In the UK local and devolved assembly elections on 7 May, the ruling Labour Party suffered a humiliating defeat. They lost 1,498 councillors, 38 councils (many of which Labour has run for decades), and 21/30 of their seats in the Welsh Senedd, which they had controlled since its creation in 1999. This has (again) brought calls out into the open for Prime Minister Keir Starmer to quit. The figure seen as most likely to be able to replace him is Andy Burnham, current mayor of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA). Starmer's net favourability is now -46%. In fact, all party leaders currently have negative net favourability, while Burnham has a shockingly positive 9%.⁽¹⁾ Just as the bourgeoisie lost confidence in the Conservatives to quell discontent and fix the economy, after fourteen years of stagnation, now they are losing confidence in Starmer after only two.

After a few million ‘resets’, U-turns, and rebrands have failed to fix the government’s dilemma of unpopularity, the Labourite bourgeoisie are pinning their hopes on… another rebrand. Even the Labour-affiliated unions, dropping their recent facade of opposition to the Party of Capital to grovel before the ‘King of the North’,⁽²⁾ have already sent Burnham £20,000 (while many workers go hungry or cut their strikes short for lack of strike funds).⁽³⁾ Meanwhile, a major chunk of the ruling class continues to put their money on Reform UK. Literally. With millions of pounds of donations (the latest to barely break the news was a hitherto-undisclosed £5 million from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, to Farage personally); preferential press coverage; and a 24-hour propaganda TV channel, GB News, with the privilege of minimal oversight from Ofcom,⁽⁴⁾ Farage is currently set to handily win the next general election according to the polls. This, combined with the rise of the Greens, has driven these machinations in the Labour Party. But who will shaft us until then?

The first Labour leadership candidate to announce himself was the then-Secretary for Health and Social Care, former president of the National Union of Students, and perennial worm Wes Streeting. His open self-ambition is only matched by his unlikability, even in Labour circles (thus he has failed to get the numbers to start his own leadership challenge). Not long ago, he was considered firmly on the right of the party. When NHS resident doctors went on strike, he threatened to cut training places if they didn’t call it off; he voted in favour of cuts to disability benefits; he pushed forward the privatisation of the NHS; and he had no problem joining the transphobic moral panic for political capital, taking to The Sun in 2024 to declare that he did not stand by his previous claim that “trans women are women”⁽⁵⁾ and spearheading moves to pause puberty blockers and segregate hospital wards (both convenient ways to cut the NHS). He insisted he wasn’t qualified to say whether Israel was breaking international law – despite privately believing so, as revealed in the Mandelson files. Today he supports a wealth tax, engages in operatic concern-raising about the government’s policy towards Gaza, and takes to Pink News to declare that “every trans person, every child deserves to feel safe, respected, and included in our society and in the health system that serves them”.⁽⁶⁾ Why the Damascene conversion? The elusive answer can be found in a 2023 interview with The Guardian:

If I was ruthlessly focused on the pursuit of the top job, I’d tack left... You win the Labour leadership from the left, as I reminded Tony Blair from time to time. His pitch of 1994 was not the Tony Blair of 2007. So even an arch moderniser like him still did a bit of tacking left.⁽⁷⁾

Even the tiniest promises of capitalistic reform are just electoral fodder to these people. But Streeting is just pouncing on the opportunity another faction has opened. The real contender is Andy Burnham.

Pro-Burnham commentators, and a good chunk of Labour MPs who are scared for their own and their party’s survival, hope that he will be able to pull off what he calls ‘Manchesterism’ – the relative success of his mayoralty that has buoyed his popularity – in the rest of the country. The ‘ism’ part is meant to imply that Burnham has a distinct ideological plan to ‘fix Broken Britain’. The number of op-eds being published trying to figure out what that ‘ism’ is, like the Kremlinology of the last century, suggests otherwise. Burnham is in part a perfect candidate for PM because he is a lifelong political chameleon: from a princeling in the Blair and Brown ministries, to a rightist and a leftist over the course of the 2015 leadership election, to a loyal member of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, to a co-founder of the centre-left ‘Mainstream’ network.

