Original post on mstdn.social

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Cool it with the tram-trains

Cai ap Gwilym At a time when scepticism about the benefits of devolution is rife, it is a shame that so few are talking up Trafnidiaeth Cymru (TC). The South Wales Metro is shaping up to be a genuinely transformative project, with electrification continuing apace, along with station upgrades, frequency improvements, and contactless payment. Outside […]

nation.cymru

Original post on mstdn.social

mstdn.social

Original post on mstdn.social

mstdn.social

Original post on mstdn.social

mstdn.social

Original post on mstdn.social

mstdn.social

Original post on mstdn.social

mstdn.social

Original post on mstdn.social

mstdn.social

A response to the Financial Times: The shrinking arguments against degrowth

On 26 June 2026, the _Financial Times_ ran a piece titled “The shrinking arguments for degrowth.” Written by John Burn-Murdoch, the FT’s chief data reporter, the column argues that “** _the idea that economic growth is a barrier to achieving better outcomes is at best outdated, in many cases a misreading of the data_**.” He builds his case in five steps: (1) growth reduces environmental impact, (2) eradicates poverty, (3) raises all wages, and (4) improves wellbeing, and therefore (5) degrowth is a terrible idea (hence the title of the piece). I take each claim in turn and show that none survives careful scrutiny. # Claim n°1: Green growth Green growth is the kind of zombie argument that keeps coming back no matter how many times the evidence buries it. John Burn-Murdoch resurrects it with confidence (I’ve kept the original hyperlinks from the _Financial Times_ column): “A few decades ago, the theory would have better matched the evidence. Back then, growth in GDP per capita still tended to be accompanied by growth in pollution and larger material footprints. But that link has long since decoupled in a growing roster of countries and pollution levels are now falling worldwide. In many cases economic growth now _reduces_ each person’s environmental impact. Much of this results from hard-won regulation, hand-in-hand with growth. The solar and batteries revolution – central to decoupling energy from emissions – is now powering millions in poor countries and has also made fortunes in richer ones: a case of growth and wealth creation alongside huge positive externalities for people and planet.” This passage packs several points. Let me take them one at a time, starting with one that is consensually false. “** _Pollution levels are now falling worldwide_**.” There are countless ways to show that isn’t true, but here is perhaps the cleanest: the 2025 Planetary Health Check from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research reports that “seven out of nine Planetary Boundaries have been breached, with all of those seven showing trends of increasing pressure – suggesting further deterioration and destabilization of planetary health in the near future” (p. 11). In the journal _Nature_ , Fanning and Raworth (2025) track 13 indicators across the same nine planetary boundaries to find that “the median level of overshoot increased from 75% in 2000 to 96% in 2022.” The planet is getting worse. This is a well-established scientific fact and disputing it without evidence is, frankly, suspicious. The “** _growing roster of countries_** ” links to Hannah Ritchie’s 2021 _Our World in Data_ piece and its graph of 30 countries that grew GDP while cutting CO2 between 2005 and 2020. I’ve explained at length why that chart shows far less than it claims (see A response to Paul Krugman, Chapter 2 of _Slow down or die_, and also A response to Hannah Ritchie). In short: it only includes one environmental factor, covers a short period of time without correcting for recessions, and, most importantly, the reductions it celebrates are an order of magnitude too slow to meet climate targets (see, for example, Vogel and Hickel, 2023). A country can sit proudly on that list and still be failing every test that matters for environmental sustainability. The opening line (“** _back then_** ”) points to a 2026 preprint (a not yet peer reviewed academic article) titled “Developed economies are growing while reducing many of their environmental impacts.” The empirical study tracks GDP against nine environmental indicators from 1960 to 2023. Here is the first problem: of the two things Burn-Murdoch singles out as decoupled (“** _pollution_** ” and “** _material footprints_** ”), material footprint is one that the paper explicitly says has _not_ decoupled. In the authors’ own words: “We do not see clear evidence of absolute decoupling for energy and agricultural nitrogen use, nor for material footprint, though growth in these pressures was very slow, if present, for the past decade in high-income countries” (p. 3). _Very slow growth_ is not decoupling; it is, at best, a plateau at a catastrophic level (in these countries, material footprint currently sits at roughly 24 tonnes per person, which the authors note “far exceeds a recommended sustainable range of 8-14 metric tons per person annually,” p. 7). The only moment this indicator actually decreased was a “brief, sharp decline in 2008-2009 coinciding with the U.S. housing market bubble correction and global financial crisis” (p. 3), which is closer to a recession than to green growth. What about the rest? In fairness, the paper does report that five of its nine indicators declined in absolute terms in high-income countries: phosphorus, agricultural land, carbon dioxide (CO2), sulphur dioxide (SO2), and fisheries catch. That sounds like a win for green growth, until you look behind each number. Agricultural land declined, but “this apparent absolute decoupling masks externalization of some land-intensive production to upper- and lower-middle income exporters” (p. 3). The land didn’t disappear, it just moved to China, Brazil, Argentina, and Southeast Asia. Fisheries catch fell by over 40% between the mid-1980s and 2022, not because rich nations fish more sustainably, but because the wild fish are largely gone. The authors are explicit: “our results reflect decoupling from wild catch more than decoupling from fish consumption” (p. 7), with farmed production having overtaken wild catch globally in 2022. Phosphorus declined, but the authors attribute it mainly to legacy phosphorus already accumulated in soils, reducing the need for new applications, alongside the rising costs of fertilizer (and again, there is the issue of scale: global phosphorus application is about 18 Tg P/year, which is three times the safe threshold set by the planetary boundaries framework). CO2 is decoupling for the high-income group as a whole, but “approximatively 43 % (21 out of 45) of countries within this group do not meet the absolute decoupling criteria” (p. 5). And in the countries where emissions decline, the cuts are minimal: high-income CO2 fell by roughly 0.8% per year over the past decade, while “projected pathways limiting 2100 warming to 1.5°C require global emissions to be reduced ten times faster” (p. 7).[1] If _global_ emissions must fall ten times faster than the high-income group is currently managing, then on any equity-based sharing of the remaining carbon budget, those countries who today emit far above the world average would have to cut faster still. Biodiversity (measured as vertebrate loss) is still rising in absolute terms. The one place the paper finds “absolute decoupling” for it is Latin America, where, in the authors’ own words, “this apparent ‘decoupling’ is caused by having fewer animals left to lose, rather than population recovery” (p. 2). That may be the most depressing evidence for decoupling: growth stops causing biodiversity loss because all the biodiversity has already been lost. Not sure we can call that green growth. That leaves one genuinely clean success: sulphur dioxide. SO2 emissions have fallen across the world since the 1970s, and the decline is real and worth having (SO2 attacks the human respiratory system and cutting it was a public-health achievement). But the authors explain precisely why it wasn’t difficult to achieve: “the decoupling of SO2 emissions from GDP was attributed to the passage of easily enforceable pollution regulations combined with the deployment of relatively cheap filtration technologies” (p. 7). So, easily enforceable rules and cheap end-of-pipe filters, something that can hardly be generalised to all environmental issues. Resting the case for green growth on SO2 would be like an alcoholic claiming sobriety because he’s cut back on mouthwash – technically, a reduction, but not the problem anyone’s actually worried about. So, what do the paper’s own authors conclude? Their results “offer mixed support for the green growth hypothesis. […] For advocates of green growth, our findings pose critical questions about feasibility and pace” (p. 8). That is a hedged, heavily caveated paper that Burn-Murdoch has overblown into “** _the link has long since decoupled_** ”**** and**** “** _pollution levels are now falling worldwide_**.” He’s not reporting a finding, he’s laundering one. He doesn’t stop there. “** _Much of this results from hard-won regulation, hand-in-hand with growth_**.” Regulation, yes. Hand-in-hand with growth, no – and, again, the evidence runs the other way. In a scientific article published in _Nature Communications_, a team of researchers have tracked global emissions from 1820 to 2022, finding that 60% of cumulative fossil-fuel CO₂ reductions over two centuries occurred during recessions, with just five global crises accounting for roughly 40%. We already knew this from Le Quéré et al. (2019), who studied the 18 fastest-decarbonising countries over 2005–2015 and found reductions in energy use “explained at least in part by the lower growth in GDP” (p. 215). Policy mattered, they concluded, but its “effect is hidden by the effect of GDP growth on energy demand” (p. 216). I’m not saying regulations don’t matter – of course they do. What’s dishonest is bundling them with growth when the clearest cuts on record coincide with growth slowing or reversing, which, if anything, strengthens the case for degrowth. This is the strangest line of the paragraph: “** _In many cases economic growth now reduces each person’s environmental_** impact.” Read charitably, it’s a statement about correlation: as GDP per capita rises, per-capita impact tends to fall (that’s the decoupling claim I’ve just debunked). Read literally – that producing more