a site can do so in the knowledge that they will be working in the same conditions in which they trained. For every 10,000 homes, we need around 2,500 bricklayers, 2,500 groundworkers, and 1,000 carpenters. Needless to say, we do not have them. The sector needs 239,000 more workers by 2029.

So as we push for an increase in housebuilding, across both social housing and private development, here is my ask as we in the Labour Party gather for our annual conference in Liverpool: put skills hubs in the new town plans from day one.

When we stand up a development corporation in Leeds, Tempsford, or Manchester, a construction training hub should sit on the masterplan alongside a school and a GP surgery. At Northstowe, Homes England provided land for an NHBC training hub that trains 200 apprentices a year. This should leave a skills legacy for years to come.

The Prime Minister has rightly put social value at the heart of public procurement. It now needs to be delivered in every community with local recruitment, apprenticeships that reach care leavers and work for those who have long been without it. Money that stays in our local communities. And training that outlives the project.

Opposition parties offer nothing more than grievances about a housing crisis they have no plan to fix. We can offer better: social homes at rents people can actually pay, built to a standard someone independent will stand behind, by young people from the same town on wages that stay in it. Where you are from should never determine where you end up, and it should never determine whether the home you are offered is any good.

Next week in Liverpool we will rightly celebrate our plans for the biggest increase in social and affordable housing in a generation. Let us also commit to what will deliver it: a package of measures that ensures homes of the highest quality and skills that will serve a new generation of British construction workers. That is how you win consent, and how you keep it.

The post Oliver Ryan MP: Securing buy-in for new homes by raising standards and training the next generation appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.

Andy Burnham’s new government has rightly kept housing at the top of its agenda. Angela Rayner has reiterated the commitment to build 1.5m new homes over the parliament and to oversee the ‘biggest council-housebuilding programme since the post-war period’. But to meet this challenge, they must go further. Standardising some aspects of housing design could help boost numbers without compromising on quality.

Starmer’s administration had undertaken significant reforms to boost housebuilding by rewriting outdated planning laws – including through the newest National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) – and committing £39bn for new social and affordable homes. 

But the Fabian Housing Centre has estimated that every region failed to meet its housebuilding target last year and that England will fall far short of building 1.5 million new homes over the next five. Even Angela Rayner has made it clear that the target is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve. Clearly, the government must go further if its commitment to building thousands of good-quality homes every year is to materialise in neighbourhoods and communities across the country.

One of the ‘quick wins’ for government would be to standardise housing frames. High-quality, well-designed homes are essential, if meeting the new homes target is to genuinely improve the lives of people across the country. However, what constitutes a good home in the eyes of local authorities varies from one area to the next without good reason. Housebuilders are left without clear guidance on what kinds of homes and designs are needed and where. 

This lack of clarity is damaging for all builders, including housing associations. Every minor change adds administrative delays, paperwork, and extra material costs. But it particularly impacts small and medium-sized builders who cannot easily absorb the impact of delays and shifting design requirements. When a builder is forced to make unexpected changes to designs of homes and sites, they lose the ability to achieve economies of scale across their supply chain.

The current approach also fails to protect the architectural character of our towns, despite its intention, as what is deemed good design can shift even within localities. And a lack of building, stalled sites, and planning refusals can lead to the decay of local areas.  This approach has also failed to lead to interesting, well-designed homes that garner public support. In the absence of a clear definition of what makes a good home in a local area, innovation is risky, rather than rewarding. As a result, developers prefer design choices that are ‘safe’ and can pass planning.

Instead, the government could require local authorities to adopt standardised housing frames and local design guides for developments in their area. This would support local identity and architectural character, while supporting innovation, and offering builders clarity and predictability about acceptable forms of development from day one.

In a recent Fabian Housing Centre report, we recommended two changes. First, the government should establish a diverse set of England-wide standardised housing frames for different types of homes, perhaps following a competition which consults the public. Councils would be required to select a few frames that best suit their area. Second, local authorities should be required to establish a clear design code within their local plan, covering height, density, site layout, and distances between homes for light and privacy. 