He has – as is a requirement for politicians these days – engaged in a bit of self-flagellation to show workers (aka ‘ordinary people’) not just that he understands their plight, but personally has the one simple trick to end it without the hassle of overthrowing capitalism (doctors hate him):

I think Britain started on a path in the mid-1980s that is the path that has led us to where we are today… For me, we need a different path that puts those things back under public control, makes them more affordable. The path that Britain has been on for 40 years, in my view, has been the wrong path. It's taken us to this place where people can't afford life's basics, they can't afford a few pints at the weekend, they can't afford a holiday. And that's why they're saying to politicians, do better. This is not good enough. And they're right to say that. I'm saying there's a new path here, new politics to build a new economy for Britain.⁽⁸⁾

Different paths; wrong paths; new paths; new politics; a new economy (maybe even a New Labour?). The genius clearly knows his way around words at least. You might even think he's trying to lead you down the garden path. He has made “the end of neoliberalism” a slogan in his by-election campaign launch. But at the same time, less than a year after proclaiming “we’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond market”, he has quickly reassured the banks that the government’s famous ‘fiscal rules’ restricting borrowing (and thus investment) will remain sacrosanct. The importance of these rules to British financial capital is so clear that his statement immediately reduced the 10-year gilt yield!⁽⁹⁾ So continuity with Starmer there. What else is Burnham’s new solution to the crisis-stricken economy?

Manchester is the city with the fastest growing economy in the UK, well above the national average (though this isn’t saying much). This has been assisted by a close relationship between local authorities and business interests, and massive state investment (much funded by the central government), continued by Burnham from previous administrations. Another hint he has given us is calling for ‘public control’ of assets like energy and water. Commentators have linked this to Manchester’s ‘Bee Network’ which provides the fare-capped buses, trams, hire bikes, and pedestrian walkways necessary to deliver workers to workplaces at a minimal cost. Greater Manchester was the first local authority to use new powers to bring bus services back under public franchise in 2017. Similarly, he has used the Combined Authority to build thousands of council homes and seize sub-standard lettings – even floating the idea of seizing empty homes – and joined Sadiq Khan in (unsuccessfully) agitating for the government to give local authorities the power to impose rent controls. He has been quite clear about the reason for this, to make sure we don’t get any idea that things are done for the sake of meeting our basic needs, instead of the scraps we receive only being given when it suits the needs of capital: “housing is a risk to growth… if people can’t find places to rent, they won’t move here because it’s too difficult to live”.⁽¹⁰⁾

In a word, Burnham’s big new idea is statification: increased state involvement in the economy to support the functioning of capital, above all financial capital. Burnham already runs Greater Manchester like a massive corporation: managing the flow of investment; negotiating with enterprises and landlords; and investing funds (which the GMCA, unlike most other authorities, has) to reduce the cost of housing and transport, allowing the rate of exploitation to be raised. Like any clever CEO, especially one who’s rising up from middle management, he knows that a corporation works most efficiently when it effectively delegates – hence his noted support for regional devolution.

It goes without saying that this has nothing to do with socialism. Ignore the braying of leftists and fuming right-wingers who think nationalisation is ‘socialism’, such as Owen Jones, who has already complained that Burnham used the vague phrase ‘public control’ instead of his preferred nonsense ‘democratic public ownership’.⁽¹¹⁾ In fact, it's exactly what Bukharin noticed as a consequence of the development of monopoly capitalism in 1915:

While the finance capitalist groups are becoming stronger, there has increased tremendously the interference of the state in economic life…
The interests of the state and the interests of finance capital coincide more and more. On the other hand, a maximum of centralisation and a maximum of state power are required by the fierce competitive struggle on the world market. The latter two causes on the one hand, and fiscal consideration on the other, form the main factors making for state organisation of production within capitalist society.⁽¹²⁾