actively reduces impact – it tips into nonsense. The only economy in which making more stuff lowers your footprint is one staffed entirely with animal caretakers, environmental consultants, and climate activists, all running on sunlight and good intentions. # Claim n°2: Poverty eradication Same playbook, different zombie theory. Having dealt with the environment, John Burn-Murdoch moves on to poverty, trying to show that economic growth is the key to eradicating it: “Other assertions are more straightforwardly flawed, namely that growth is no longer accompanied by reductions in poverty. […]. The tight link between growth in GDP per capita and reduction in poverty is one of the most remarkable findings in economic research — and it has held firm across every global region for more than two centuries. Researchers have long interrogated whether total national income growth is matched by growth in incomes for the poorest, consistently finding that it is, across a range of countries, time periods and policy environments. When I updated these analyses to include the past 15 years, I found that this link between aggregate and bottom-fifth outcomes has become even stronger. Where incomes for the poorest have stagnated, it is generally because the economy didn’t grow (see the UK of late), not because growth was shared unequally.” The two hyperlinks on “** _interrogated_** ” and “** _consistently finding_** ” point to David Dollar and Aart Kraay’s “Growth is Good for the Poor” (a _World Bank_ working paper from 2001) and its sequel, “Growth still is good for the poor” (Dollar, Kleineberg and Kraay, a 2016 academic article published in the _European Economic Review_). Burn-Murdoch presents them as proof of a “** _tight link between growth and reduction in poverty_**.” The trouble is that’s not what either paper measures. What Dollar and Kraay actually test is the relationship between the income of the poorest fifth and average income. Their headline result is that “changes in the share of income of the poorest quintiles are uncorrelated with changes in average income” (p. 68). This means that the poorest fifth’s slice of national income stays roughly constant as the whole economy grows, their incomes rising more or less in step with the average. That is a finding about distribution-neutrality showing that economic growth, on average, neither helps nor hurts the poor’s relative position, but it’s no proof that growth actually reduces poverty, and certainly not that growth is the best or only way to do so.[2] The “** _held firm across every global region for more than two centuries_** ” line links to another piece from _Our World in Data_.[3] That two-century triumph rests almost entirely on the extreme-poverty headcount using the dollar-a-day line and its successors. Move the threshold up just a little and the miracle disappears. As the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights documents in his 2026 Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth, at USD 8.30 per day roughly 3.7 billion people remain deprived, and the absolute number below that line has barely changed in three decades, because population growth has offset the falling rate (para. 29 p. 17). Between 1990 and 2001, only $0.60 out of every additional $100 in global income per capita improved the situation of people living under $1 per day (Woodward and Simms, 2006). Between 1999 and 2010, $111 of additional growth in global GDP was needed to achieve a $1 reduction in poverty (Woodward, 2015). The pattern repeated the following decade: between 2010 and 2020, only 1% of the increase in world spending reached the extremely poor (Kharas, 2020). When growth is captured overwhelmingly by people who are already rich, it does little for the poor, and that’s exactly the situation we’re in. Today, the richest 10% of humanity (556 million people) own 75% of all wealth and receive 53% of all income, while the poorest half (2.2 billion people) own 2% of wealth and take 8% of income. And even for the poverty reduction that did happen, was it because of growth? The honest answer from the literature is that it’s neither sufficient nor necessary. On sufficiency, the Roadmap’s verdict is blunt: growth is “neither sufficient nor automatically pro-poor,” its effects depend on labour-market institutions, bargaining power, and whether the gains accrue to labour or capital (para. 50 p. 29), a point I return to below. The old transmission belt – growth creates jobs which make poverty vanish – is not as automatic as one would think. In fact, since 2012 the correlation between GDP increases and falling unemployment across the OECD has been a feeble 0.34, with “jobless growth” becoming the rule rather than the exception (para. 52 p. 30). On necessity, the case is even weaker, because poverty has been reduced without waiting for growth. Kerala reached the lowest infant mortality in India despite decades of relative poverty; Thailand’s universal health coverage sharply cut health-driven impoverishment; Rwanda roughly doubled life expectancy through community-based health insurance (these three examples are given in the Roadmap, para. 222 p. 115). Survival, health, security, and many other concrete human needs can be met in many ways, some of them far less GDP-intensive than others. The resources to generalise wellbeing already exist: one study cited in the Roadmap (Hickel and Sullivan, 2024) finds that it’s possible to provide decent living standards for a projected 8.5 billion people at around 30% of current global resource and energy use (para. 214 p. 110). In much of the world, poverty is not a production problem but one of distribution. Recent changes in poverty headcount are carried overwhelmingly by China. And indeed, looking at the World Bank’s $1.90-a-day line, extreme poverty in China went from 88% in 1981 to zero by 2018. However, tracking people’s ability to access essential goods and services, regardless of whether they’re monetised, Sullivan et al. (2023) find that the Chinese poverty rate averaged 5.6% in the 1980s, far below capitalist economies of comparable size and income at the time (51% in India, 36% in Indonesia, 29% in Brazil), before soaring during the market reforms of the 1990s. As privatisation inflated the price of essentials while deflating working-class wages, poverty climbed to 68% in 1995. In another article from 2023 (“Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century”), the same authors generalise the finding, challenging the standard view that capitalism and growth are poverty eradicators. The authors’ evidence says otherwise: “the rise of capitalism caused a dramatic deterioration of human welfare. In all regions studied here, incorporation into the capitalist world-system was associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality.” As in the Chinese case, and in line with the conclusions of the UN Roadmap, what eradicates poverty is not GDP growth but progressive social movements and public policies that actually render resources more accessible to those who need it the most. The “** _I updated these analyses_**[which supposedly makes the case]**_even stronger_** ” does strengthen the original claim, but only the one actually made by Dollar and Kraay (2001) and Dollar et al. (2016), which, as shown above, is a proof of distribution-neutrality, not of poverty eradication, and certainly not of growth necessity. As for the UK, the British poor didn’t stagnate in a politically neutral vacuum where growth simply failed to show up; they stagnated through more than a decade of deliberate austerity, in which the means of meeting basic needs became less accessible. “** _The economy didn’t grow_** ” does a lot to obscure the fact that the public provisioning system was dismantled. The UK isn’t a case of an economy with a general deficit of wealth, it’s a case study in how a state can immiserate its poorest by unwise choices of allocation, motivated by an invalid theory. # Claim n°3: Wage stagnation Two claims done, three to go. The third concerns not poverty but inequality: “Other assertions are more straightforwardly flawed […] that it has not led to shared prosperity, and that wages have stagnated despite national incomes expanding. The argument that stagnant wages in rich countries have decoupled from soaring economic output also often rests on shaky analysis. On both sides of the Atlantic, comparing like with like, workers’ output and compensation have kept moving in virtual lockstep.” The “** _comparing like with like_** ” points to a 27-page American Enterprise Institute[4] report, “Understanding trends in worker pay over past 50 years” (2024), authored by AEI senior fellow Scott Winship. Winship’s point is that pay has kept up with productivity: between 1948 and 2022, productivity increased by a factor of 4.1 and hourly compensation by a factor of 3.9 (Fig. 4, p. 8). But the same paper also argues that something changed in the 1970s, after which “the compensation of the _median_ worker has lagged overall productivity significantly” (p. 10, italics in original). Focusing on averages is a well-worn trick for hiding inequality. If a billionaire walks into a room, _average_ wealth soars, which gives an illusion of improvement, even though nobody actually got richer. If a billionaire walks into a room, _median_ wealth stays the same, which is a more accurate depiction of real changes in wealth levels within the room. While productivity rose by 111 % between 1973 and 2022, median hourly compensation rose by only 50 % (Fig. 7, p. 10), which means that the median worker only captured under half of productivity gains. That’s a long way from the “** _virtual lockstep_** ” announced in the FT column. The “** _both sides_** ” directs to Pessoa and Van Reenen’s “Decoupling of Wage Growth and Productivity Growth? Myth and Reality,” a 2013 discussion paper from the Centre for Economic Performance at LSE.