At The Northern Rose we deal with social issues across Manchester. We can bring attention to the problems like housing affordability, working conditions, and cost of living, but where do we look for answers? An obvious answer is local government. We can talk to local councillors, request information from government departments, and try to contact the mayor. All these people are accountable to the public and can be replaced through democratic means if they act against our interests.

However, a large part of Manchester is not publicly owned and many of the decisions that influence people within the city are not directly within the control of our elected officials. So, to get a better idea of exactly who, and what, is influencing these factors, we’ve sought to understand who owns large parts of the city.

Do we know who owns what?

Walk along the Manchester Ship Canal and you’d think you were looking at publicly owned infrastructure, like the tram lines or the town hall. You’d be wrong. The entire thirty-six-mile waterway, from Eastham Locks to Salford Quays, belongs to a single private company. So does the Bridgewater Canal. So does most of Trafford Park.

Look up at the skyline instead and the same story repeats. Most of those towers stacking up around Deansgate and Greengate belong to one developer. If you work in Manchester, most of the office blocks are owned by one property firm. The land the BBC sits on, the land under Spinningfields, and the land the next high-rise luxury flats will be built on, almost none of it is publicly owned, publicly accountable, or, in most cases, even publicly understood.

Manchester often sells itself as regenerated from the bottom up, a city of workers who built themselves a diverse and thriving metropolis. The truth is a handful of private companies, most of them family-controlled, one of them barely known, decided what large parts of this city would become.

The family at the top: Peel Group

Peel Group is not controlled by a pension fund or accountable to public shareholders. It’s a private, family-controlled empire, roughly two-thirds owned by the Whittaker family, with a further quarter held by the Saudi conglomerate Olayan Group. At the top of the family sits John Whittaker, a man who has spent five decades quietly assembling one of the largest privately held landbanks in Britain, and who mostly operates in the shadows.

What do they own?

Peel owns the Manchester Ship Canal outright, with ambitions to grow container traffic through it more than tenfold by 2030. It owns the Bridgewater Canal too. Through Peel L&P, its property arm, it controls TraffordCity which equates to the Trafford Centre’s surrounding 3.5 million square feet of retail, leisure and office space, drawing forty million visits a year, plus Trafford Palazzo, and a further £2.6 billion of investment planned over the next two decades. It’s behind Manchester Waters (formerly branded Trafford Waters), a mixed-use development that’s already delivered 850 homes across three gateway sites, with a 24-storey tower under construction and a fresh masterplan for the 25 remaining acres at Pomona Island submitted to Trafford Council at the end of last year.

Through Peel Ports, it plans to open Port Salford, a £400 million tri-modal freight terminal built in partnership with Salford City Council. It runs Barton Aerodrome and Manchester Heliport. It’s behind Cammell Laird’s shipbuilding and repair operations via the APCL joint venture. It is, by tonnage, the UK’s second-largest ports operator.

There’s also MediaCityUK, which Peel L&P describes on its own site as having been one of their central projects, and “one of the most transformational regeneration projects in Europe at the time of its delivery”. The freehold has since passed to Landsec, but the branding exercise worked, and MediaCityUK is often thought of as a Peel achievement, a gift to the city, rather than being a very profitable regeneration on land Peel happened to control.

Peel’s power

In 2010, Peel Energy proposed a 200,000-tonne biomass incinerator on Ship Canal land in Davyhulme, known as Barton Renewable Energy Plant. Residents organised as the Breathe Clean Air Group and the group marched through Urmston. Trafford Council’s planning committee rejected the scheme unanimously, citing both air-quality fears and harm to the “vitality and confidence” of Davyhulme, Flixton and Urmston. Peel appealed. In 2014, a judge overturned the council’s legal challenge and found for Peel anyway, ruling that the benefits outweighed the health concerns, at which point Trafford’s own deputy council leader was left threatening judicial review against a decision made in Whitehall, about land in his own borough, against the wishes of his own residents. That’s what it looks like when a large private landowner’s planning appeal can simply overpower a unanimous local vote.

In 2011, Peel sold the Trafford Centre to Capital Shopping Centres for £1.6 billion, which was then the most expensive property acquisition in British history, taking £700 million of the price in shares rather than cash. Peel reportedly avoided paying around £200 million in capital gains taxes because it took payment in shares. Peel kept buying more, becoming Capital Shopping Centres’ largest shareholder within a year. That company became Intu, which collapsed into administration in 2020, and those shares should’ve been worthless, although Peel claimed Intu’s collapse had no impact on them. This is a useful reminder of the opaqueness of Peel and shows it isn’t infallible with a flawless record on investments. It’s a firm that seemingly made a very large, very leveraged bet on retail property and lost, even as it kept the far more durable asset (the land underneath) for itself.

The airport stakes tell a similar story of failure. Peel owned a 76% stake in Liverpool John Lennon Airport in 1997 but has now sold its entire stake. Doncaster Sheffield Airport, which it owned outright, closed entirely in November 2022. This decision cost many jobs and reduced regional connectivity across South Yorkshire and was a decision made by a private landlord answerable to nobody but itself. The airport looks set to reopen in 2027 with public funding and support from Andy Burnham.

And then there’s Therme Manchester next to the Trafford Centre. A £450 million “wellness resort”, Europe’s largest, being built on land that was under Peel’s control until very recently. It’s not a Peel project in ownership terms. But it’s Peel’s pattern in miniature: a huge, privately financed leisure destination on former industrial land, arriving with promises of jobs and regeneration, on a site that used to be something else entirely, decided somewhere well above the heads of the people who’ll live next to it.

What’s the problem?

Journalist Andy Spinoza, in his book Manchester Unspun, described Whittaker as an “aggressive property entrepreneur” and a “secretive tax exile” who lives on the Isle of Man. Peel’s ultimate controlling company, Tokenhouse Ltd, is itself registered on the Isle of Man, one of the UK’s favourite tax havens. The arrangement runs like this: a Crown dependency company, controlled by an offshore-based family, sits atop a family empire whose entire value is generated by land, water, rent collection, and infrastructure inside Greater Manchester. The wealth is extracted here.

Peel has not always been free of scrutiny. In 2013, Baroness Margaret Hodge was chair of the Public Accounts Committee, where she accused Peel of not paying enough corporation tax. A spokesperson for Peel stated that they pay the “appropriate level of tax”, and since then, there has seemingly been no further government scrutiny of Peel. The Herald reported in 2014 how Peel avoids taxes in Glasgow, but nothing is being done to redress the issue.

Contrast the Whittaker family’s public profile with Manchester’s other big developers. Tom Bloxham and Tim Heatley built careers on being visible, quotable, and endlessly profiled. Whittaker built one on being none of those things. An empire this size, run this privately, by a family that avoids interviews, ought to be scrutinised much more. Instead, their wealth extraction seems to be accepted as a norm.