In Bukharin's day, especially during the conditions of total war, this took the form of mass nationalisation and unprecedented regulation of production by central governments. In the century since, nationalisation has come and gone. As Bukharin noted, “the bourgeoisie loses nothing from shifting production from one of its hands into another, since present-day state power is nothing but an entrepreneurs' company of tremendous power, headed even by the same persons that occupy the leading positions in the banking and syndicate offices”.⁽¹³⁾ Indeed, the bourgeoisie has used privatisation to navigate their crisis just as much as nationalisation: for Thatcher and Yeltsin, it was an essential complement to massive restructuring, allowing unprofitable nationalised industries to be closed and wipe off billions of dollars (and millions of jobs) in the process.

More recently, the government has made clear turns towards (re-)nationalisation. In March 2025, the owners of the last steelworks in the UK capable of producing virgin steel, Scunthorpe Steelworks, announced they would no longer buy raw materials for their loss-making plant, effectively closing it indefinitely (blast furnaces are extremely difficult to re-light). Parliament was rapidly recalled for an emergency Saturday session – a rare occurrence reserved for major situations, like the death of Elizabeth II or the invasion of the Falklands – to pass the Steel Industry (Special Measures) Act 2025, which allows the Secretary of State to directly issue orders to steel manufacturers. By January, the government had already spent £377 million to keep it running.⁽¹⁴⁾ Finally, in May, the government announced legislation to nationalise the plant. They have also nearly finished a gradual process of re-nationalising train operating companies when their franchising contracts expire.

There are increasing calls for water and energy to follow. In fact, the bourgeoisie at large are showing increasing support for a more active state. Despite the most brain-dead Labourites heralding this as a return to their mythical post-war ‘socialism’ – the second coming of Clement Atlee – calls for this ‘socialism’ have come from the ruling class's right wing almost as much as their left. Farage consistently called for the Steelworks to be brought into public ownership,⁽¹⁵⁾ and Richard Tice has called for a sovereign wealth fund to massively invest in industry and “actually own British steel”.⁽¹⁶⁾

But this turn is less significant than it might seem. Even in privatised industries, the state is forced to retain a leading role in this monopoly capitalist epoch. Due to the falling rate of profit, it is forced to artificially maintain businesses through generous subsidies, deregulation, and absorbing the cost of failure, both to coax investment and preserve strategic supply chains (this alone explains the panic about British Steel). For instance, privatised water companies were propped up by the state from the start: beginning with undervalued shares, and followed with regular debt write-offs, bailouts, temporary re-nationalisation, and subsidies. Now, they are in huge debt spirals (Thames Water, which supplies Greater London, is £17.6bn in the red) after paying their colossal dividends through years of under-investment – which has also created the famous images of raw sewage spewing into our rivers out of storm overflows (291,492 spill events over 2024, in a record drought year!).⁽¹⁷⁾ Just as in the last few decades the bourgeoisie hoped privatisation would be their magic trick to restore profitability by introducing ‘innovation’ and ‘entrepreneurialism’ (which, naturally, did not work), now they hope a bit of nationalisation will prove more efficient.⁽¹⁸⁾ Moreover, they see state investment as the only way to jumpstart re-industrialisation (see Tice's speech), the importance of which is making itself becoming more and more apparent as imperialist warfare becomes more and more open and large-scale. Either way, nothing fundamental will change, so our rulers will not find the solution to their crisis. And it certainly won't change the bourgeoisie spewing shit on us.

Despite Burnham aping its name to create the impression of a personal vision, today's Manchesterism is obviously very different from the ‘Manchesterism’ of the 19th Century. Then, it meant free trade, foreign non-intervention, and laissez-faire economics, literally the opposite of today's statification and rearmament in preparation for world war. It represented the interests of Manchester's booming industrial capital, peaking at almost a billion tonnes of imported cotton in 1914,⁽¹⁹⁾ as opposed to today's stagnating growth which is heavily based on financial wrangling. So what do they have in common?