[5] Again, the authors separate _average_ from _median_ wages because they behave differently – average stays coupled to growth while median decouples from it. So, the honest rewrite of Burn-Murdoch’s sentence isn’t “** _output and compensation have kept moving in virtual lockstep_**.” It is: average compensation has roughly tracked average productivity, while the typical worker’s pay has lagged well behind – and the gap is a matter of distribution, not decoupling. Wage inequality is only the tip of the iceberg. A fuller measure of “** _shared prosperity_** ” has to include income and wealth – and once it does, the argument collapses. A glance at the World Inequality Database shows how unequal UK growth has actually been. National income grew an average of 1.7% a year between the 1980s and 2024, from £18,139 in 1980 to £38,181 in 2024. Same pattern for wealth: from £73,274 in 1980 to £168,211 in 2024 (a 1.9% yearly growth rate). But these are averages. In the 1980s, the British richest 10% owned 52% of national wealth and received 28% of national income, and, in 2024, they own 57% of wealth and capture 36% of income. In the 1980s, the richest 10% owned about 20-25 times as much as the poorest half of the country, a ratio that rose to 61 in 2024. Calling that “** _shared prosperity_** ” is a stretch. Growth has not lifted all boats, whatever the _Financial Times_ would like readers to believe. When we remove the selective interpretation of the studies, what’s left is exactly what degrowth economists have been saying all along: an economy that grew unsustainably, for the benefit of a minority of already-rich individuals. In such situation, arguing for _more_ growth in the name of “shared prosperity” is either dishonnest or naïve. # Claim n°4: Happy growth Claim four concerns growth and wellbeing. Here, the columnist mobilises four references and, as usual, asks each of them to carry more than it can bear. “And earlier this year new research pushed back on the argument that once a country becomes rich enough, further economic growth doesn’t boost wellbeing. After adjusting for the way people change their frame of reference over time, focusing instead on whether they say they are doing better than in the past, the research found life satisfaction continued to climb alongside GDP per capita even in countries as rich as the US. Moving away from individual material wellbeing to broader societal measures, research finds that economic growth fosters trust in government and prosperity boosts social cohesion. Indeed, the past decade of political turmoil in Britain has coincided not with rising inequality (it has been falling) but with anaemic growth.” Let’s begin with his centrepiece proof, the “** _new research_** ” that supposedly shows that “** _life satisfaction continued to climb alongside GDP per capita even in countries as rich as the US_**.” Both hyperlinks point to the same paper: Alberto Prati and Claudia Senik, “Is it possible to raise national happiness?” (_Journal of Public Economics_ , 2026). It is a careful, honest work, but it doesn’t say what Burn-Murdoch claims it does. Actually, the authors themselves caution against that precise reading: “we should probably not conclude that national happiness in the USA more than doubled in the second half of the 20th century. Yet, for a similar reason, we should also probably not trust that national happiness in the USA has been flat. The truth is likely to be in the middle” (p. 16). The journalist has taken a paper whose punchline is “the truth is likely to be in the middle” and reported the top of the range as the finding. There is also a scope problem. “** _Even in countries as rich as the US_** ” implies a general result holding across rich nations, but the paper only looks at data from the US between 1959 and 2008, and the time period closes precisely where it gets inconvenient. As the authors themselves note: “the period covered by the data ends in 2008 […] and it may not capture the recent deterioration in the mental health of Americans” (p. 10). A study of the US that stops in 2008 cannot stand as evidence that growth boosts wellbeing in every rich country, always. The Prati and Senik (2026) article raises interesting questions about measurements but it offers no tangible proof that growth makes people happier. The question it asks is whether the famous flatness of reported life satisfaction reflects a real hedonic treadmill (people genuinely don’t get happier) or a mere “rescaling” (people raise the bar for what 10 out of 10 means). The authors are explicit that they have not settled this: “We do not claim to have demonstrated that rescaling, rather than the hedonic treadmill, is the actual process that explains the relative inertia of reported happiness” (p. 16). And the mechanism they propose, far from rescuing growth, it’s much closer to Easterlin’s original hypothesis: the reason Americans report “7/10” decade after decade is that the “best possible life” benchmark keeps moving up with affluence, so that “7/10 […] had a very different meaning in 2008 than it did 50 years earlier” (p. 10). People don’t become harder to satisfy, they become “tougher in their grading style” (p. 2). The second reference (“** _research finds that economic growth fosters trust in government_** ”) is Timothy Besley, Christopher Dann and Sacha Dray’s “Growth Experiences and Trust in Government” (_Quarterly Journal of Economics_ , 2026). Bringing together data from several opinion surveys, the paper shows that across 166 countries, “people who have experienced higher GDP growth are more prone to trust their governments.”And yet, this paper contradicts the second part of Burn-Murdoch’s sentence, the part stating that “** _prosperity boosts social cohesion_**.” Indeed, Besley et al. (2026) report that growth experiences have “no statistical impact found for nonstate institutions […] nor on interpersonal trust” (p. 1766). Interpersonal trust is the standard empirical proxy for social cohesion, and on that measure growth does precisely nothing in this specific paper. The reference attached to “** _prosperity boosts social cohesion_** ” is a 2018 paper published in _Comparative Sociology_ titled “Social Cohesion and Its Correlates: A Comparison of Western and Asian Societies.” It does find that “economic prosperity” (which they proxy with GDP) is one of the few “universal” correlates of cohesion (p. 449), but that’s a statement about levels of prosperity, not about growth, and certainly not about whether more growth in an already-rich society improves cohesion. The paper’s own data show that there is no iron law here: South Korea ranks fourth in GDP but only scores average on cohesion, behind the much poorer, far more cohesive Bhutan and Laos (p. 445). “** _The past decade of political turmoil in Britain has coincided not with rising inequality (it has been falling) but with anaemic growth_.**” The link here is not, as one might assume for such a grand statement, a data source or an academic paper; it is an opinion column by Tim Harford (“UK inequality is getting worse, right? But what if it isn’t?,” July 2024), itself a plea for growth over redistribution.[6] It’s a common trick that most readers miss: one opinion piece citing another, each lending the other a false air of scientific solidity. Harford’s piece is anything but solid. His claim rests on a single metric (the World Inequality Database’s top-1% income share). He argues that “in the UK, the share of income flowing to the richest 1 per cent is lower than it was during the financial crisis. It is much the same in the most recent numbers as it was in 1997.” Checking the numbers, the share went from 6.8% in 1980 to 12.1% in 1997, peaked at 14.7% in 2007, and landed at 13.1% in 2024, the latest year with available data. That’s a classic trick: pick the peak year (2007) and note that today’s level is lower, implying that inequality is falling. Start from the lowest point instead (6.7% in 1976) and you get the opposite conclusion: inequality has risen. Harford himself spends a good half of his column acknowledging that there are forms of inequality that have not been captured by this indicator. Wealth inequality, for instance, hasn’t fallen at all, it actually increased, regardless of which start year you choose. In 1976, the top 10% wealthiest Brits owned 39 times more than the bottom half of the population. That ratio climbed up to 45 in 2007 and to 61 in 2024. Pointing to one income-inequality indicator to argue inequality isn’t worsening is unconvincing – it’s a bit like measuring the width of your shadow as proof your diet worked. # Claim n°5: There is no case for degrowth Here is the final move. Having claimed that growth reduces environmental harms (Claim 1), lifts the poor out of poverty (Claim 2), ensures shared prosperity for everyone (Claim 3), and improves overall wellbeing (Claim 4), John Burn-Murdoch closes with a warning against degrowth. “where growth slows – whether through demographic decline, policy missteps or explicit degrowth agendas – living standards will stagnate (including for the poorest), reducing public support for altruism and pushing us towards a zero-sum world with increased inter-group tensions and more hoarding of scarce resources. Economic growth isn’t everything for everyone, but it turns out it’s pretty close. It has delivered remarkable progress on exactly the benchmarks that its critics prioritise – recently even on environmental impact. The problem facing rich and poor alike today is that we don’t have enough of it, not that we’ve had too much.” Let’s start by noting that the phrase “** _whether through demographic decline, policy missteps or explicit degrowth agendas_** ,” bundles three entirely different things under one heading, as if a collapsing birth rate, a central-bank blunder and a deliberate downscaling of activities would have the same impact. Obviously, they would not. When speaking of “** _reducing public support for altruism_** ,” the journalist cites a 2016 study in _World Development_(“Public Opinion and Foreign Aid Cuts in Economic Crises”). The title is indicative enough: it’s a study about foreign aid during recessions. Its finding is that voters deprioritise aid during economic downturns, even when there are no specific budgetary constraints. Let’s say it again: degrowth is not a recession (otherwise there would be no need to coin a new concept). A planned, equitable degrowth would defuse that perceived fear of scarcity the study identifies as the real driver of self-interest. If anything, this paper is an argument for managing the end of growth carefully, rather than the current strategy, which leaves rich societies to lurch through repeated involuntary crises. “** _Demographic decline_** ” links to another FT piece arguing that it’s a “drag on growth in productivity and living standards” because an ageing population “shrinks the workforce.” But this is a problem only if you are committed to growing aggregate GDP in the first place. A shrinking workforce is a crisis for a system that measures success by total output and therefore needs an ever-larger labour force. From a post-growth perspective, one organised