Not all bad

It’s important to recognise that Peel has done some good things for Manchester and the North West. Peel has given the council a free 125-year lease to land in Castlefield for housing for the homeless. Embassy Village has reportedly been a huge success and Bev Craig has described it as an example of how “good people can do good things”. Additionally, their projects do create jobs for locals and stimulates the local economy, although we don’t have the figures to tell us exactly how beneficial these projects are.

However, the question we need to ask is whether this philanthropy and job creation make up for the resources that are siphoned away from the region through a lack of tax revenue, and we would suggest that it does not. If Peel paid fair taxes, then many more jobs could be created and there would be more resources available for council funding of essential projects.

Who actually decided this?

None of what has been covered here is illegal. None of it is even unusual, by the standards of how post-industrial British cities get rebuilt. But that’s the point. These activities shouldn’t be so ordinary. Our legal architecture and local governments enabled a handful of private families to own the physical infrastructure of a major English city, without scrutinising their tax affairs, and we’ve simply come to accept that this is the way things are.

Manchester talks a good game about being a city that regenerated itself. What’s less often said is how much of that regeneration happened on land owned by a small handful of private families and funds, on terms those owners set, with the profits flowing to the Isle of Man, to Monaco, to a Canadian pension fund, or to a London Real Estate Investment Trust. Profits often seem to leak out the region and not back to the people who actually live, work, and contribute to the local economy. If you want to know who actually decided what Trafford Park looks like, who gets to build the canal-side flat and who doesn’t, whether Davyhulme gets an incinerator or Great Jackson Street gets another tower on a public loan, you’re not looking for a councillor. You’re looking for a handful of men who, between them, rarely give an interview.

Peel is just one part of the puzzle, and in subsequent articles we’ll look at Bruntwood, Renaker, Urban Splash, Capital & Centric, Allied London, and Landsec — the other large asset owners across Manchester, to break down exactly who owns the city.

Christopher Nolan’s interpretation of The Odyssey is a brilliant retelling of a story older than the Bible. Nolan nails many aspects of the story that only reiterate that he is the greatest modern director. However, Nolan does something even more significant than producing a cinematic masterpiece, he sent a deeply meaningful political message. The genius of what Nolan has done is that the message isn’t in your face, it isn’t telling you what to believe, but like any great cultural product, it weaves a message into the narrative which shows the benefits of certain political position.

What is the Message?

Throughout the film, the “Laws of Zeus” recur as the moral spine. These are Nolan’s dramatisation of xenia (ξενία), the Greek code of guest-friendship. A host was obligated to welcome a stranger, offer food, shelter and protection, and hold off interrogating them until their needs were met. A guest, in turn, was expected to behave respectfully, not abuse the host’s generosity, and reciprocate where possible. Crucially, xenia wasn’t abstract charity but a binding relationship, often expected to carry across generations, knitting families and communities together through mutual obligation. Breaking it wouldn’t just offend a stranger but corrode the very cultural norms that makes strangers safe to encounter at all.

What Happens When You Break Xenia?

The Odyssey’s most important message is that when we stop following this law of hospitality, or we abuse it, it erodes trust in the whole system. Odysseus’ disastrous journey back from Troy demonstrates the catastrophic impact of his own role in breaking the rule of xenia. The Trojan Horse abused the laws of hospitality: it was presented as a gift, only to become the weapon that destroyed the Trojans. As the story spread across the Mediterranean, people became suspicious of anyone seeking hospitality, worrying that any guest might be concealing a Trojan Horse of their own. Nolan perfectly conveys how deeply that single act of betrayal damaged trust in the gifts of strangers, and in the laws of xenia, across the ancient world.

When Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca, he finds his own crime replicated. A household of suitors who have taken up residence as guests while plotting to seize everything within it. Odysseus eventually rescues his home, but there is no clean redemption. He goes into exile all the same, as the man who broke xenia. He may have restored it under his own roof, but he cannot undo what he did at Troy. Nolan’s argument isn’t really about gods punishing mortals. It’s that a society which stops policing the obligations owed to strangers—which stops being good hosts to guests and guests to hosts—eventually eats itself.

A Warning, Not a Prophecy

The timing of this message is pertinent, arriving as the political right openly campaigns on the idea that migrants and refugees are burdens to be turned away rather than obligations to be honoured. Nolan’s film sends a stark warning: when guests abuse the trust extended to them, hosts stop extending it, and when hosts turn strangers away on principle, they abandon the very obligation that once bound societies together. Either way, the bond breaks, and everybody loses. That, more than any battle with a Cyclops, is the real danger Nolan is asking us to sit with.

Privatisation rarely announces itself. It doesn’t arrive with the drama of a ministerial statement or a sweeping legislative change. Instead, it emerges through a slow and deliberate erosion: the closure of a day unit, the outsourcing of a specialist service, the quiet rewriting of commissioning frameworks to make private providers not just optional, but inevitable. And when mental health care is already fragile - skeletal teams, high turnover, exhausted staff - these pressures don’t simply reshape the system. They break it.

Across England, NHS community mental health teams are buckling under decades of neglect. Workforce shortages that were once described as “concerning” are now terminal. Staff are spread so thinly that continuity of care - the foundation of safe mental health practice - has become a luxury, not a standard. At the same time, private companies and large VCSEs are absorbing bigger and bigger portions of public money, often delivering worse outcomes at far higher cost. The public is told services remain “free at the point of use,” as though that phrase alone can protect against everything happening beneath the surface.

This article looks at what privatisation is already doing to the workforce, to patient care, and to the future of the NHS itself - and why we need an urgent parliamentary debate before the damage becomes irreversible.

The Workforce Is the Heart of Mental Health Care - and It Is Being Hollowed Out

Mental health care relies on expertise: psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, OTs, social workers, peer workers, support staff, administrators. When you weaken that workforce, you weaken everything else. But national workforce planning has been repeatedly delayed, watered down or quietly abandoned - largely because publishing the numbers would expose the scale of political failure.

The result is a system where:

· Vacancies remain open for months or even years

· Teams operate at 40–60% of required staffing

· Newly qualified staff are thrown into high-risk roles without support

· Experienced clinicians leave for better pay and safer working conditions

· “Skill-mixing” is used as a euphemism for diluting clinical expertise

In this context, the rise of private and VCSE contracts doesn’t relieve pressure - it intensifies it. Many of these organisations require NHS staff to move across to deliver services, draining teams already on their knees. Others operate with minimal qualifications, creating a parallel workforce with fewer protections and less training.