One could use another term taking Manchester as an exemplar of capitalist development: Manchesterisation, meaning the downward spiral of working class living conditions in the direction of those of 19th Century Manchester.⁽²⁰⁾ When Engels wrote about the cotton capital of the world in 1845, he famously observed that the city’s spectacular growth had been accompanied by a spectacular immiseration of the working population, forced into shockingly squalid conditions, longer hours, and lower pay (especially accomplished through piece work).⁽²¹⁾ Today’s Manchesterism, with the help of a far larger productive base, hasn’t led to such an extreme absolute immiseration (yet). But this is not to say it’s working for us either. Like all other workers, present-day Mancunians face falling real wages, cuts, and generally precarious lives. Just over 1 in 20 are unemployed.⁽²²⁾ The fastest growing city in the UK also has – by no coincidence – the third most homeless population.⁽²³⁾ Despite Burnham’s quietly dropped pledge to end rough sleeping by 2020,⁽²⁴⁾ Greater Manchester’s homelessness rate actually grows almost every year, as in the rest of England – where 1 in 153 are homeless as of 2025, an 8% increase in one year.⁽²⁵⁾ According to End Child Poverty, 238,226 children are in poverty in Greater Manchester, ranging from 26.8% of children in Trafford to 43.6% in Manchester itself.⁽²⁶⁾ This is particularly clear in Southeast Manchester, which is both home to much of Manchester’s non-UK-born population and predominantly made up of ‘deprived’ households. Just as two centuries ago Manchester was built by the super-exploitation of Irish immigrant workers, and seventy years ago imported thousands of Asian workers to super-exploit, today it relies on hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers from around the world, especially in key sectors like health and social care. No wonder Burnham has declared his support for Shabana Mahmood’s ruthless anti-migrant regime.⁽²⁷⁾ And just as piecework enabled this super-exploitation in the 19th Century, today we have the so-called ‘gig economy’. The secret of Greater Manchester’s relative success is nothing more than the right conditions for the rate of exploitation to be raised, plus some effective use of financial leverage.

Burnham has described his ideology as ‘business-friendly socialism’. A contradiction in terms for those of us who use socialism to mean the working class liberating ourselves from wage-slavery, but an apt description for those who use it to mean deceiving us into staying slaves. He may not have any new ideas under all the hype, but we believe him when he says his ‘path’ means more Manchesterisation.

The crisis of bourgeois democracy

That Starmer is facing a leadership challenge only two years after winning a 174-seat majority is somewhat unprecedented. The only other time a governing PM has faced a leadership challenge within such a short timeframe was the vote of no confidence Theresa May faced in 2018, during a minority government and the chaos of Brexit negotiations in which May (a supporter of remaining in the EU) constantly struggled to negotiate with the Eurosceptic wing of her own party. The Labour government is facing no such internal division over a major policy. Just like his predecessor, Starmer is simply being forced out as a scapegoat for the inability of any government to solve the capitalist crisis.

Starmer’s opponents do not seem in much better shape. Unlike the 2019 Tory leadership election to succeed May, which saw ten candidates nominated from 313 MPs, Labour’s 402 can only muster up four or five challengers, the frontrunner⁽²⁸⁾ of which is not even an MP yet! Because of this, for all the noise MPs have been making about opposing Starmer since November, Starmer has not actually been formally challenged. Burnham’s allies’ plan is to run Burnham in the Makerfield by-election, scheduled for 18 June, hope he wins, and then launch a leadership challenge. This months-long convoluted plan suggests that Labour is running out of options.