around inclusion and wellbeing, a gently declining population is not the end of the world. If anything, it makes it easier to reconcile an economy’s macroecological footprint with its planetary boundaries. “** _Zero-sum world_** ” and “** _increased inter-group tension_** s” hyperlink to two columns from Burn-Murdoch, and both rest on the same underlying study: Chinoy, Nunn, Sequeira and Stantcheva’s “Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences” (_American Economic Review_ , 2026). This paper measures “zero-sum thinking,” a psychological and cultural trait, defined in the study as the belief “that gains for one individual or group tend to come at the cost of others.” That’s a study of a psychological mindset, not a finding about whether the world actually is zero-sum. Degrowth does not argue that we should _believe_ that we live in a zero-sum world. It argues that we do. It’s a biophysical claim grounded in science, that material and energy throughput cannot expand forever on a finite planet, especially one where planetary boundaries are already under heavy strain. And, even on the discourse itself, it’s not clear why zero-sum thinking is so problematic. In “Are we destined for a zero-sum future?” Burn-Murdoch himself concedes that a zero-sum mindset is “not in itself clearly a good or bad thing, morally speaking,” that “no one is arguing that this shift in mindset is not justified,” and that if societies become “more concerned with fairness, that is no bad thing.” So, the doom-laden phrasing of the final paragraph – zero-sum thinking as the road to some kind of Walking Dead hoarding and inter-group hatred – is contradicted by the author’s own hedges three weeks earlier. He warns us against the very thing he elsewhere admits is rational and possibly good. To support the sweeping claim that growth is “** _pretty close_** ” to being “** _everything for everyone_** ”, the journalist cites aSubstack post from March 2026 by retired World Bank economist Lant Pritchett, where Pritchett introduces an unpublished, revised paper titled “Economic growth _is_ enough and _only_ economic growth is enough” (italics in original). Again, a quick look is enough to realise it provides limited evidence for what Burn-Murdoch wants to say. Figure 1 (p. 13) is a textbook saturation curve: beyond a certain GDP-per-capita threshold, growth loses its correlation with wellbeing entirely. Or, in the paper’s own dense phrasing: “The results show that the elasticity tends to start at a moderate level, then rise with GDPPC, reaching a peak in Quintile II, fall modestly but remains high in Quintile III, and then falls to a much lower level by the average GDPPC in Quintile IV, P$27,010.” (Please, if you’re a scholar, spare your readers and read Deirdre McCloskey’s _Economical Writing: Thirty-five rules for clear and persuasive prose_.) Pritchett’s own curve says exactly what growth-critical economists have long argued: rich countries have already saturated the things that matter, and squeezing more GDP out of them barely moves the needle on human wellbeing. “You might like having a red car more than a blue car but if you don’t have a car, its color is hypothetical,” Pritchett writes. Degrowth is a prescription for the countries with the car, the SUV, the second SUV in the driveway, and the advertising, insurance, repairing, highways, and parking lots that comes with them. Citing a poor-country growth argument to rebut a rich-country sufficiency argument is a category error, one that has been debunked many times over (see, e.g., Hickel, 2020). The entire point of the “contraction and convergence” strategy explored by the Global Justice Project is to make ecological room for needs satisfaction in the countries where growth will actually help. The closing claim – that the problem “** _facing rich and poor alike_** […] ** _is that we don’t have enough of it_** ” – is absurd. For the poorest, the binding constraint is not the size of the world economy, it is its distribution and the ecological space left for them (see, for example, _Unequal uses of the Earth_). Every symptom Burn-Murdoch lists – a frightened, low-trust, hoarding, zero-sum society – is a distributional failure dressed up as an argument for more growth. Almost every problem the column raises – stalled mobility, stagnant median wages, intergenerational rent transfers, fraying trust, the AI-driven tilt toward capital – is a problem of distribution, not of growth. On a finite planet, where seven out of nine planetary boundaries have been breached, you cannot answer a distributional crisis by simply growing the economy further. If claim n°1 about decoupling is false (and I’ve shown that it is), then further growth in already-rich economies is unsustainable, regardless of what social good you hope it will deliver. The zero-sum panic isn’t an argument against degrowth. Read honestly, it is the single strongest argument for taking degrowth seriously. # Conclusion Across all five claims, the pattern repeats: Burn-Murdoch reaches for a congenial source, drops its caveats, and presents his selective interpretation as settled science. Coming from the _Financial Times_ ’s chief data reporter, that’s genuinely concerning. These cheap-shot tribunes, which bundle a handful of hyperlinks into a bombastic claim, are dangerously close to misinformation. What worries me is that some readers will take this at face value. A column like this takes minutes to read, hours to write, but days to fact-check against the literature. I’m aware that this is a losing battle for scientists, who will always run out of time first. My hope is that this debunking sharpens readers’ critical instincts and helps them see that a handful of old papers and posts, dressed up with one’s own columns, cannot overturn the well-documented findings of an entire field. Looked at fairly, this isn’t even a real attack – it’s a mosquito on the back of an elephant. # Notes * * * [1] The column mentions a technology that is supposedly “** _central to decoupling energy from emissions_** _._ ” The hyperlink points to a _Bloomberg_ profile of a Chinese battery billionaire. Little technical reminder: solar energy and batteries make electricity, and electricity is only about 20% of global final energy consumption. The other 80% is liquid fuels for transport, heat for industry, and the like, where solar barely reaches. Worse, even within that 20% slice, the “** _revolution_** ” is only now, and only barely, beginning to substitute for fossil fuels rather than add to them – for most of industrial history, new energy sources have piled on top of the old rather than replacing them (see _More and More and More_). [2] It gets worse for the journalist, because the authors he cites went out of their way to disclaim exactly the reading he gives them. Dollar and Kraay are explicit: “This is not to say that growth is all that is needed to improve the lives of the poor” (p. 9). They also note that the “pro-poor growth” agenda amounts to “a call for some other policy interventions that raise the share of income captured by the poorest,” and that, search as they might, they were “unable to uncover any systematic evidence” that the usual policies do so (p. 3). In other words: the paper sold here as evidence that growth lifts the poor concludes that we don’t know how to make growth do anything special for them. And here is the detail that should have ended the paragraph before it even began. Dollar and Kraay deliberately refuse to use a poverty line. They define “the poor” as the bottom 20% and 40% rather than people below a fixed threshold, and they explain why in a footnote: with a real poverty line, the relationship gets messy, and they concede that on that measure “incomes of the poor […] rise less than proportionately with average incomes” (p. 12, fn. 7). So the canonical reference for “growth reduces poverty” quietly sidesteps measuring poverty-below-a-line, precisely because the result is weaker once you do. [3] In the _Our World in Data_ piece, its author Max Roser estimates that “the world economy needs to increase five-fold for global poverty [using a $30 poverty line] to substantially decline” (for a critique of this approach, see Hickel and Sullivan, 2024, pp. 4-5). In the Global Justice Project, Thomas Piketty and his colleagues also assume a large increase by a factor of 3.5 of world GDP. The difference is that, contrary to John Burn-Murdoch, they’re advocating for a convergence scenario with degrowth in very rich countries, quasi-stagnation for rich countries, and growth for all the others who have not yet reached the GDP target (for more, see A response to the WIL, 2026). [4] Note that the American Enterprise Institute is a free-market think tank. Basically, its _raison d’être_ is to make the case for what John Burn-Murdoch argues, which should be enough to raise suspicion. Relying on them for proof that growth is good would be like quoting a report from Philip Morris to argue that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. [5] Fun fact: John Van Reenen’s book _The Economics of Creative Destruction_ (co-written with Ufuk Akcigit) includes a foreword written by the French president Emmanuel Macron, which lays out a passionate defence of economic growth and capitalism: “Creative destruction is the vital energy of the ‘spirited horse’ of capitalism. If we know how to tame it and steer its path, then it is possible to reconnect with shared prosperity while protecting our common goods. […] it [talking about the book] reinstates a growth objective. We have given in too much to defeatism, by taking growth as exogenous and lamenting its slowdown. If we believe in creative destruction, we know we can influence the rate of growth, through more work and more innovation” (p. xii). [6] Here is Tim Harford making a plea for growth in the _Financial Times_: “If income inequality has fallen, and taxes have become more redistributive, then what is the problem? The answer: slow growth. Broadly-based economic growth supplies the funding for public services and benefits, while easing people’s concerns about affording the essentials of life. The UK’s problem is not that economic growth has been too narrow, but that it has barely happened at all. What we have had is broadly-based stagnation. […] There is a paradox here: the weaker growth becomes, the more people focus on inequality, fighting over the pie rather than finding ways to make the pie grow. This new government is right to emphasise the need for growth rather than redistribution.”