Patients do not receive a “choice” in this shift. They simply receive worse care.

Privatisation Doesn’t Need Fees at the Door - the Damage Happens Long Before That

Politicians often reassure the public that privatisation isn’t happening because the NHS remains free at the point of use. But privatisation doesn’t begin when you’re forced to pay. It begins when services are carved up, outsourced, fragmented and hollowed out - until the only providers left standing are private.

Here’s what that looks like on the ground:

1. Longer waiting times become normalised

When private or VCSE organisations fail to deliver, patients are sent back to the NHS - only now the NHS has even less capacity to absorb them.

2. Complex cases are left with NHS teams

Private providers often take on “light-touch” work with predictable outcomes, while NHS teams are left managing the most distressed, unwell and high-risk patients with the least resources.

3. Local knowledge evaporates

Mental health care is relational. Understanding housing associations, community networks, GP relationships, schools, crisis teams - this takes time. Private organisations often rotate staff, rely on short contracts, or simply don’t have this background.

4. Standards quietly fall

When commissioners outsource services to meet “transformation targets,” scrutiny decreases. Contracts are monitored on paper, not practice. Meanwhile, NHS staff are held to ever-tighter standards.

5. Money is spent on management, not care

Private and large VCSE providers absorb millions in “infrastructure,” “overheads,” “leadership teams,” and “innovation frameworks.” The NHS cannot compete with its own money being used against it.

This is privatisation - not in theory, but in lived experience.

The Long-Term Costs Are Catastrophic - Financially and Clinically

Privatisation is often sold as efficiency. In mental health, it has done the opposite.

Private inpatient beds are dramatically more expensive than NHS ones

Trusts now spend hundreds of millions annually sending patients to private hospitals. These beds frequently offer:

· Lower staffing levels

· Less experienced clinicians

· Higher rates of restraint

· Worse outcomes

But because NHS beds have been shut down, trusts have no alternative.

Community contracts are awarded to organisations with little expertise

Across England, “transformation” money has been funnelled into corporate-scale VCSEs and private companies to run highly complex services. These groups often:

· Deliver minimal clinical work

· Use unskilled staff

· Fail to meet targets

· Require major corrections by the NHS

The public ends up paying more for worse care.

Fragmented care is expensive care

When multiple organisations handle different fragments of a patient’s journey, communication fails. Patients bounce between services, relapsing, withdrawing, repeating assessments, and eventually entering crisis.

Crisis care is the most expensive form of care.

Fragmentation therefore isn’t just unsafe; it is financially irrational.

The Ideological Shift: Mental Health Care as a Marketplace

Underlying this entire process is an ideological shift: mental health care reimagined not as a public service, but as a market. Patients become “service users,” clinicians become “providers,” and care pathways become “products.” Contracts replace relationships. Procurement frameworks replace clinical reasoning.

This shift has real consequences:

· Clinical expertise is devalued

· Short-term contracts replace long-term investment

· Outsourcing becomes the default

· Commissioners are incentivised to choose the cheapest bidder, not the best service

· Patient needs become secondary to market logic

It is an approach that prioritises appearances - “transformation,” “innovation,” “community-led models” - over outcomes. It is an approach that asks: How cheaply can we do this? rather than What do patients need to stay well and alive?

Where This Leads If Unchallenged: A Dystopian Future Already Taking Shape

If current trends continue, mental health care in England could become a patchwork of inconsistent, semi-privatised services where:

· NHS community teams become small crisis-response hubs

· Most “care” is outsourced to low-paid, low-skilled providers

· Patients are triaged, assessed and signposted endlessly

· Private inpatient beds become the norm

· Standards vary wildly between areas

· Preventable deaths continue to rise

· Accountability becomes impossible

In such a future, “free at the point of use” becomes meaningless. Care that is technically free can still be unsafe, inadequate or dehumanising.

This is not speculation. It is the direction of travel.

Why We Need Parliamentary Scrutiny. Now.

The Early Intervention in Psychosis team going on strike is not an isolated event. NHS mental health staff are increasingly speaking out because they have reached the limit of what can be sustained safely or ethically.

We need:

· A full parliamentary debate on Community Transformation and privatisation

· A published national mental health workforce plan

· Transparency on where mental health budgets are going

· Evidence-based assessment of VCSE and private sector outcomes

· A commitment to rebuilding NHS services, not replacing them

For years, the deterioration of mental health care has been treated as an unfortunate inevitability. It is not. It is a political choice - one that can be reversed if there is public pressure and honest debate.

The stakes are too high for silence. The NHS can survive neglect for a while. It cannot survive being dismantled piece by piece while pretending everything remains the same.

Could Count Binface beat Nigel Farage in Clacton? This idea sounds like rubbish. Which is precisely why it’s worth taking seriously.

Beneath the humour, there is a serious political question: could Britain’s first-choice intergalactic bin collector exploit the same electoral maths that delivered victory for Reform? Because when you lift the lid on Clacton’s result, things get interesting.

In the 2024 election, Farage won with 21,225 votes, taking 46.2% of those cast. But dig through the numbers and there is another story.

Farage won less than half of votes cast. More importantly, his votes represented only around 27% of those eligible to vote. Nearly three-quarters of eligible voters either backed another candidate or stayed at home. That leaves plenty of material for a candidate willing to rummage around in the electoral bins.

If every party opposed to Reform decided to throw their differences in the same recycling bin and endorse one challenger, Count Binface, then there is a genuine opportunity. The combined non-Reform vote in 2024 exceeded Farage’s total by more than 3,500 votes. If every voter who backed another party simply voted for Binface instead, Farage would lose.

Of course, politics is not a simple bin collection round and voters might not get on board the bin lorry. We’d be right to expect that the Conservatives would never vote for a candidate backed by Labour and Labour voters would refuse to support a candidate endorsed by the Conservatives. Others might just refuse to vote. However, Binface is largely apolitical. With policies like building one affordable house and capping the price of ice-cream, all parties could realistically back him and not compromise their political agenda.

So, if Farage kept every one of his 21,225 votes, Binface would need to persuade roughly 86% of those who voted for another party in 2024 to unite behind him. Maybe that’s wishful thinking. But there is another landfill of support: the people who didn’t vote.

Turnout in Clacton was only 58.4%. More than 32,700 eligible voters stayed home. If a unity campaign failed to consolidate every opposition voter, it wouldn’t necessarily be fatal. Winning over a relatively small fraction of those non-voters could make up the difference. I’ve written about the electoral appeal of humour and Binface’s campaign has the potential to reach and mobilise the typically disengaged from politics.

Even if only 80% of anti-Reform voters backed Binface, he would be around 1,400 votes behind Farage. Convincing just a few thousand non-voters to turn up would be enough to tip the scales.