Across the aisle, Reform’s promise of ‘something new’ is getting confusing as more and more of their faces seem familiar. Five out of eight of its MPs are Tory defectors, including former Home Secretary Suella Braverman; Johnson’s Minister of Housing, Truss’ Minister of Health, and Sunak’s Minister of Immigration, all of which are one person, the former Tory leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick; plus a whole scum of ex-parliamentary losers, including two recent former chairmen of the Conservative Party, Nadhim Zahawi and Jake Berry. This is reaching such levels of absurdity that it didn’t escape the sleepy brain of a Lib-Dem MP, Max Wilkinson, who responded to Jenrick pontificating “Where are we, less than two years later?” with “You’re in a different party” and (pointing to the government frontbench) “You used to be over there!”.

Someone should remind Wilkinson that when he started his career in Cheltenham Borough Council in 2014, his party was also ‘over there’, helping to implement ruthless austerity in coalition with the Tories. Then again, so was the other politician promising ‘something new’, Zack Polanski. Back in 2015 he was literally singing and dancing gleefully on the stage of the Lib-Dem conference⁽²⁹⁾ while millions of children went hungry, thousands having joined them since his party was elected to government.⁽³⁰⁾ “What did we do in five years in government to make us proud?” he then cheered.

The pattern in every country seems to be more and more frequent replacements of incumbent governments. In 2025, out of the 38 reasonably democratic national-level elections held, 21 resulted in a loss of seats or majority for the governing party.⁽³¹⁾ This continues the trend of 2024, the bourgeoisie’s self-congratulatory ‘year of democracy’ (a bumper 74 national elections and over a billion ballots), in which, for the first time, every single one of incumbent governments of the twelve developed countries lost vote share.⁽³²⁾

This is because the crisis of profitability is becoming acute. In truth, no politician has a solution to the crisis humanity finds itself in, or the brewing mass discontent it's whipping up. Except, of course, for world war. Only that kind of massive destruction of capital on a global scale will be able to restore the rate of profit and begin a fresh cycle of accumulation. In practice, though he may manage to make administration more efficient, Burnham will find it extremely difficult to implement any fundamentally different economic approach to Starmer (such as the mass investment he is known for in Manchester) as the bourgeoisie, faced with a stagnating rate of profit, is extremely opposed to government expenditure – hence the debacle around fiscal rules. Whenever a government inevitably proves incapable of solving the crisis (both in terms of falling profit rates and rising working class discontent), the bourgeoisie is tending to simply replace that government with another on loop. Many politicians are simply unwilling to take on this sacrificial role, hence the drop-off in candidates and increase in recognisable faces.

The crisis also limits the scope for what they can do on a political level. Maintaining the rate of profit requires the immiseration of the working class, which in turn requires violence, intimidation, and divide-and-rule to pre-empt resistance. Even a compassionate slavedriver like Burnham, who prefers to leave the dirty work to others, has had to change tack to prepare for his imminent coronation as PM. Thus, despite previously voicing support for the scrapping of restrictions on benefits for migrants, he is now backing Shabana Mahmood’s immigration crackdowns.⁽³³⁾ Or, even though he’d previously argued trans people should be allowed to use the toilets of their gender identity, he’s now declaring his support for the new EHRC guidance – which states otherwise and provides a carte blanche for this to be enforced by challenging individuals based on their “physique or physical appearance”,⁽³⁴⁾ the latest barbaric gain of the transphobic moral panic – while quickly adding that it should be implemented “in the fairest and most compassionate way possible” and “we’ve got to move [on]”.⁽³⁵⁾

Beyond Farage’s Reform stands Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain. Their pledges to “[not just] halt mass immigration, but reverse it”⁽³⁶⁾ through “mass deportation”, and that “Restore believe Britain is a people defined by indigenous British ancestry and Christian faith”,⁽³⁷⁾ make Restore possibly the most right-wing party in parliament since 1945. Lowe already has a seat in parliament, the support of Elon Musk, the backing/membership of most of the open neo-fascist Right, and won every single one of the ten Greater Yarmouth seats Restore contested in the local election – more than the BNP could ever hope for. Or maybe the bourgeoisie will go for someone even further right. The more democracy continues to prove unstable (and the more war approaches), the more attractive individual dictatorship becomes. The bourgeoisie have proved extremely politically flexible over the last century and a bit. But how our rulers choose to organise themselves – naked dictatorship or democratic theatre – is something for them to decide. They will attack us regardless.