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Some notes on ‘Manchesterism’

by Mark Burton (with input from the SSM collective) Britain’s probable next Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has used the word ‘Manchesterism’ for his alternative governmental programme. Since we have been observing and constructively criticising the Manchester developmental model for nearly one and a half decades, we can offer a few observations about it. Burnham set out the basic concept of Manchesterism in a Guardian article of 22 January, 2026. In Greater Manchester it meant “roll[ing] back some of the worst aspects of the 1980s”, i.e. of Thatcherism. Specifically he listed * Taking back public control of the buses. Burnham used the provisions of existing legislation to replace the free for all of bus companies to prioritise profitable routes, with a system whereby routes were planned by Transport for Greater Manchester, in partnership with local councils, and the bus companies had franchises to deliver that service. It was something we campaigned for as part of the Better Buses coalition, helping get a positive result for the required public consultation. * “Taking a long-term approach to rebuilding an economy devastated by the deindustrialisation of the Thatcher era.” This was based on setting up “five growth-driving clusters across the city region” covering Advanced Materials and Manufacturing, Digital, Cyber and AI, Health innovation and Life Sciences, Creative Industries and Low Carbon. The announcement of these had been accompanied by the usual claims about the high growth rate of Greater Manchester compared to the rest of the UK. * Establishing pathways for young people into these sectors via the prioritisation of technical education, via partnerships between the region’s leading industries and schools and colleges, using the framework of the T levels established by the last Tory government. So how would that apply to the UK as a whole? In the Guardian article, Burnham says, > _“_ _Replicating this thinking at a national level could mean putting electoral reform centre stage as the means to create a more collaborative politics and consensus on the public investment needed to free the country from the pernicious pincer movement of the simultaneous cost-of-living and housing crises. This in time will restore greater control over public spending and remove the uncertainty about the country’s direction, thereby putting us in a better position in relation to the markets_ _“_ _._ In his speech of 29 June at the People’s History Museum, he explained some more. Manchesterism is, * _Place-first, not party-first_ * _Problem-solving, not point-scoring_ * _Long-term, not short-term_ At the national level it will mean resetting the balance between the centre and the regions, since councils don’t have the resources they need to do the things local people need. It will combine fiscal responsibility with investment in infrastructure, with Universities playing a key role to facilitate innovative businesses, because the desired growth will come from the ground up, not from central manipulation. However, it means government, local and national, will intervene where the market does not and cannot deliver, hence the promise of a massive building programme for council housing. A further dimension of the emerging Manchesterism model is the Greater Manchester ‘Good Growth Fund’, £1Bn of public investment aimed at reaching the parts of the conurbation that have not benefited from the (typically speculative) inward investment that was such a strong part of the City of Manchester’s strategy (led by Richard Leese and Howard Bernstein, initially as a pragmatic accommodation with the Thatcher government after successive defeats of the Labour party nationally) since long before Burnham arrived at the mayoralty. In his 29 June speech, Burnham implied a similar approach nationally. After all, he represents one of those places where the frustrations of a hard-pressed population mean the far right is snapping at the heels of the Labour Party, with the real possibility of a far right government after the next election: Burnham, like it or not, is probably the best chance to prevent that. ## Behind ‘Manchesterism’ While the above is more indicative of the likely Burnham government’s policy mix than would be a definitive statement, it is possible to identify a number of underpinnings, and on that basis to suggest both its likely benefits but also, critically, its limitations. ### Collaborative politics In 2004 I was seconded (from the NHS) into a fairly senior management role at Manchester City Council. One of the ‘delights’ was attendance at, actually quite interesting, management courses, and I was also able to attend an external programme that emphasised cross-agency leadership (a key part of my role). One of the emphases in all this was on working in partnership: it was said to be something at which Manchester excelled, and that was true. The external programme, which featured appearances from leaders from a number of organisations, public and private, in the city, also emphasised ‘leadership without authority’, the use of informal power and influence, with other organisations, and their key players, to achieve goals. It is possible to see a lot of this in the way Burnham works: it is something he is very good at. The GM Mayor has actually quite limited powers and no authority over the other council leaders. So the use of convening and ‘soft’ power, has been essential, as when on Burnham’s arrival he pulled council leaders and others together to tackle street homelessness. So when he says, > _“While the political direction I set is not up for negotiation, I will build an inclusive team at the very highest level so that all parts of the party – and the country – can see themselves reflected and represented in it…. > I will reach out to other political parties to find as much common ground as we can and build that more collaborative approach…”_ he is speaking from experience. It is, also sound political know-how to keep one’s critics and enemies close. However, there can be a downside. Perhaps he is too willing to accommodate, to compromise. Greater Manchester is the only large city without a low emissions zone. There was going to be one, albeit an inadequate one that would not have charged private cars but would have charged the most polluting commercial vehicles. There were protests from taxi and van drivers and Burnham quickly retreated. So now we have an inadequate strategy that pretends that electrifying buses will deal with the problem, despite the evidence collected by his Greater Manchester Combined Authority. So the possibility of ‘flip-flopping’ and then ‘spinning the compromise’ as somehow better, will be something to watch out for. We’d want to see a broader definition of collaborative politics to involve a much more participatory democratic model. That would be a vital component of an effective counter-strategy against the far right. ### Place-making and Community Wealth Building Burnham emphasises ‘place-based collaboration’ and the primacy of place-based strategies. Again he is drawing from a legacy that he encountered in Manchester. The Centre for Local Economic Strategies is based here, and for decades it has been promoting the idea, and the methods, for making local economies work better for the local population. One of the key ideas is that of ‘anchor institutions’, those organisations that are rooted in the place, like the universities, the hospitals, the councils, and other locally focussed organisations, such as, in Manchester, the Co-op. Anchor institutions can exert an influence of the flows of money, for example by procuring services and goods locally, or by having preferential employment policies for local people. They can establish interventions, often in partnership, for local economic and social development, examples of which Burnham gave in his speech. While this has happened in and around Manchester, perhaps the best-known and most successful implementation has been that in Preston, under the leadership of council leader Matthew Brown. The term used for this is ‘Community Wealth Building’. That idea, of ‘plugging the leaks’ so the ‘local multiplier’ can take effect, was promoted by the New Economics Foundation in its pre-Keynesian radical days, itself probably drawing on developments as far away as Brazil. ‘Community Wealth Building’ is actually a bit of a misnomer: it is really the capture, and then retention, of revenue for the local economy. That is its limitation. It doesn’t change the underpinning economic system that relies on exploitation-based profit maximisation. So while, so long as the system is still functioning, it can be mitigated by capturing some of the value (in the technical, Marxist sense) that it generates, it will not fundamentally change the system, and the whole strategy is vulnerable to the wider dynamics of footloose capital, itself in permanent crisis, now intensified by both geopolitics and the collapse of earth and ecological systems. Can Burnham offer anything that goes beyond these ultimately limited strategies? ### Growthism and the idea of ‘Good Growth’ The word ‘growth’ appears eleven times in his 29 June speech, and eight times in his January Guardian article. While this reflects the dominant political and economic thinking, it also reflects Manchester’s strategy – known as ‘boosterism’. While Greater Manchester’s claims to higher growth rate than other comparable cities were questionable at the turn of the decade, it now seems to be the case that, after London and Reading, it does have a higher rate in 2026 (although as the BBC radio programme ‘More or Less’ noted, there are likely questions about fair counting and we know that the crude statistic of changes in the size of the economy isn’t necessarily reflected in things like wages). However, that is because it is successful in attracting investment, because it has a concentration of Universities and hence a pool of well qualified people, and also because of the building boom in the centre. However, is it a recipe for national success? There are a number of problems. Firstly, there are winners and losers and Burnham has been clear that the very evident wealth in the urban core is not reaching many of the suburbs and towns. That would likely result from stimulating growth on a National scale, notwithstanding the proposed de-centring of government administration from Whitehall (a number 10 of the North). Secondly, the idea of success being based on competition with other places becomes problematic on a national scale: not everywhere can be a winner. Thirdly, economic (i.e. material) growth brings problems. All the evidence is that it worsens the climate and ecological crisis – we are already in serious overshoot on multiple dimensions, including climate. Growth is also dependent on global supply chains, of oil and petrochemicals, minerals, and also food: these are threatened by geopolitical events and also by the increasing difficulty of winning these resources from their sources. Growth is not a sound strategy for the long term and might not even be possible. Burnham qualifies the term ‘growth’ as ‘good growth’. Well, nobody wants bad growth surely! Good growth is an attempt to suggest that it is possible to pick and choose, so that only good things grow: it is a flawed concept. The economy isn’t like that: it is not selective, since to produce ‘good things’ means that bad things will happen: for example, the more the digital economy grows (one of the foci of the Greater Manchester ‘Good Growth Fund’), then the extraction of minerals and energy (rare earths, copper, cobalt, lithium, aluminium, oil, coal……) increases, with all the attendant impacts (spoil heaps, tailing ponds, air pollution, destruction of forests and of communities and livelihoods elsewhere). As we put it elsewhere, ‘the multiplier doesn’t care about the climate’. We live in a world with absolute limits and not only does growth have to be capped, it probably has to be reversed. At the very least, as we’ve consistently argued, if you want some things to grow on a finite planet, then you have to also prepared to make some things contract. In his 29 June speech he included ‘defence’ industries as part of good growth, and is already landed with the challenge of filling Starmer’s parting gift of a £4.7Bn shortfall on the expansion of weaponry. Well, that’s a prime example of a sector that does need to contract, to allow the ecological space for other sectors to grow. ## In conclusion In many ways Andy Burnham has been a good mayor for Greater Manchester. However, the good things (e.g. buses, a carbon budget, the technical education developments, action on homelessness) have been constrained, partly by his own limited powers, as he acknowledges in the 29 June Speech, but also by the overall economic model and strategy of growth. That’s why in Greater Manchester we have a Joint Strategic Plan that will build on 13 square miles of green space and add to the overshoot on the Greater Manchester carbon budget: this was agreed before the current government’s roll-back of environmental regulations, green-lighting of green belt destruction and excessive housing targets. It’s why we still have filthy air here and, despite the real improvements in public transport and provision for walkers and cyclists, the private car rules supreme. Maybe it’s why we have a local government pension fund that steadfastly refuses to divest from fossil fuels. Good luck to him as our national leader, but don’t expect too much, and keep up the pressure! ### Share this: * Share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon * Share on X (Opens in new window) X * Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Print (Opens in new window) Print * Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn * Like Loading... ### _Related_