The question is not whether Count Binface personally has a realistic route to Westminster. It is whether a divided opposition can avoid throwing away an opportunity. That is the real lesson from this absurd thought experiment.

This isn’t really about Count Binface. It’s about the mechanics of Britain’s electoral system. Under First Past the Post, elections are often won not because one candidate commands majority support, but because everyone else is divided.

Could Count Binface become MP for Clacton? Probably not. Could a united challenger defeat Nigel Farage? The numbers suggest the answer is yes.

Count Binface currently isn’t quite binevitable, but there is a real path to Bindependence Day.

Zack Polanski has done something no Green leader has managed before. Membership has tripled, the party won its first by-election, and the Greens are now perceived as a real electoral threat by the Labour Party. And yet this week a poll put the Greens at their least popular ever under his leadership, worse than at any point before he took over. Something isn’t working, and it isn’t the policy offer.

The problem is the story. Right now, the Green Party are letting their national profile get written for them. Recognising a surging Green movement, the press has piled on scrutiny thick and fast. Stories including a spring conference row over a contested “Zionism is Racism” motion, candidates suspended and, in some cases, arrested over alleged antisemitic posts, and a party that looked slow and defensive in response. That’s a real story, and no comms strategy papers over bad candidate vetting.

But the deeper problem is that this is now the only story. Polanski’s actual politics like the wealth tax, the rent freezes, proportional representation, have been almost entirely displaced by a narrative he didn’t write and has struggled to answer on its own terms. You cannot out-argue a bad vibe. You can only replace it with a better one.

My suggestion is that the Greens lean into unseriousness. Not as a substitute for taking the scandal seriously, but as a separate strategy entirely. Being sharp, funny and self-aware about your own party is not the same as being sloppy about who you let stand as a candidate. Confusing the two is exactly how the party ends up doing neither well.

Building and Stalling

The Greens have always been popular with educated, conscientious, and politically active voters. For those who are consuming lots of political content, the Greens are visible and their policy platform is convincing. However, for most voters who don’t consume much politics, personality, vibes, and slogans mean more than the policy agenda.

Polanski came to prominence thanks to his feel-good vibes and ability to cut through the media landscape. Appearances on popular podcasts, The Last Leg, and snappy social media clips helped him reach younger voters. The whirlwind by which Polanski emerged on the public stage led to a historic surge in popularity.

There is no doubt that Polanski is a talented political operator. Able to light up spaces with a smile and a laugh and radiate positive energy. The problem is that many voters are not seeing this side of him. Many are only hearing the right-wing talking points. Polanski has stated on his podcast “Bold Politics” that he purposefully doesn’t platform ragebait figures to generate outrage. I understand this decision, but this is not how you beat the algorithm.

Without being far more combative and attention grabbing, the Green ceiling may only be as high as the audience it already has. A change in approach and adaptation to the algorithm may improve the reach, and increase the potential vote share.

Winning the Attention War

Social media rewards outrage and spectacle by design, not by accident, that’s simply the reality. Compare the register the Greens currently operate in: statements “condemning,” “calling for,” “expressing solidarity with.” Worthy, correct, forgettable. It’s the language of a pressure group, not a party trying to replace Labour.

Nigel Farage understands something the Greens haven’t yet: being memorable and being taken seriously aren’t in tension, they’re the same project. A pint in a pub does more for Reform’s brand than a hundred position papers — not because Farage is right about anything, but because he grasps that for most of the public, politics is downstream of personality and spectacle whether anyone likes it or not.

Farage is thin-skinned and facing his own political crisis, but this isn’t to say something cannot be learnt from his approach to politics. I have written about how comedy can reach apolitical voters, and this can be from both the left and the right. Currently, politicians from the right have made the best use of this strategy, perhaps because they are less conscientious and have less shame. It’s time the left learnt to have less shame, because the moment demands it.

Why This Will Work

The Greens have the raw material to do this well. They’re the most popular party by far among voters under thirty, and that generation’s entire media diet runs on absurdity, irony and the joyfully ridiculous. It’s the language TikTok speaks natively. The Greens need to lean into this. This doesn’t mean stopping BBC or Sky News appearances, but it does mean focusing on stunts and content that will reach a much larger, apolitical audience. Content that reaches those who don’t watch the news.

Practically, this doesn’t require a variety show. Send someone dressed as a landlord to a Reform press conference to hand out fake rent invoices. Stage a mock funeral for the NHS outside the DHSC. Project Wes Streeting’s own quotes onto a wall outside a hospital facing corridor care, Led By Donkeys style. Cheap, shareable, and impossible for lobby journalists to ignore, because they generate footage, not just quotes.

These stunts need to be designed to go viral, grab the headlines, and provide the opportunity to put forward a narrative. This is because comedy does something a press statement can’t: it can reach the masses, and it can make people like you. A party willing to respond with humour, rather than retreat into defensive legalese, signals something about its character that voters want to see. No “we take this extremely seriously” statement will shift a narrative, but a comedic acknowledgement and engagement with issues will reach the masses and win supporters.

Zohran Mamdani may only be a mayor, but he went from 0% name recognition to becoming the mayor of the richest city in the world with this approach (take a look at this video).

The Greens don’t have a popularity problem because their politics are unpopular — rent freezes and wealth taxes all poll well. They have a reach problem, and reach isn’t fixed with serious policy documents or traditional messaging. It’s fixed by showing people, repeatedly and visibly, who you actually are. Right now, the Greens’ image is being increasingly defined by other people’s headlines. It’s time the Greens answered it themselves — and made people laugh while they did it.

Why This Matter?

The Northern Rose is committed to progressive politics. Wealth inequality is out of control, and without addressing it, the state won’t have the resources to meet any of the crises ahead, from climate change to an ageing population. Any party willing to fight the billionaire class rather than court it has our support, which is exactly why a comms failure that lets scandal eclipse a genuinely radical platform matters. Polanski’s success pushes every other party to take that platform seriously. It’s worth the Greens fighting for the attention on their own terms, rather than ceding it to right-wing headlines. It’s time for the Greens to stop playing by the rules and start making their own.

The UK government’s plan to ban social media access for under-16s is correct. Social media companies exploit users and damage their mental health. These companies know about the harms they are creating and do nothing about it. Australia led the way, and now our government has chosen to take the same step.

I am not opposed to social media in principle. I think it could be an incredible tool used for many beneficial purposes. However, like any tool, it can also cause harm. Ultimately, the utility of social media depends on how it’s governed and run. If platforms were constructed for the benefit of the public and creators held accountable for the decisions they make, then we would not have the toxic platforms that we have today. Since the platforms have been constructed to extract as much profit from users as possible, no matter the cost to their mental health, bans are necessary. Yet, this doesn’t mean that we should ban all social media.