When housing developments adopt the local authority’s chosen frames and comply with these local design codes, they should be automatically fast-tracked through the planning system. Other unique styles could still be approved, but they wouldn’t qualify for this fast-tracked route. This could cut the cost of development by around two percent.

England would not be the first to adopt this approach of standardised housing frames and design guides. In Ireland, standardisation is being used as part of a programme to boost the number of social homes by 50 per cent. New South Wales in Australia adopted these policies to deliver 112,000 homes over the next five years. Croydon saw delivery on small sites double after the introduction of a suburban design guide for small sites. 

As the new administration beds in and the next election comes into view, housebuilding is only going to become more important, as waiting lists rise and the market struggles. The temptation will be to compromise on quality, so that developers can build more.

But fast-tracking planning permission for compliant homes would both cut the cost of development and create great places to live. These small changes could transform how we build homes and help tackle the housing crisis in every community.  

The post Why ‘quick wins’ are key to solving the housing crisis appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.

Minister Andy Burnham faces a difficult task in changing the UK’s economic fortunes. The decline is due to the obsession with neoliberalism, which has failed to improve the quality of life for millions. Chancellor John Healey’s first budget offers a chance to improve the purchasing power of the bottom 50% of the population, which in turn will increase people’s disposable incomes, invigorate local economy and fuel economic growth.

Neoliberal Destruction

The evidence of neoliberal destruction is all around us. Workers’ share of gross value added has declined from 71.9% in 1975, to 59.7% in 2026. 1.23m workers are on zero-hour contracts. 4.4m jobs pay less than the real living wage. 6.3m workers are in insecure jobs with no guarantees of when they will work, how much they will earn, and whether they will have enough hours or even if they will have a job in future. The insecurity is compounded by a tax system in which the poorest 20% pay a higher proportion of their income in direct and indirect taxes than the richest 20%. 

Unsurprisingly, 25.3m people, including 14.9m working adults and 7.7m children, live below minimum income standards, and have little capacity to boost economic growth. At the same time, the richest 1% has more wealth than the bottom 70% of the population combined.  50 families hold more wealth than the poorest half of the population, comprising more than 34m people. Due to concentration of wealth in relatively fewer hands governments rely upon fewer people to stimulate the economy and are easily held to ransom.

Public infrastructure has been dismantled. 6.16m individuals await 7.28m hospital appointments. 1.3m households (about 4m people) are on a waiting list for a social home; but only 12,198 social homes a year are being built. Social care is in disarray. Universities are in financial crisis. Rivers are polluted with raw sewage. Roads are potholed. Half of England’s schools are unfit for use. The court system is creaking and prisons are overflowing. The economy is vulnerable as manufacturing has declined from 30.1% of economic output in 1970 to 8.5% by 2026.

Neoliberals have restructured the state. Instead of directly investing in infrastructure and new industries, it guarantees corporate profits through privatisations, outsourcing of public services, private finance initiative (PFI) and public private partnership (PPP). Profiteering by corporations has depleted the public purse, leaving less for frontline services. Neoliberals demand cuts in wages, benefits, state pension and public investment, but are silent on the social cost of corporate welfare and tax perks of the super-rich. 

Big banks have been bailed out and are now bankruptcy proof. The finance industry has turned town centres into economic deserts. Private equity has no long-term interest in the wellbeing of workers, customers and communities. It extracts cash through asset-stripping, cuts in wages and staffing, and tax abuses. It has devoured names such as Bernard Matthews, Body Shop, Byron Burger, Casual Dining, Cath Kidson, Claire’s, Comet, Debenhams, Flybe, Four Seasons Health Care, Homebase, HMV, Maplin, Monarch Airlines, The Original Factory Shop, Payless Shoes, Poundworld, Silentnight, Southern Cross, Thomas Cook, TM Lewin, Toys “R” Us and more. It owns supermarkets, hospitals, care homes, GP surgeries, water companies, vets and receives government contracts.