For a revolutionary workers’ democracy

Does this sound like democracy to you? The (fairly obvious) truth is that bourgeois democracy is a facade for the dictatorship of the rich. The decisions have already been made behind closed doors, and more importantly, on the world market. Capitalism commands that as MPs day-drink on the job and snort cocaine in the House loos⁽³⁸⁾ for £98,599 a year, we get hungrier and hungrier.

Many leftists are inexplicably excited by the prospect of Burnham governing differently. Even those who have decided against him still keep the option open for a properly ‘radical’ politician of the Capitalist Left, just in case. For instance, Judy Cox of the SWP writes:

Winning reforms requires a confrontation with big business through working class struggle outside parliament. Today, Burnham is part of the “soft left” of the Labour Party. It sees parliament as the only way to bring about change, rather than working class struggle on the streets and in workplaces.⁽³⁹⁾

As if the ‘hard left’ would be any different! Have they missed the last 100+ years of the Labour Party crushing and derailing that working class struggle? Of course this is unsurprising for anyone familiar with the SWP’s modus operandi. The implication is that this would not be the case for a sufficiently ‘Left’ capitalist politician, like the ones it has supported time and time again, from George Galloway to the Labour Left – most famously Corbyn (who recently returned the favour by unceremoniously booting them from his Your Party). Thus, in the latest issue of Socialist Worker, Rob Hoveman castigates Burnham for not supporting such “radical” measures as “a wealth tax” and “rather than bowing down to the bond markets, ensur[ing] British pension funds… lend the government money”.⁽⁴⁰⁾

Despite the efforts of the politicians’ pets, we class-conscious workers are not fooled into thinking there can be any other way under capitalism. The only real alternative is for the proletariat to start organising itself as an independent political force.

Not a ‘mass workers' party’. This is the opportunistic practice of the social democratic and Trotskyist parties. In practice, as the ‘mass’ of workers only becomes revolutionary in high points of struggle, ‘building a mass workers’ party’ always means opportunistically abandoning socialism for reformism and alliances with the bourgeoisie. Nor the Stalinist bastardisation of the ‘vanguard party’, a government-in-waiting which substitutes the dictatorship of the proletariat for the dictatorship of the party, and socialism for state capitalism.

Workers need to take up a clearly-understood refusal to support any section of the capitalists, independently pursuing our freedom through class struggle, strengthening ourselves through internationalist class unity. The world party of the proletariat will unite the minority of workers who have already realised the necessity of revolutionary socialism, to argue and fight for this political direction within the class struggle. No longer will we have to watch pissed-off workers fall under the leadership of whatever bourgeois faction is currently in opposition.

We should know better than to think the bosses’ parliament is for anyone other than them to waste time in. Workers have another way of showing our power. The workplace is our ballot box, the strike is our ballot, and world communism is our candidate. What we don’t have just yet is workers’ ‘parliaments’. That is, the workers’ councils (aka soviets). Of course these will be nothing like a present-day parliament, but the living expression of revolutionary class struggle. Whereas bourgeois parliaments are crap theatres that distract us from the machinations of ministers and boards of directors, workers’ councils are living bodies, constantly democratically coordinating the efforts of the working class to break their chains, transform society, and keep down the reactionary ex-ruling class. Whereas bourgeois parliaments work best when we are exhausted and easily ordered around, workers’ councils live off the active socially creative energy of the working class, nothing more, nothing less. Whereas bourgeois politicians are elected for five-ish years to do whatever they want in the meantime, workers’ councils are made up of recallable and mandate-bound delegates: they vote exactly as their constituents order them to, and if they aren’t satisfied, they can replace their representative/s at any time. Smashing the bourgeois states that rule us today, council republics made up of these will constitute a real workers’ democracy – democratic not just in terms of maximum political freedom within the working class, but in terms of the whole society, since the working class today make up the vast majority.