If we are serious about protecting children and rebuilding a healthier digital public sphere then we should ask a bigger question: why are we relying on a handful of American technology companies to shape our social lives in the first place?

Perhaps it is time for Britain to do something more ambitious: create a publicly owned social media platform.

The Social Media Experiment Has Failed

Social media was sold as a democratising force. It would connect communities, give ordinary people a voice, and strengthen civic participation. And it could still fulfil this promise.

Instead, platforms evolved into profit and data-extraction machines. Platforms make money by maximising engagement. The longer users remain online, the more advertisements they see. As a result, algorithms are designed not to inform us or make us happier, but to keep us scrolling.

The consequences are increasingly well understood.

Young people face unprecedented levels of online comparison and anxiety. Political debate is rewarded when it generates outrage rather than understanding. Conspiracy theories spread faster than fact checkers. Hate becomes profitable.

The problem is not merely bad content. The problem is that the platforms themselves are designed around incentives that prioritise engagement over wellbeing.

The Public Service Alternative

We’ve spoken about it before, and let’s reiterate it here. By building our own social media infrastructure, we could guarantee:

1. Genuine accountability. A British platform would be subject to British law in a meaningful sense, not through the clumsy reach of regulators who can fine Meta an amount that equates to pocket change, but through direct institutional accountability to Parliament, Ofcom, and ultimately us, the public.

2. Data protection with teeth. UK user data would remain under British jurisdiction, subject to the protections of domestic law rather than trusting foreign companies will act in trustworthy ways. This matters not just for privacy but for national security.

3. Editorial standards without editorial control. One of the core dilemmas of social media governance is the tension between free expression and harm prevention. A public institution would not be censoring speech; it would be applying the same editorial and regulatory principles that supposedly govern British broadcasting. It wouldn’t be perfect, but at least we’d have the power to refine our own principles, and they’d be subject to challenge, appeal, and the law.

4. Investment in British digital infrastructure. A serious UK platform would require engineering talent, data centres, content moderation teams, and product development. Those are skilled jobs, based here, contributing to the economy.

None of this would be particularly difficult. The UK has the expertise for building such a platform, and arguably this is now a matter of national security.

Banning under-16s from social media may protect the next generation from the worst harms of today’s platforms. Building our own could ensure they never have to choose between connection and exploitation in the first place.

Émile Zola’s Germinal is a classic of European literature and an essential book for understanding how the plight of workers is as pertinent now as it was in the late 19^th century.

Although the French miners of Zola’s Germinal live and work in conditions far worse than most of us can imagine, their fight to improve their lives is remarkably similar to ours.

Published in 1885, Germinal follows Étienne Lantier, an unemployed mechanic who drifts into a northern French mining community, finds work underground, falls in with the miners’ growing discontent, and eventually leads them into a strike that destroys mines and miners alike. It’s a sad book. Zola doesn’t romanticise poverty or sanitise the violence that erupts when people are pushed far enough. Nor does it have a happy ending or clear resolutions, but beneath the brutality, there’s a political argument running that can teach us a lot.

There are three lessons in particular that I got from the book that apply to the modern working-class:

1. Nobody is coming to save you

Étienne become convinced in that the International (the nascent workers’ organisation that was supposed to be weaving together the struggles of labourers across Europe into something unified and powerful) would come to the rescue of the striking miners. The miners listen and are eventually persuaded to become members.

Yet, once the strike drags on, the International essentially does nothing. The miners run out of their fighting fund and begin to starve, and no meaningful support materialises. I don’t think Zola is making a cynical argument here. He’s not saying organisation is pointless. He’s saying that outsourcing your hope to a distant structure, however well-intentioned, is a way of rejecting our own responsibility. The cavalry isn’t coming. Whatever is going to change will change because the people most affected by the problem build the power to change it themselves.

This is, I think, the first and most uncomfortable lesson of Germinal: not that solidarity is a lie, but that relying on external solidarity will not win the day. Support for a movement will always be important, but it cannot be substituted for the movement itself.

2. Know who you’re actually fighting

The most politically sophisticated thing Zola does in Germinal is show us how easy it is to point your rage in the wrong direction, and how costly that mistake is.

The miners have no shortage of reasons to be angry. They’re angry about the poor conditions of their work, the local manager who doesn’t have sympathy for their issues, their neighbours who gossip, the shopkeeper who exploits their debt. This makes it difficult for them to know where to channel their anger. Eventually, their rage is directed towards the mines. Since the miners cannot identify the shareholders who own the mines, seeing them as opaque, distant, and removed from reality, the physical mines themselves become the manifestations of ‘The Company’. However, this is a disaster for the miners because they destroy the very capital they need for work.

Zola does provide the stakeholder with a face, in the form of the Grégoire family. The family genuinely believe they have earned their dividends through the prudent investments of an earlier generation. They infantilise the workers and treat them as lesser humans. However, because they are detached from the workings of the mine itself, the workers don’t recognise the insidious nature of the family. They simply benefit, quietly and completely, from a system that grinds and exploits other people, whilst they live lives of leisure.

Unable to directly confront the real stakeholders and thus negotiate effectively, the strike eventually turns violent. The shopkeeper who exploited the workers for so long is killed and his body mutilated in a distressing scene. This achieves nothing since the shop keeper is himself a worker. Although slightly higher in the hierarchy than the miners, he was simply another cog in the machine.

Ultimately the enemy is not the manager who delivers the bad news. It’s not the shopkeeper who charges too much. It is the system and stakeholders who enforce dreadful conditions on the workers while extracting all the profit for themselves. This is not a comfortable lesson because structures and the stakeholders who own and control them are harder to hate than those who work to maintain them, but movements that hate the wrong people tend to exhaust themselves without ever threatening the correct targets or achieving any gains.

3. Formulate your method

The strike in Germinal fails. Zola makes sure we understand why, and the answer is not simply that the bosses were too powerful. The demands, the methods, and the leadership were unclear. The tactics oscillated from peaceful striking, which was politely ignored, to explosive violence, which eventually led to destruction, loss of life, and soldiers shooting striking miners.

Since the workers were unable to articulate exactly who their enemies were, and held out hope for an external force to save them, they were unable to formulate effective methods. Destroying the mines was of no benefit to the workers because they needed the mines for work. What was essential was that they renegotiated the terms of their work, or simply took ownership of them.

As an ex-miner who had previously experienced strike action, the character of Rasseneur provides the most realistic programme of change. He suggests negotiating with the bosses and securing gradual improvements to their conditions, but he is ignored because he is no longer personally invested in the movement and vainly wishes to lead the workers.