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Ryebank Fields: the battle against development continues

Green space, contamination fears, and local residents’ resistance: no end in sight in the battle to save Ryebank Fields

northwestbylines.co.uk

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The right wing threat and a viable future

_A statement fromSteady State Manchester _ Composite of Farage against fire at the Southport race riot (2024). by MB from source under a CC licence. ## ``Introduction`` With horror we see the electoral success of POX, The party of Xenophobes and Fascists (which, without irony, actually calls itself _Reform_ _UK 1_). In the May election round they gained 677 more councillors, took control of 8 councils, landed a regional Mayor and gained another MP, in a formerly safe Labour seat. Some caution is needed; while their vote share was 31%, on this occasion, the first past the post system yielded a disproportionately greater level of representation, 41% of contested council seats. Nevertheless, should this be repeated at a General Election, then they could form the next government, some 80 years after the great war against fascism. In what follows we will identify why POX is such a threat, explore the basis for their success, and review strategies, flawed and promising, to fight back.`` ## What is POX and why is it such a threat?`` POX has multiple roots. Its leadership is largely from the property owning class, Nigel Farage (or should it be ‘Falange’?)2 himself is a stockbroker, while their largest funder Aaron Banks is a businessman whose wealth was estimated to be about £250,000,000 in 20173. Their token Asian chair, Zia Yusuf, is even richer4. Among their membership are a large faction from the Little Englanders from the far right of the Conservative Party, well represented in the cohort of new councillors. There is also a sizeable contingent of out and out fascists, former members of the various fringe fascist groups, BNP, NF etc., and Farage himself appears to have flirted with such politics in his youth5. No doubt there are also others who naively see POX as offering answers and potential roles for them in changing the country. While they are beginning to make inroads into Labour heartlands, they certainly do not represent working class interests.`` The party’s limited policy statements threaten all kinds of minorities, sustainability and especially decarbonisation, and public spending6. It promotes authoritarianism and is characterised by a callousness – exemplified by the newly elected mayor Andrea ’finger’ Jenkyns saying migrants should be housed in tents (that would be in the cold and wet British winter). As a right wing populist party7, POX pretends an alliance between the working class and sections of the elite and property owning class: needless to say, what they have in store is the antithesis of working class interest. These multiple dimensions of the right wing threat imperil any moves to an economy and society that is both sustainable and just – what we call the _Viable Economy and Society_.`` ## Pillars of their success`` The POX vote mirrored that 10 years ago for leaving the European Union. In council wards where more than 65% voted Leave in 2016, the POX got an average 45% vote share. In contrast, in places where a majority voted to stay in the EU, just 19% voted POX. However, being anti-European is not the explanation; both vote results reflect a deeper problem. The psephologist John Curtice noted8 that POX _“won 39% of the vote in heavily working-class wards but only 19% in the most middle-class ones”._ ‘Middle-’ and ‘working-class’ are misleading terms here9, but he goes on to note that “support for the party averaged 43% in wards where more than half of adults have few, if any, educational qualifications. In contrast, it polled just 19% where more than two in five have a degree”.`` Curtice notes that _“…_ _o_ _n average the party only polled 22% in wards where more than one in five identify as other than ‘white’, compared with a tally of 33% in places where more than 95% told the 2021 Census that they were ‘white’.”_ This reflects the established social scientific finding that familiarity breeds tolerance and understanding. It is noteworthy here though since on television news reports, the majority of POX voters who were interviewed stressed immigration, and particularly so-called illegal immigration, as chief reasons for their support. As we know Farage bangs on endlessly about immigration generally and ‘the boats’ in particular, and has succeeded in shifting the terrain of political discourse, at least for the Tory and Labour leaderships.`` While the POX vote could, then, be characterised as that of those with little education and little direct experience of diversity – of the ignorant – we need to look at what is behind this. Curtice again: _“[POX]__did best in what has sometimes been characterised in the wake of the Brexit referendum as ‘left-behind’ Britain – places that have profited less from globalisation and university expansion”._ Casting the view further afield, this is not a uniquely English or British phenomenon. The German neo-fascists, AfD do best in the east of the country, in the areas that de-industrialised and lost much of the previous socialist safety net heavily after unification. Trump’s vote similarly reflected economic woes. In all these cases, though, the vote was also the result of the lack of a credible progressive alternative (although the renewed Die Linke in Germany is proving something of an exception10): Labour, Social Democrat, and Democrat voters stayed at home.`` Demographics only goes some way to explain POX’s success. We also have to look at how their appeal is manufactured. In Mr Farage, POX clearly has a valuable asset. Paradoxically, given his class affiliation, he is able to project an image of the common sense rebel, who likes a pint and a cigarette. He is very adept at putting forward plausible arguments, their strength being their foundation on half-truths. So, there has been an increase in the numbers of desperate people trying to reach the UK in small boats: he doesn’t mention that this is caused by the successive blockage of safe routes, nor that the majority of asylum claims are successful – people flee for a reason. Of course there is no mention of the fundamental reasons why people become refugees, the damage caused by Western imperialism to their countries and by climate and ecological devastation to their livelihoods. He says decarbonisation is costly. It is, although the continued burning of fossil fuels will have a greater cost, and the cost of ‘renewable’11 electricity is artificially high due to it being tied to the price of that expensive fuel, gas. Other arguments appeal to self interest, or selfishness: the UK’s carbon emissions are small compared to the global total, so we shouldn’t worry about our carbon pollution – rather like justifying dumping an old refrigerator in a beauty spot because rogue waste disposal operators are fly tipping there.`` POX’s argumentative skills would count for nothing, however, were there not open and supportive platforms for them. This is all very well documented, whether in terms of the disproportionate number of appearances of Farage on the BBC’s news and current affairs programmes, or the right wing mainstream press in this country. As an example, BBC presenter Nick Robinson, on the flagship Today radio programme, 23rd April, interviewed Adrian Ramsey (Greens) and Nigel Farage (POX). For Ramsey he just repeated the same simplistic question (about gender identity), interrupting when Ramsey tried to give a nuanced answer. Ramsey didn’t get to talk about Green policies at all, and this in the lead-in to local elections. When it came to Farage, in contrast, he mostly just let him talk on his preferred, divisive themes, with the usual lack of persistent questioning.`` ## Countering the threat`` How should the POX threat be countered? What the Labour leadership is doing is very much not the way. Under the influence of the socially conservative ‘Blue Labour’ and right wing Blairite factions, pronouncements so far have been on the terrain established by POX and the Tory right. Starmer and those around him are signalling to voters that they will take action on the POX hobby horses, making destructive assaults on the rights of migrants, and increasing military expenditure12 13. As George Eaton has written: _“expect an increasing number of MPs to demand a ‘reset’ – greater action to reduce immigration (one of the defining issues in Runcorn) and an avoidance of further austerity measures.”_ But as Simon Wren-Lewis points out14, _“…_ _any Labour MP should know reducing immigration will increase the need for austerity measures given Labour’s fiscal rules, or do these MPs believe the Reform party politicians who falsely say the opposite?__“._`` It really does appear that Labour’s socialist humanitarianism is proving less durable than the social liberalism of the Liberal Democrats, who have been far more reliable in countering POX’s immigration rhetoric15. So what is the alternative? We can split this into two parts. `` ### Fair Distribution, Environmental Wins and Basic Decency`` Firstly, making appropriate policy demands – to both pressure the Labour government and also strengthen the emergent alternative platform in the form of the disaffected Labour activists and rebel MPs (and possibly some local government leaders like the supposed Prince in Waiting in the North), the Greens, Plaid Cymru, the SDLP, and a number of social movements and NGOs. These need to centre on fair distribution, via adequate benefits – the winter fuel payment and the 2-child cap being likely easy wins, an adequate Living Wage, Trade Union rights and progressive taxation on income and on wealth so the richer sections and big capitalists pay16.`` It means seeking environmental win-wins in terms of shock hardening, green jobs, adequate public transport, amenity and liveability of communities. It means resisting militarisation and authoritarian legislation on protest. It means not seeking easy answers (e.g. Labour’s flawed green industrial revolution with its unrealisable short term goals on electric power and failure to recognise the deep nature of the energy and minerals crisis).`` Above all it means espousing and modelling basic decency, humanitarian values and kindness – much more than trying to make economistic justifications for immigration, as some soft critics in and allied to Labour, and the Lib Dems, are doing.. We don’t support immigration because it boosts the economy but because we believe in the social value brought by a diverse population, and of course, the rights of people to flee persecution and reach a safe haven, like Farage’s Huguenot ancestor. For we know that the expansion of the economy (the establishment’s magical but elusive ‘growth’) will, by damaging the livelihoods and environments of those at the wrong end of global supply chains, lead to further migration anyway as ecosystems and food production collapse and armed conflicts spread.`` Allied to that is the need to consistently and clearly call out lies, half truths and hate wherever we encounter it.`` ### Building an informed political culture`` Beyond all that, though, there is a greater need, and this perhaps goes to what’s really at the root of POX’s success. Britain has a truly abysmal political culture. Politics has become the province of parties that seem little more than electoral machines, with the politicians, at national level typically being those who have always specialised in politics as a profession, coming up through policy units, think tanks, and so on. Gone are the days, for example, when the Labour Party was the political voice of the trade union movement and its leadership included those who’d come up from the shop floor. But there is more to it than that. Again, looking at the labour and socialist movement, there was a time when its lifeblood was in the various community organisations that gave members a grounding in political education – it taught them to read the world, and it did that through their participation. That was the case for the renowned Manchester Hall of Science, that so impressed William Morris for the quality of the debate, there were the Clarion clubs, the socialist churches and clubs, and the Workers Educational Association (which still exists)17. Without romanticising all this excessively, the contrast is stark with today’s culture of passive consumption of ideology manufactured by the political and media machine, although something of the possibilities were glimpsed in the period of political awakening north of the border around the last independence referendum. `` There needs to be the recreation of a movement of political education fit for these present times of climate and ecological emergency, continued austerity, social division and conflict, and the renewed threat from the right. That does imply building a culture of civic discourse within our communities, a culture that would realise the idea of active political and cultural citizenship, rather than the pale, peculiarly British identity of ‘subject’. The key processes in such political educative work are what is called in the jargon _conscientisation_ – the developing of an understanding through critical reflection on the realities that face participants, and _de-ideologisation_ , where the process of active engagement in this exploration enables participants to penetrate the smog of received and distorting ideology; ideology that is manufactured in the interests of the elite and property owning class. Only something like this has any chance of making a dent in the dominance of the mass media and the algorithmic propaganda found on the main social media platforms. For it to happen would mean the combination of local initiatives and its dedicated facilitation by radical parties and movements. We invite you to do that work!`` _The Steady State Manchester collective, May 2025_ 1 As a party, it has a very strange structure. It is both a political party and a limited company. _“_ _As of 2025, ownership of the party was transferred from Farage to a new business legally constituted as Reform 2025 Limited, a company limited by guarantee, replacing the original company which was controlled by Farage as majority shareholder. The directors and guarantors of the new company are Farage and Ziauddin Yusuf, who will effectively control the new company Ltd.”.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_UK#Funding_and_structure _So it is far from democratic. 2 The surname ‘Farage’, is probably of French Hugenot origin; he also has distant German ancestry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Farage . The similar sounding ‘Falange’.was the Spanish fascist party of democracy-overturning dictator Francisco Franco – the Phalange are a Christian fascist movement in Lebanon, that conducted in the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Palestinian refugee camps. 3 https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/bristol-businessmen-who-bankrolled-brexit-45452 4 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zia_Yusuf and https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/back-school-mr-yusuf-and-his-remoralisation-mission 5 https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/nigel-farages-most-controversial-moments-ukip-brexit-b1122381.html 6 https://assets.nationbuilder.com/reformuk/pages/253/attachments/original/1718625371/Reform_UK_Our_Contract_with_You.pdf?1718625371 7 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_populism 8 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yg467m8mjo 9 Class, as an analytic category, is properly defined by relation to the means of production, not in terms of the resulting occupational and cultural characteristics. 10 https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-left-party-die-linke-rising-young-voters-heidi-reichinnek/ https://jacobin.com/2025/03/die-linke-resurgence-germany-left https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2025/03/04/die-linke-germany/ 11 We put ‘renewable’ in quotes since there are real limits to the renewability of the new wind and solar generation plant: but that is an issue that neither POX nor the net-zero, green growth lobby appreciate. 12 https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/starmers-seemingly-suicidal-spiral-losing-votes-all-fronts 13 https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/reforms-rise-local-elections-whats-ha]ppening-and-why 14 https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-mistakes-that-have-led.html 15 The Labour party had a number of ideological roots, including socialist humanism, Marxism, Christian socialism, and trade union sectional interests. Those became allied with a largely ameliorative economic approach concerned with managing capitalism more efficiently. A similar contradiction is present in the Liberal (Democratic) Party, and in liberalism more generally. Social liberalism, going back to writers like John Stuart Mill, is about human rights, fair representation, and political and social freedom. Economic liberalism (going back to Adam Smith, John Locke and others is concerned with allowing the supposedly free market of commodities, including labour, to operate freely and efficiently. In both parties, this contradiction between social philosophy and economic ideology is what keeps fundamental change to the system off the agenda. 16 For an example programme, adequate to the social, economic and ecological challenges, including taxation proposals, see http://gettingreal.org.uk. 17 For more on this history and its relevance to alternatives to growthism, see our _In Place of Growth_, 2012, page 39 _Box: Historical memory and lived culture_. `` ### Share this: * Share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon * Share on X (Opens in new window) X * Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Print (Opens in new window) Print * Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn * Like Loading... ### _Related_