China invests over 41% of its GDP in productive assets, and India 34.3%. The UK spends around 17.9%, with about 50% provided by the private sector. Due to low investment state the UK has languished at or near the bottom of the G7 and OECD league of investment in productive assets for over thirty years, resulting in low productivity.

Reviving the UK

There is an urgent need to tackle social problems. What could the Chancellor do?

The government could embrace the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and create new money for economic revival, but MMT has no political traction.

It could increase tax rates but has pledged not to increase rates of national Insurance, income tax, VAT and corporation tax.

The post-war prosperity we had was built on government debt of 270% of GDP. The public debt is currently around 95% of GDP and the government can borrow more for social investment, but it fears big corporations and the City of London who demand more privatisations.

Despite the self-imposed constraints, the government can access billions for tackling poverty and social investment by eliminating tax, legal and fiscal anomalies .Here are some examples.

Wages are taxed at marginal rates of 20%-45%. Earners also pay national insurance. Capital gains above £3,000 are taxed at marginal rates of 18% to 24%. By taxing capital gains at the same rates as wages, around £12bn to £14bn could be raised. More, if national insurance is levied.

Dividends above £500 are taxed at marginal rates of 8.75%, 33.75%, and 39.35%. Bringing dividend taxes in line with income tax rates could raise £6 billion a year. Higher if national insurance is also charged.

Gross tax relief on pension contributions to employers and employees in 2024- 2025 was £83.9bn. 14% of the tax relief benefited 1.1m additional rate (45%) taxpayers, 57% benefited 6.6m higher rate (40%) taxpayers and 29% went to 30.4m basic rate (20%) tax payers. By restricting tax relief at the rate 20% to all, the government could have £14.5bn spare.

A 2% tax on wealth above £10m could raise £24bn a year.

A modest Financial Transactions Tax (FTT) on the purchase and sale of financial instruments like shares, bonds, and derivatives could raise £5bn a year.

VAT at the standard rate on private healthcare insurance premiums could raise around £2bn a year.

A home worth £320,000 falls into the same council tax band as a property worth £32m. Additional council tax bands can raise revenues.

The rules for curbing tax avoidance don’t apply to business rate avoidance. Promoters of one scheme boasted that they have deprived local councils of £500m of revenue. Millions can be raised by ending abusive schemes.

In 2024-25, HMRC failed to collect taxes of £59.2bn; totalling nearly £500bn since 2010. Another £12.8bn is lost through profit shifting by multinationals. Billions can be raised by tackling tax abuse and its enablers.

Lawyers, accountants, dentists, surveyors and architects trade through limited liability partnership (LLP) structure. As partners, they receive share of profit instead of wages. Their self-employed status means that the LLP does not pay employer national insurance on the profit shared by partners, saving the firms £150,000 for every £1m of profit shared. Big four law firms alone reportedly avoided paying £4bn of employer national insurance. Billions can be collected by ending the employer national insurance dodge.

Dividends to foreign investors are paid without deducting tax at source. Countries such as the USA, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden have a dividend withholding tax for foreign investors. The UK should follow suit. Each £100bn dividend paid to foreign investors could yield £20bn or more in tax revenues.

Research shows that since the pandemic corporations have increased their profit margins by an average of 30%. Electricity and Gas supply companies increased their profit margins by 363%, often without additional investment or risks. Governments can raise large amounts through windfall taxes. For example, a windfall tax on the UK’s four biggest banks could raise £19bn. A small windfall tax is already levied on energy companies and there is scope for much higher rates. Their 2025 profit of £23.1bn is further boosted by the Iran war. 

HMRC is an unsecured creditor for taxes specifically relating to a business (such as corporation tax and capital gains tax). It recovers little from bankrupt businesses. Phoenixing also robs the public purse. HMRC wrote-off £5.6bn in 2023-24, £7.2bn in 2024-25 and £12.8bn in 2025-26. Restoration of the preferential creditor status for HMRC can raise billions.