Zola never tells us what the correct methods would be, and it would be to reduce the complexity of nuance that he creates throughout the book to suggest there would have been a perfect method. But there are sliding door moments which decide the success of the movement. For instance, when the workers meet with the manager to demand better conditions, they were close to successfully forcing the manager to yield concessions, only to relent when he mentions ‘The Company’ and ‘The Board’. These parties appear nebulous and godlike to the workers and they fail to get the names and locations of exactly who the stakeholders are. What they didn’t realise is that the owners of the Mining Company were just people, and these people can be pressured.

We see the same issues today. When we don’t identify those responsible for our declining conditions, then how can we formulate how to engage with them? This isn’t about blaming one person, but it is about knowing where to apply pressure. Even if we don’t fully understand all the stakeholders, it is important to identify at least some of the correct targets.

4. The consequences of failure

Zola shows us that the repeated failure of the workers will lead to nihilism and anarchism. Souvarine, the novel’s most extreme character, is a committed anarchist who believes that the only honest response to an unjust system is its total destruction. He ultimately sabotages the mine, causing it to flood and kill many of the miners who return to work after the failed strike. This kills the very people he wants to liberate, and Zola is likely correct to insinuate that the greatest suffering created from the violent sabotage of capital will be borne by workers.

Germinal is nearly 140 years old. The mines it recreates are mostly closed and the International it references collapsed not long after Zola published his novel. And yet the three failures Zola diagnoses are relevant today. That’s what makes the book feel less like history and more like a warning that keeps getting ignored. No one will fix our conditions for us, we need to identify who is responsible for our declining living conditions, and we need to develop the correct methods for engaging with them.

Zola couldn’t tell us what to do. But he was very clear about what not to do. That’s not nothing. Sometimes it’s everything.

Every few years, a story about military dolphins surfaces and briefly dominates the news cycle. In May 2026, it happened again. I’m going to tell you why.

In a recent press conference US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked whether Iran was planning to deploy “kamikaze dolphins” to attack American warships in the Strait of Hormuz. Hegseth responded: “I cannot confirm or deny whether we have kamikaze dolphins, but I can confirm they don’t.”

We can’t say for certain whether this question was planted, but the Pentagon has consistently restricted who can report and ask questions about their activities, and there is a very clear benefit to such a question. The question arrived at a moment where congressional scrutiny of the war is growing. A question about kamikaze dolphins is not just funny—it is useful. It consumes airtime, generates social media engagement, and ensures that the lead clip from that briefing is a quip rather than a question about civilian casualties or legal authorisation.

Is There Any Truth to the Claim?

The reason these stories are so effective is that they contain a kernel of documented truth. The US Navy has run a Marine Mammal Programme since the 1960s, using dolphins for mine detection and harbour protection. The Soviet Navy did the same, and when the USSR collapsed, Ukraine inherited the programme and then sold 27 animals to Iran in 2000, along with the programme’s chief trainer. Russia revived its own dolphin units after annexing Crimea in 2014. The infrastructure for military dolphins genuinely exists. That is what makes the “kamikaze” elaboration so potent, it combines absurd fiction onto a credible foundation.

Propaganda and Turning the News into Entertainment

The purpose of planting such a question is to shift the news environment into focusing on an entertaining and humorous topic. This is not the first time that the military use of dolphins have become the focus of a news cycle. The Russians have been accused of using dolphins to guard military convoys and North Korea might have a fleet of communist dolphins trained to spread communist ideology through marine warfare.

The role of this propaganda is twofold; firstly, It frames the adversary—whether that be Iran, Russia, or North Korea—as both cruel and technologically desperate, a country reduced to strapping bombs to animals because it lacks the precision technological weapons to compete.

Secondly, the propaganda hijacks the news cycle and the media end up reporting on this rather than on the actual events taking place. It fills the available attention space with something absurd enough to be funny, harmless enough to share, and memorable enough to crowd out harder questions about what is actually happening in the war.

Comedy to Distract and Entertain

What makes the current moment genuinely interesting is that Iran has apparently recognised this dynamic and decided to play along rather than fight it. As I have written about for The Conversation, Iran’s social media operation has become adept at using humour and memes to reach audiences who don’t follow conventional news. Both sides seem to have concluded that absurdity travels further than argument. The dolphin, improbably, has become a weapon in meme warfare.

The next time you hear a bizarre military story in your feed, it is worth pausing and thinking about the purpose it serves. The laughter it provokes may be the intended reaction.

The Church and Friary of St Francis, designed by Victorian architect Edward Welby Pugin and completed in 1872, closed its doors as a working church in 1989 and fell into years of neglect and vandalism. At its lowest point it appeared on the World Monuments Fund's Watch List of 100 Most Endangered Sites in the World - alongside Pompeii and the Taj Mahal and the building was purchased for just £1.

Following a £6.5 million restoration programme, Gorton Monastery reopened in 2007 and now operates as a vibrant events venue, community space and home to Manchester Camerata chamber orchestra.

In this video we sat down with Elaine Griffiths, CEO of the Monastery of St Francis and Gorton Trust - the driving forces behind the restoration - and Grahame Birtles, one of the monastery's tour guides, who brings the building's extraordinary history to life. Together they tell the full story of how a community refused to let one of Manchester's greatest buildings disappear.

This is one of Manchester's most remarkable stories of luck and coincidence, underpinned by hard work, commitment and dedication, in a way, embodying Manchester.

Our Other Reports:

No New Doctors? Resident Doctor Strike Explained

We spoke with resident doctors to see why they are continuing strike action after negotiations broke down with the government.

In a nutshell, the heart of the dispute is pay restoration - doctors argue their salaries have been eroded in real terms for over a decade, and that the government's proposed deal, which would spread increases over three years, fails to address that.

The BMA accused the government of moving the goalposts during negotiations, with a 3.5% pay offer coming in below the current rate of RPI inflation.

Jewish & Muslim Communities Come Together To Celebrate Passover

Jewish and muslim communities came together to celebrate passover at St. Peter's Square in Manchester.

Passover represents the Jewish story of freedom, marking the Exodus of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. Na'amod - a UK wide movement of British Jews - invited muslim communities in Manchester saying that passover should signify a freedom for all.

Katy, a spokesperson for Na'amod said that passover signifies a freedom for all and used the opportunity to call for a stop to the escalating state-backed settler violence in the West Bank alongside the end of the genocide in Gaza.

Na'amod is currently calling for MPs to uphold international law and call for an end to the ethnic cleansing and banning imports to the UK from illegal settlements.