steadystatemanchester.net

The right wing threat and a viable future

_A statement fromSteady State Manchester _ Composite of Farage against fire at the Southport race riot (2024). by MB from source under a CC licence. ## ``Introduction`` With horror we see the electoral success of POX, The party of Xenophobes and Fascists (which, without irony, actually calls itself _Reform_ _UK 1_). In the May election round they gained 677 more councillors, took control of 8 councils, landed a regional Mayor and gained another MP, in a formerly safe Labour seat. Some caution is needed; while their vote share was 31%, on this occasion, the first past the post system yielded a disproportionately greater level of representation, 41% of contested council seats. Nevertheless, should this be repeated at a General Election, then they could form the next government, some 80 years after the great war against fascism. In what follows we will identify why POX is such a threat, explore the basis for their success, and review strategies, flawed and promising, to fight back.`` ## What is POX and why is it such a threat?`` POX has multiple roots. Its leadership is largely from the property owning class, Nigel Farage (or should it be ‘Falange’?)2 himself is a stockbroker, while their largest funder Aaron Banks is a businessman whose wealth was estimated to be about £250,000,000 in 20173. Their token Asian chair, Zia Yusuf, is even richer4. Among their membership are a large faction from the Little Englanders from the far right of the Conservative Party, well represented in the cohort of new councillors. There is also a sizeable contingent of out and out fascists, former members of the various fringe fascist groups, BNP, NF etc., and Farage himself appears to have flirted with such politics in his youth5. No doubt there are also others who naively see POX as offering answers and potential roles for them in changing the country. While they are beginning to make inroads into Labour heartlands, they certainly do not represent working class interests.`` The party’s limited policy statements threaten all kinds of minorities, sustainability and especially decarbonisation, and public spending6. It promotes authoritarianism and is characterised by a callousness – exemplified by the newly elected mayor Andrea ’finger’ Jenkyns saying migrants should be housed in tents (that would be in the cold and wet British winter). As a right wing populist party7, POX pretends an alliance between the working class and sections of the elite and property owning class: needless to say, what they have in store is the antithesis of working class interest. These multiple dimensions of the right wing threat imperil any moves to an economy and society that is both sustainable and just – what we call the _Viable Economy and Society_.`` ## Pillars of their success`` The POX vote mirrored that 10 years ago for leaving the European Union. In council wards where more than 65% voted Leave in 2016, the POX got an average 45% vote share. In contrast, in places where a majority voted to stay in the EU, just 19% voted POX. However, being anti-European is not the explanation; both vote results reflect a deeper problem. The psephologist John Curtice noted8 that POX _“won 39% of the vote in heavily working-class wards but only 19% in the most middle-class ones”._ ‘Middle-’ and ‘working-class’ are misleading terms here9, but he goes on to note that “support for the party averaged 43% in wards where more than half of adults have few, if any, educational qualifications. In contrast, it polled just 19% where more than two in five have a degree”.`` Curtice notes that _“…_ _o_ _n average the party only polled 22% in wards where more than one in five identify as other than ‘white’, compared with a tally of 33% in places where more than 95% told the 2021 Census that they were ‘white’.”_ This reflects the established social scientific finding that familiarity breeds tolerance and understanding. It is noteworthy here though since on television news reports, the majority of POX voters who were interviewed stressed immigration, and particularly so-called illegal immigration, as chief reasons for their support. As we know Farage bangs on endlessly about immigration generally and ‘the boats’ in particular, and has succeeded in shifting the terrain of political discourse, at least for the Tory and Labour leaderships.`` While the POX vote could, then, be characterised as that of those with little education and little direct experience of diversity – of the ignorant – we need to look at what is behind this. Curtice again: _“[POX]__did best in what has sometimes been characterised in the wake of the Brexit referendum as ‘left-behind’ Britain – places that have profited less from globalisation and university expansion”._ Casting the view further afield, this is not a uniquely English or British phenomenon. The German neo-fascists, AfD do best in the east of the country, in the areas that de-industrialised and lost much of the previous socialist safety net heavily after unification. Trump’s vote similarly reflected economic woes. In all these cases, though, the vote was also the result of the lack of a credible progressive alternative (although the renewed Die Linke in Germany is proving something of an exception10): Labour, Social Democrat, and Democrat voters stayed at home.`` Demographics only goes some way to explain POX’s success. We also have to look at how their appeal is manufactured. In Mr Farage, POX clearly has a valuable asset. Paradoxically, given his class affiliation, he is able to project an image of the common sense rebel, who likes a pint and a cigarette. He is very adept at putting forward plausible arguments, their strength being their foundation on half-truths. So, there has been an increase in the numbers of desperate people trying to reach the UK in small boats: he doesn’t mention that this is caused by the successive blockage of safe routes, nor that the majority of asylum claims are successful – people flee for a reason. Of course there is no mention of the fundamental reasons why people become refugees, the damage caused by Western imperialism to their countries and by climate and ecological devastation to their livelihoods. He says decarbonisation is costly. It is, although the continued burning of fossil fuels will have a greater cost, and the cost of ‘renewable’11 electricity is artificially high due to it being tied to the price of that expensive fuel, gas. Other arguments appeal to self interest, or selfishness: the UK’s carbon emissions are small compared to the global total, so we shouldn’t worry about our carbon pollution – rather like justifying dumping an old refrigerator in a beauty spot because rogue waste disposal operators are fly tipping there.`` POX’s argumentative skills would count for nothing, however, were there not open and supportive platforms for them. This is all very well documented, whether in terms of the disproportionate number of appearances of Farage on the BBC’s news and current affairs programmes, or the right wing mainstream press in this country. As an example, BBC presenter Nick Robinson, on the flagship Today radio programme, 23rd April, interviewed Adrian Ramsey (Greens) and Nigel Farage (POX). For Ramsey he just repeated the same simplistic question (about gender identity), interrupting when Ramsey tried to give a nuanced answer. Ramsey didn’t get to talk about Green policies at all, and this in the lead-in to local elections. When it came to Farage, in contrast, he mostly just let him talk on his preferred, divisive themes, with the usual lack of persistent questioning.`` ## Countering the threat`` How should the POX threat be countered? What the Labour leadership is doing is very much not the way. Under the influence of the socially conservative ‘Blue Labour’ and right wing Blairite factions, pronouncements so far have been on the terrain established by POX and the Tory right. Starmer and those around him are signalling to voters that they will take action on the POX hobby horses, making destructive assaults on the rights of migrants, and increasing military expenditure12 13. As George Eaton has written: _“expect an increasing number of MPs to demand a ‘reset’ – greater action to reduce immigration (one of the defining issues in Runcorn) and an avoidance of further austerity measures.”_ But as Simon Wren-Lewis points out14, _“…_ _any Labour MP should know reducing immigration will increase the need for austerity measures given Labour’s fiscal rules, or do these MPs believe the Reform party politicians who falsely say the opposite?__“._`` It really does appear that Labour’s socialist humanitarianism is proving less durable than the social liberalism of the Liberal Democrats, who have been far more reliable in countering POX’s immigration rhetoric15. So what is the alternative? We can split this into two parts. `` ### Fair Distribution, Environmental Wins and Basic Decency`` Firstly, making appropriate policy demands – to both pressure the Labour government and also strengthen the emergent alternative platform in the form of the disaffected Labour activists and rebel MPs (and possibly some local government leaders like the supposed Prince in Waiting in the North), the Greens, Plaid Cymru, the SDLP, and a number of social movements and NGOs. These need to centre on fair distribution, via adequate benefits – the winter fuel payment and the 2-child cap being likely easy wins, an adequate Living Wage, Trade Union rights and progressive taxation on income and on wealth so the richer sections and big capitalists pay16.`` It means seeking environmental win-wins in terms of shock hardening, green jobs, adequate public transport, amenity and liveability of communities. It means resisting militarisation and authoritarian legislation on protest. It means not seeking easy answers (e.g. Labour’s flawed green industrial revolution with its unrealisable short term goals on electric power and failure to recognise the deep nature of the energy and minerals crisis).