Since 2006, the Bank of England has paid interest on central bank reserve deposits to commercial banks. Central bank reserves are deposits held by commercial banks at the Bank of England (BoE) and are used to settle payments between banks. They are also used by the BoE to manage interest rates through tools such as quantitative easing. The interest payments accelerated in 2009 as quantitative easing took hold. As interest rates rose, payments to commercial banks increased. The EU had similar arrangements but in 2023 virtually eliminated the practice. The Swiss central bank also stopped paying interest on central bank reserves. The UK continues to pay massive amounts; £38.23bn in 2023, £36.33in 2024 and £25.9bn in 2025. Billions can be freed by ending hidden subsidies to banks.

The above is a small sample of the anomalies that need to be addressed to boost the public purse. The tax base needs to be broadened.  Billions can be raised without increasing the basic rates of national Insurance, VAT, income and corporation tax. It won’t immediately dismantle neoliberalism but a start can be made by reducing inequalities, alleviating poverty, raising personal allowance and removing millions for paying income tax, bringing essential services into public ownership and by making much needed social investment. Does the government have the political will to act?

The post Here’s how the chancellor can raise the billions needed to improve the quality of life of millions appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.

It is by no means irrational or hyperbolic to fear that Trump is not interested in how voters feel because he sees other paths to ensure he does not face a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives or the Senate, or both, on January 3, 2027.  

It is not hard to imagine a tiered Republican strategy for the midterms:   

• win at the polls, with the help of redrawn maps and turbo-charged gerrymandering, voter suppression tactics and disinformation campaigns – all familiar though amplified;
• prepare to use federal emergency powers and other instruments of power to reduce access to voting in places that will underpin Democratic victories; and 
• prepare to contest the election results in the House via the certification process at the state level and in Congress to avoid seating a majority of Democrats on January 3, 2027.

There is little doubt that the elections will be subject to significant external pressures.  We just do not know which tactic or swarm of tactics candidates, state election officials, election workers, the courts, law enforcement, civil society and, ultimately, voters will need to confront and counter over the coming months.  House and Senate Democrats, election officials and administrators, civil society groups, among others, all have conducted tabletop exercises to identify and evaluate the threats and vulnerabilities by voting district, understand how countermeasures will need to be deployed; and once voting starts, monitor where threat actors are operating and deploy appropriate countermeasures.  

There is no American playbook to follow. While voter suppression has been a feature of our system for some time, what is new and worrying is that we  have a federal government that, having seized unprecedented executive power, is the single greatest threat to free and fair elections.  We know the threat is not hypothetical as we  already have seen myriad election-related efforts undertaken in plain sight to subvert the midterms.  

Surveying the landscape, Trump and/or his administration:  

• Pivoted from one tactic to the next.  When the Supreme Court pushed back on Trump’s deployments of National Guard (suggesting, though not ensuring that they would not be deployed during the midterms), and as his mid-decade redistricting effort largely failed to ensure the Republicans would hold the House, he directed his Attorney General to seize ballot boxes, with varying justifications.  Is this just about showing there is little that can stop him, while seeding doubt in the minds of American citizens about election security and privacy of voting decisions?  Or let’s drill deeper and consider the following: the seizure of specific voting machines in Georgia and Puerto Rico, ostensibly to prove the machines were vulnerable to foreign interference, are deemed vulnerable and decertified, forcing election officials to count ballots manually.   
• Called for voter ID for the midterms, “whether approved by Congress or not!” Trump went on to say, “the People of our Country are insisting on Citizenship, and No Mail-In Ballots, with exceptions for Military, Disability, Illness, or Travel.”  He then issued a second post threatening to act by Executive Order. 
• Called on Republicans to “nationalize” elections and “take over voting” in 15 unspecified locations.  
• Continued to repeat the baseless claim that the 2020 election was tainted by massive and widespread fraud, and in June called for the appointment of a special prosecutor – “The evidence is MASSIVE and OVERWHELMING. A Special Prosecutor must be appointed. This cannot be allowed to happen again in the United States of America! Let the work begin!” Trump continues to double down on the debunked allegations that the 2020 was “rigged and stolen.”
• Moved to curtail mail-in voting. Last summer, Trump resurrected his quixotic campaign against mail-in ballots (after toning it down last year at the request of Republican candidates, who ended up benefitting from mail-in ballots and early voting), reportedly after speaking with Putin. Let’s pause on that for a moment – recall Trump at the Helsinki summit took Putin at his word that Russia did not seek to influence the 2016 election, going against at the time the unanimous views of the U.S. intelligence community.  And now he is taking election security advice from Putin!  