In This Episode

We sit down with Zoe, a local climate activist who has been arrested multiple times for taking part in protests. We explore what first motivated her to become an activist, what keeps her going despite the personal risks, and how she is trying to raise attention to the climate crisis.

Zoe speaks about the philosophy behind her actions - from moral responsibility and urgency to the belief that ordinary people can challenge powerful institutions. She also reflects on the consequences of protest and the experience of arrest.

What Else Have We Been Doing?

Henry North

Since covering the Gorton & Denton by-election, we’ve continued to cover union events and industrial action across the city alongside spinning several plates journalism related and not.

We’ve covered what looks like a case of Union busting at the iconic Refuge bar in Manchester (more about this in the future), the Together Alliance march in London last Saturday and a strike over the last minute pull out of pay rise and back pay by NHS management. The behaviour is unprecedented and it’s hard to believe that the pay rise stopped was from Band 2 to Band 3 which is a difference of £2,204 from £25,272 to £27,476 for 11 employees.

Kevin Corran, the Unison representative at the picket line told us that managers had spent more on a review of the pay agreement than they would have spent on the agreement itself - a frustrating situation.

It’s a lot to keep up with and to get videos as we publish them, we’d appreciate it if you could subscribe to our YouTube channel and if you like a video… please give it a like. It helps push us in the algorithm and reach new audiences.

Adam’s also been busy speaking at conferences. A couple of weeks ago he was in Dublin where he won an award for the best overall paper and - at the time of writing - is in Oxford for another conference where he’s given a speech.

What’s Coming Up?

We’re going to need the help in the algorithm too because we recorded a podcast episode last week about the many problems of social media and how they can censor the news that we consume. Adam talks about how he’s been at the Sky Sports campus in Brentford with a team of academics collecting data on the harms of social media - it’s an interesting chat but unlikely to be amplified by the platforms we publish on.

This Easter weekend we’ll be publishing an feature on the 30th anniversary of the restoration project at the Manchester Monastery - dubbed Manchester’s Taj Mahal. It’s a great story, one of coincidence and luck but underpinned by hard work and dedication.

Excitingly we’ve also set up The Northern Rose shop. I’m currently in the process of putting it all together but soon you’ll be able to find bucket hats, beanies, hoodies and mugs on there.

Once again, thank you for your continued to support. As we close in on 500 subscribers on YouTube I’m very proud of the following we have achieved and the news we have provided.

The internet was supposed to be decentralised and put power back in the hands of the people. Two decades later, the power to control our public conversation is in the hands of private American corporations and volatile billionaires. Meta decides what you see when you log in each morning. X, under Elon Musk’s ketamine addled stewardship, has become a place where disinformation and misinformation travels faster than corrections and fact checking ever can. TikTok raises legitimate questions about data sovereignty and foreign influence. And yet, in the UK—a country with a globally recognisable and well trusted public broadcasting tradition, thriving digital sectors, and the belief (often not enforced) in accountable institutions—there is no serious stake in, or alternative to, the platforms where millions of us get our information and live a significant portion of their public and political lives.

That needs to change. And there is an organisation capable of this sitting in plain sight: the BBC.

YouTube short explainer - follow this link

The Private Sector Has Not Delivered Solutions

The stakes of this debate are not abstract. During recent years, disinformation campaigns around Brexit, Covid-19, and multiple general elections spread primarily through privately-owned social platforms with no meaningful accountability to British law, British users, or British democratic norms. Whenever the government presses these companies to act, it is threatened, lobbied, or obfuscated by billionaires and their minions. When Parliament summons their executives to give evidence, the sessions became theatrical and demonstrate just how little leverage the British state has over the infrastructure that dictates much of our public debate.

The 2023 Online Safety Act was an attempt to impose some legal duties on platforms. It was also an admission of defeat. Rather than building something better, the UK chose to trust that billionaires would act better. Do you feel people are safer on the internet now than they were in 2023? That is not a strategy. It is managed decline.

Meanwhile, our data—the raw material of targeted advertising, political profiling, and behavioural manipulation—gets extracted out of the country and enriches companies that don’t pay their taxes here, employ relatively few people here, and feel no obligation to serve the British public interest.

The Answer Is a UK Platform

What would a publicly owned, UK-based social media platform actually offer? Several things that current private platforms don’t:

1. Genuine accountability. A British platform would be subject to British law in a meaningful sense, not through the clumsy reach of regulators who can fine Meta an amount that equates to pocket change, but through direct institutional accountability to Parliament, Ofcom, and ultimately us, the public.

2. Data protection with teeth. UK user data would remain under British jurisdiction, subject to the protections of domestic law rather than trusting foreign companies will act in trustworthy ways. This matters not just for privacy but for national security.

3. Editorial standards without editorial control. One of the core dilemmas of social media governance is the tension between free expression and harm prevention. A public institution would not be censoring speech; it would be applying the same editorial and regulatory principles that supposedly govern British broadcasting. It wouldn’t be perfect, but at least we’d have the power to refine our own principles, and they’d be subject to challenge and appeal.

4. Investment in British digital infrastructure. A serious UK platform would require engineering talent, data centres, content moderation teams, and product development. Those are skilled jobs, based here, contributing to the economy.

Why the BBC Model Makes Sense

Let’s be clear, the BBC is an imperfect institution. Nobody would pretend otherwise. It has been criticised from left and right, accused of bias in every direction, and periodically dragged into political controversies that have damaged its reputation. But its underlying architecture as independent of both government and commercial pressure, funded by the public, accountable through a governance structure with genuine independence is one of Britain’s most distinctive and valuable contributions to democratic life. Versions of it have been adopted across the world precisely because it works.

A publicly owned social media platform need not be run by the BBC itself. There are good arguments for a separate institution with its own charter and governance. But the principles of the BBC model apply directly: public funding, independence from day-to-day ministerial control, a statutory obligation to serve the public interest, and an Ofcom-style regulator with real powers.

Additionally, the BBC has millions of terabytes of data that is ready to be incorporated into a platform like this. Not only would it provide a public square, but a place to advertise and publicise BBC content.

This would not be a platform that tells people what to think. It would be a platform designed around what people actually need: reliable information, genuine connection, a space where public debate can happen without being algorithmically manipulated toward outrage because outrage drives engagement and engagement drives advertising revenue.

That is the fundamental problem with commercial social media. Its business model is structurally hostile to a healthy public square. Platforms make money by keeping you scrolling, and the most reliable way to do that is to make you angry or anxious. This creates a terrible user experience, which has been described as “Enshittification”.

A publicly owned platform, freed from that incentive, could be designed around entirely different goals and actually providing an excellent user experience, rather than pure profit extraction. We have already discussed the benefits of public ownership on the Rose.