`` Above all it means espousing and modelling basic decency, humanitarian values and kindness – much more than trying to make economistic justifications for immigration, as some soft critics in and allied to Labour, and the Lib Dems, are doing.. We don’t support immigration because it boosts the economy but because we believe in the social value brought by a diverse population, and of course, the rights of people to flee persecution and reach a safe haven, like Farage’s Huguenot ancestor. For we know that the expansion of the economy (the establishment’s magical but elusive ‘growth’) will, by damaging the livelihoods and environments of those at the wrong end of global supply chains, lead to further migration anyway as ecosystems and food production collapse and armed conflicts spread.`` Allied to that is the need to consistently and clearly call out lies, half truths and hate wherever we encounter it.`` ### Building an informed political culture`` Beyond all that, though, there is a greater need, and this perhaps goes to what’s really at the root of POX’s success. Britain has a truly abysmal political culture. Politics has become the province of parties that seem little more than electoral machines, with the politicians, at national level typically being those who have always specialised in politics as a profession, coming up through policy units, think tanks, and so on. Gone are the days, for example, when the Labour Party was the political voice of the trade union movement and its leadership included those who’d come up from the shop floor. But there is more to it than that. Again, looking at the labour and socialist movement, there was a time when its lifeblood was in the various community organisations that gave members a grounding in political education – it taught them to read the world, and it did that through their participation. That was the case for the renowned Manchester Hall of Science, that so impressed William Morris for the quality of the debate, there were the Clarion clubs, the socialist churches and clubs, and the Workers Educational Association (which still exists)17. Without romanticising all this excessively, the contrast is stark with today’s culture of passive consumption of ideology manufactured by the political and media machine, although something of the possibilities were glimpsed in the period of political awakening north of the border around the last independence referendum. `` There needs to be the recreation of a movement of political education fit for these present times of climate and ecological emergency, continued austerity, social division and conflict, and the renewed threat from the right. That does imply building a culture of civic discourse within our communities, a culture that would realise the idea of active political and cultural citizenship, rather than the pale, peculiarly British identity of ‘subject’. The key processes in such political educative work are what is called in the jargon _conscientisation_ – the developing of an understanding through critical reflection on the realities that face participants, and _de-ideologisation_ , where the process of active engagement in this exploration enables participants to penetrate the smog of received and distorting ideology; ideology that is manufactured in the interests of the elite and property owning class. Only something like this has any chance of making a dent in the dominance of the mass media and the algorithmic propaganda found on the main social media platforms. For it to happen would mean the combination of local initiatives and its dedicated facilitation by radical parties and movements. We invite you to do that work!`` _The Steady State Manchester collective, May 2025_ 1 As a party, it has a very strange structure. It is both a political party and a limited company. _“_ _As of 2025, ownership of the party was transferred from Farage to a new business legally constituted as Reform 2025 Limited, a company limited by guarantee, replacing the original company which was controlled by Farage as majority shareholder. The directors and guarantors of the new company are Farage and Ziauddin Yusuf, who will effectively control the new company Ltd.”.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_UK#Funding_and_structure _So it is far from democratic. 2 The surname ‘Farage’, is probably of French Hugenot origin; he also has distant German ancestry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Farage . The similar sounding ‘Falange’.was the Spanish fascist party of democracy-overturning dictator Francisco Franco – the Phalange are a Christian fascist movement in Lebanon, that conducted in the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Palestinian refugee camps. 3 https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/bristol-businessmen-who-bankrolled-brexit-45452 4 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zia_Yusuf and https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/back-school-mr-yusuf-and-his-remoralisation-mission 5 https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/nigel-farages-most-controversial-moments-ukip-brexit-b1122381.html 6 https://assets.nationbuilder.com/reformuk/pages/253/attachments/original/1718625371/Reform_UK_Our_Contract_with_You.pdf?1718625371 7 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_populism 8 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yg467m8mjo 9 Class, as an analytic category, is properly defined by relation to the means of production, not in terms of the resulting occupational and cultural characteristics. 10 https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-left-party-die-linke-rising-young-voters-heidi-reichinnek/ https://jacobin.com/2025/03/die-linke-resurgence-germany-left https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2025/03/04/die-linke-germany/ 11 We put ‘renewable’ in quotes since there are real limits to the renewability of the new wind and solar generation plant: but that is an issue that neither POX nor the net-zero, green growth lobby appreciate. 12 https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/starmers-seemingly-suicidal-spiral-losing-votes-all-fronts 13 https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/reforms-rise-local-elections-whats-ha]ppening-and-why 14 https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-mistakes-that-have-led.html 15 The Labour party had a number of ideological roots, including socialist humanism, Marxism, Christian socialism, and trade union sectional interests. Those became allied with a largely ameliorative economic approach concerned with managing capitalism more efficiently. A similar contradiction is present in the Liberal (Democratic) Party, and in liberalism more generally. Social liberalism, going back to writers like John Stuart Mill, is about human rights, fair representation, and political and social freedom. Economic liberalism (going back to Adam Smith, John Locke and others is concerned with allowing the supposedly free market of commodities, including labour, to operate freely and efficiently. In both parties, this contradiction between social philosophy and economic ideology is what keeps fundamental change to the system off the agenda. 16 For an example programme, adequate to the social, economic and ecological challenges, including taxation proposals, see http://gettingreal.org.uk. 17 For more on this history and its relevance to alternatives to growthism, see our _In Place of Growth_, 2012, page 39 _Box: Historical memory and lived culture_. `` ### Share this: * Share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon * Share on X (Opens in new window) X * Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Print (Opens in new window) Print * Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn * Like Loading... ### _Related_

steadystatemanchester.net

Late changes to the programme

Go back to the programme There have inevitably been some changes from the printed programme, and other last minute changes. These are listed below – full details are on the event pages which you can access with the clickable links to the event or artist name in the details below. _Spotted an error?_ Please do let us know – click to email us or use this form. ### **Extra events** **A Chime for Manchester****:** CAF Artist James Nissen has won the competition to compose new chimes for Manchester Cathedral. He will give a short talk about it, Tuesday 12 May, 6:30 – 7:00, Chorlton Library. The History of Chorlton Arts Festival 2002 – 2026 Local historian Andrew Simpson will join artist Peter Topping to give an illustrated talk on our history. Tuesday 12 May, 8:00 – 9:00. **Kalinka Balalaika Orchestra** have a performance and have-a-go workshop on Monday 11 May _Click for details_ **Paul King **will be hosting a “meet the artist” event in conjunction with his exhibition. _Click for details_. ### **Clarifications, changes and corrections** The event formerly listed under M.J. Lee is now titled Manchester Crime Writers. There are 2 events from this group, a _talk_ and a _workshop_. Helen Jones’s artwork will now be on display at the Royal Oak from 9-16 May. See _Day 1_ and _Days 2-8_. On the printed programme, the wrong location map code is given for the following events: Al Roberts, Horse and Jockey, correct map code is 26. Re-enchantment, Longford Park, map code is 29. ### **Withdrawn events** Alice Laranjeira – exhibition, but other artists are still exhibiting at The Garden Bar. Woioi are no longer able to play, due to unforseen circumstances. The other bands on at the Spreadeagle, evening of 15th May will still be playing.

chorltonartsfestival.org

Chorlton Arts Festival – Annual Community Arts Festival in Chorlton, Manchester

chorltonartsfestival.org

Original post on mstdn.social

mstdn.social

The 15-Minute City

The climate emergency, spiraling inequality and COVID-19 pandemic all challenged cities. In Paris, the pandemic struck just as local government made ambitious commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 100% by 2050, while promising to increase residents’ well-being, employment opportunities and the equitable distribution of benefits across the city.

prizeforcities.org

People Place Planet - Didsbury - NEBFilm

A special community screening: The People’s Emergency Briefing #PEBuk What’s happening with climate and nature, and what does it mean for everyday life in the UK? Join us for a screening of the People’s Emergency Briefing - an eye-opening film bringing together nine leading UK scientists and

pppdidsbury.org

Original post on mstdn.social

mstdn.social