First on social media and then during an Oval Office question-and-answer session with reporters, Trump pledged to “lead a movement” to eliminate “corrupt” mail-in ballots and voting machines ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. He exclaimed, “Mail-in ballots are corrupt; you can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots. It’s the only way [Democrats] can get elected.”   

Trump issued an Executive Order to rein in mail-in voting.  As the Brennan Center for Justice noted,  the Constitution explicitly empowers only Congress and the states to set the rules for elections. The Executive Order seeks to sidestep that limitation and displace states’ mail-in voting laws by transforming the U.S. Postal Service “from a neutral mail carrier to an arbiter of who may cast a ballot by mail.”  The order also requires DHS to build and give to each state a list of citizens eligible to vote, and given that federal databases are out-of-date and unreliable, this risks mass disenfranchisement of eligible voters. 

Administration efforts responsive to the Executive Order have been challenged in the courts, and injunctions to block implementation of the order have been issued by two lower courts.  The Supreme Court just lifted one of those two injunctions.  But the Court did not declare the Executive Order legal, so watch this space. 

• Moved aggressively to seize voter rolls  in states.  The administration is pressing state election officials across the country to provide sensitive information about voters.  The requests include copies of statewide voter registration lists and ballots from prior elections, as well as access to voting equipment.  DoJ has sued more than 20 states and D.C., for not complying.  As the Brennan Center has noted, the requests cover sensitive, private information such as driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.  These demands raise privacy and security concerns and may violate state and federal laws.  They are unprecedented and a clear encroachment on the power of states to run elections as set out in the Constitution.  As Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly set out in her ruling, the Constitution gives “no role at all to the President” in setting election rules.  To date, DoJ is 0-23 in its efforts to get states to turn over voter rolls, though it is appealing rulings at pace.  
• Pushed aggressively to get the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act¸ which would have mandated proof of citizenship (a passport or birth certificate) to register or register to vote.  
• Weaponized the DoJ to serve his own ends, including by gutting the Civil Rights Division. Political appointees have removed all the senior managers in the voting section and ordered the dismissal of every major active voting rights case, including lawsuits challenging restrictive voting laws and gerrymandered maps in Arizona, Georgia, and Texas.  The head of the Division, Harmeet Dhillon, has shifted the Division from countering racial discrimination in voting to prioritizing Trump goals of voter suppression in the guise of “preventing illegal voting, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error.”   
• Set up new task forces – DoJ’s Weaponization Working Group, the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office Election Integrity Task Force and the D.C. U.S. Attorney General’s Special Unit: Election Accountability that can target voters, election officials, perceived political adversaries and journalists in search of alleged widespread voter fraud, which does not exist, and thereby enable election interference through investigations of perceived opponents, targeting of election officials for just doing their jobs and casting doubt on election systems. 
• Repeatedly threatened to prosecute election officials and to target nonprofit organizations involved in voter engagement, election monitoring and litigation to protect access to voting.
• Rewarded election deniers with key appointments in the administration, including positions with oversight of election security. An election denier involved in efforts to challenge the 2020 election, Heather Honey, was appointed to the newly created role of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity, and the CISA Director of Public Affairs is Marci McCarthy, a former Georgia GOP Party official who questioned the integrity of the 2020 election and claimed that January 6th was “set up and orchestrated by the FBI.”  Trump installed election denier Harmeet Dhillon as chief of the Civil Rights Division, for decades DoJ’s primary instrument for protecting voting rights.  Dhillion has refocused the motion toward investigating election officials rather than protecting the rights of voters.  Over the summer, Dhillon sent letters to election officials across the country, threatening them with criminal prosecution if they facilitate noncitizen voting. New Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin relied on flawed data to assert widespread noncitizen voter registrations. 