All of that is crucial. Workers’ councils genuinely place billions of workers in power – not even well-meaning politicians acting in ‘their best interest’ – and reflect nothing more than their own energy. Unlike politicians’ great ideas, workers’ councils are not just clever tricks to ‘fix Broken Britain’ (the German workers didn't realise that in 1919, and were rewarded with the most murderous reaction in history). Socialism can’t just be passed as a law. We have to consciously understand, choose, and build it, armed with a socialist consciousness by the revolutionary section of the international working class organised in a world party.

As production is brought into common ownership (i.e. out of the private property of the bosses and into the property of all), the divisions between classes lose their meaning, and with them even the workers’ state. Then – and only then – will we have a united humanity of freely associated producers, where everyone has a say in their own lives rather than living at the whim of these exploiting pricks.

The crisis of bourgeois democracy will end one of two ways. Ever deepening crisis, reduction of our living conditions, and increasingly authoritarian treatment, culminating in world imperialist war, possibly accompanied by individual dictatorship; or, it can be an opening for the working class to sweep that all away and bring to birth a different world.

Notes:

Image: Number 10 (OGL3), commons.wikimedia.org

(1) yougov.com

(2) This title has been bestowed upon Burnham, by both supporters and critics, after he successfully negotiated funding grants from the Johnson government during the pandemic. It reflects his playing on Northern regionalism to oppose himself to London and Westminster.

(3) thetimes.com

(4) Under the broadcasting code, UK broadcasters are supposed to at least pretend to be politically impartial and balanced. Of course, this only means ‘balance’ within the bourgeois perspective (e.g. invite a Tory MP to disagree with a Labour MP), and the old channels have been training for decades to sneak in their narrative regardless.

(5) thesun.co.uk

(6) thepinknews.com

(7) theguardian.com

(8) itv.com

(9) bbc.co.uk and theguardian.com

(10) inews.co.uk

(11) theguardian.com

(12) N. I. Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy (1915), ch. 13. marxists.org

(13) Ibid.

(14) nao.org.uk

(15) bbc.co.uk

(16) lbc.co.uk

(17) theguardian.com

(18) For an old case study: leftcom.org

(19) confidentials.com

(20) We have occasionally used this term, e.g.: leftcom.org

(21) See Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).

(22) ons.gov.uk

(23) england.shelter.org.uk

(24) greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk

(25) england.shelter.org.uk

(26) endchildpoverty.org.uk

(27) theguardian.com

(28) The third runner up, ex-Deputy Leader Angela Rayner, is miles behind in polling, with 8% of first-preference votes to Burnham’s 47% and Starmer’s 31%. yougov.com

(29) Do not watch without adequate ear protection: youtu.be

(30) chroniclelive.co.uk

(31) Incumbent wins: Philippines, Singapore, Albania, Kosovo (December), Liechtenstein, Norway, Poland, Australia, Vanuatu, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Argentina, Belize, Canada, Ecuador, Guyana, Saint Lucia, Iraq. Incumbent losses: South Korea, Czechia, Germany, Kosovo (February), Moldova, the Netherlands, Romania, Samoa, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Malawi, the Seychelles, Bolivia, Chile, Honduras, Jamaica, Saint Vincent, Suriname, Trinidad, Japan.

(32) ft.com

(33) bbc.co.uk

(34) gov.uk

(35) x.com

(36) facebook.com

(37) x.com

(38) bbc.co.uk

(39) socialistworker.co.uk

(40) socialistworker.co.uk