ProPublica estimates that at least 75 people across several federal agencies who were involved in safeguarding the 2020 election have been reassigned, been fired or been forced to resign.  In their place, around two dozen have been installed, ten of whom, including those identified above, worked actively to reverse the 2020 election outcome and the others were associates of the first group. 

• Sidelined key law firms, diminishing the resources available to voters whose voting rights have been abridged or denied and the voting rights groups championing their causes.  
• Ordered criminal investigations of those who have tried to hold him accountable.
• Questioned free speech of those who criticize him or his policies.
• Pressured social media platforms to do away with content moderation and thereby allow disinformation to flow far more freely, all in the guise of protecting free speech and countering the “censorship industrial complex” purportedly deployed against conservatives.
• Bullied news outlets through a combination of lawsuits and Federal Communications Commission pressure.
• Ordered DoJ to investigate ActBlue, targeted former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Chris Krebs in an Executive Order, and set the stage for the targeting of pro-democracy, voter registration and GoTV groups; 
• Severely hampered the Election Assistance Commission, which was established by Congress after the 2000 election to assist states in administering elections.  
• Dismantled the federal government’s capabilities to counter foreign and domestic interference, by gutting election security/disinformation units at CISA, Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Election security teams at CISA and assistance to local election officials have been cut back, increasing the risk of chaos and doubt about the security of voting systems and the ability to counter election-targeted disinformation.  The CISA work force is down an estimated 1,000 staffers (approximately one-third).  
• While there have been no arrests of officeholders or candidates for office, the administration is investigating Sen. Adam Schiff and charged Rep. LaMonica McIver with assault. Just before the Democratic mayoral primary, ICE agents arrested Democratic candidate Brad Lander as he was escorting a migrant out of a New York City court.  DoJ has pursued two criminal cases against each of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.  
• Created a force potentially answerable only to him – ICE.  And while ICE ostensibly is tasked with immigration enforcement, who knows how they might otherwise be deployed. 

For those watching from afar, there are a few things to keep in mind.  First, Trump will not cancel the midterms – he has no basis for doing so and history tells us that authoritarian leaders tend to embrace elections, no matter how subverted to provide legitimacy.  

Second, there is absolutely no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the United States (whether noncitizens, dead or fake voters, rigged vote count and so on).  

Third, the administration of elections is a matter for the states not the federal government.  

Fourth, what happens after Election Day up to January 3, 2027 (when the next Congress is seated) will be as critical as what happens up to and on Election Day.  

And, finally, it is hard to imagine that efforts will not continue to be made at scale through the spread of disinformation to sow doubt among Americans as to the security of election systems. 

Will Trump declare a national emergency as a basis for deploying active-duty military, National Guard units or federal law enforcement agents (such as ICE or Border Patrol) to polling places and as a pretext for seizing ballots and voting machines?  DoJ has already said it will deploy 1,000 election monitors to polling places.  Will we see an uptick in efforts to intimidate election administrators and election workers via federal agencies or local malign actors?  

Just as there is a playbook for the threats, so too is there a playbook for countermeasures.  At the state level, governors, secretaries of state, attorneys general, and election officials have been gearing up for the midterms.  Networks of lawyers, media organizations, lawmakers, tech platforms, civil society networks, campaigns – all know they will have critical roles to play. 

Ultimately, it will be up to the voters, and if there is a lesson from the recent Hungarian election, it is that there is no more effective an antidote to election interference than overwhelming voter turnout and overwhelming majorities.  

Mark S. Bergman

Principal, 7Pillars Global Insights, LLC 

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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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