The Objections, and Why They Don’t Stack Up

What are the objections? Critics might raise three objections.

1. Cost? A serious public digital platform would cost money, perhaps a billion pounds over a decade to build and sustain at scale. That is real money. It is also less than the UK government has spent on a single failed IT project, and a fraction of what we collectively hand to American tech companies each year in advertising revenue and data.

2. Would anyone use it? This misunderstands how network effects work. The BBC already has tens of millions of daily users across its digital services. A platform built on that foundation, with iPlayer-quality design and a genuine commitment to user experience, would not be starting from scratch.

3. State control? The fear that a government-owned social media platform becomes a propaganda tool. This is the most serious objection and deserves a serious answer. The answer is: institutional design. The BBC’s independence from government is not perfect, but it does exist, and it was built through decades of deliberate constitutional choices. The same choices are available here. A platform controlled by ministers would be a disaster; a platform governed by an independent public body, with statutory protections for editorial independence, would be something entirely different.

A Question of Political Will

None of this is technically difficult. It is politically difficult. The tech giants lobby hard. The ideological right is instinctively hostile to public ownership. The ideological left is sometimes more interested in punishing existing platforms rather than building better alternatives. And the current government, like its predecessors, lacks the ambition for a project of this scale.

But the question will not go away. Every election cycle, every public health emergency, every geopolitical crisis makes the case more urgent. Britain has the institutions, the expertise, and the tradition to build a digital public square worthy of its people. What it has lacked, so far, is the nerve.

It is time to find some courage.

Last night I went to sleep thinking that Matthew Goodwin - of Reform - would be the new MP for Gorton & Denton and I was wrong.

I thought that the Greens would have their vote split by Labour. I thought the narrative of the boats and what is being so widely condemned as a reckless drug policy by the Greens would be too much. It wasn’t.

I woke up to a video of the Greens co-deputy leader Mothin Ali crowd surfing and the news the Greens had done it.

On the run up to the election, there had been several cases of alleged cheating. Reform - sending a letter from a local called Patricia Clegg calling for her neighbours to vote for Reform - when the letters had come from a distribution centre in the south.

Labour left it late, which probably signified the panic. Zack Polanski claimed that Labour invented a fake tactical voting expert company to tell people to vote for Labour to avoid Reform.

But perhaps the most insidious, disgusting, whatever word you want to use was that Labour hired a small van with LED screens to drive around the constituency saying the Greens want “our daughters used for legal prostitution”. Are we living in an episode of Black Mirror?

Honestly - this reflected my experience on the ground. When I wanted to speak to Reform’s representatives, door knockers, whoever, I was told that they don’t speak to independent journalists and my questions were propaganda, showing all the Trumpian qualities you’d expect from them. Are the concerns from women up and down the country saying that Goodwin’s proposed tax on women without children is misogynistic, not legitimate? Would a party with such clear ambitions for government not want to clear the air that potentially disabled women may not face an additional tax that no man would ever be subject to? No they didn’t and it was frustrating.

Labour were useless. All canvassers were placed under strict instructions not to speak to any media and when I spoke to their press coordinator, I was told they’d have people available for interview in an hour. An hour later, they didn’t pick up their phone. An hour after that I was told I’d be sent a schedule for me to interview someone - it never came. The party in power of this country were not showing any transparency.

And then there was Hannah Spencer and the Greens. I asked Hannah how she was feeling on the run up to the election. She said she was nervous, nervous because of how much at stake there was. In the end, there was no need to be nervous - the Greens won with 40.7% of the vote share. They won by having an enormous grassroots campaign, people travelling from all over the country to support something worth believing in. And because the Green canvassers believed it, the people of Gorton and Denton believed it. The positivity was contagious.

But as the saying goes, the hard work has only just begun. It’s time to show the people what belief in the Greens looks like.

Zack Polanski told us that it’s the lowering of bills. It’s about tangible policies, not just abstract concepts of hope. Bringing water companies back into public ownership, ending shareholder profits, universal free childcare (I think a leaf taken from Mamdani’s book, why not?) and no donations from multi-nationals.

If I’m going to draw a conclusion from this, I think it’s that The Greens did something radically different to Reform and Labour. They didn’t result to cloak and dagger electoral techniques, they actually presented a version of the future.

One of hope, not hate.

A poignant place to start is an image engrained in my memory of a father holding a crying son turning away from the Britain First march. I felt like crying too at the scenes that were unfolding. As the 300 or so self-described ‘patriots’ walked the streets of Manchester, police could only chase small pockets of violence that erupted as passersby let their thoughts be known. But at no point were the racist, emboldened thugs so clearly exposed when they turned left off Portland Street onto Sackville Street. The circus – exclusively of clowns – found the road busy with stationary cars and once they turned their attentions to Canal Street a group of Asian men got out a black Audi and started asking a police officer if they could move it. The police officer refused. He said he thought that they were going to attempt to run over the Britain First protesters. A ridiculous statement – of course – as anyone with a pair of eyes could see that the urgency to move was because the men’s car had been scratched, kicked in and the registration plate torn off.

Half an hour before, just down the road where Portland Street meet Princess Street, there more depressing scenes. I’d decided to join the Sackville Gardens counter-protest. We’d been asked to share details of the counter-protest by Salford Anti-fascists, whereas Stand Up to Racism had organised a more ‘family-friendly’ protest with dedicated speakers like Jeremy Corbyn and Green Party co-deputy leader Mothin Ali – who suffered racist abuse himself while walking to his car.

As my counter protest reached Portland Street, the march was halted by police. After about half an hour of waiting, there was talk of the police issuing a ‘containment order’ and inevitably it started to kick off. There was wrestling, batons being swung and a personal low for me to see – dogs introduced. Thankfully they stayed on their leads. There were reports of vicious police brutality, but from what I saw, I’ll say they were heavy-handed and cannot prove otherwise.

After the protest, I was looking at the Rochdale Canal over the road from the Palace theatre and the water levels there were surprisingly so low, you could see all the rubbish lying on the floor including hundreds of bottles, a traffic cone and a plastic chair. I found myself gazing at all the filth lying there listening to police sirens wailing in the background. A woman passing by said, “I can’t believe that’s like that, in the centre of Manchester”. Before I had chance to ask her what exactly she was referring to, she was gone.

As I walked around town I saw mothers taking their young daughters out for a day in Manchester, likely heading out to visit one of the many things to do in our brilliant city – but the look on children’s faces wasn’t one of joy, it was one fear and confusion as they witnessed a glimpse into a future where “society is violent and horrific place to live”, Paul Golding’s - the leader of Britain First - dream.

Solidarity?

Now the dust has settled, I’ve got a nag. Britain First sent out a national call for any idiot to come and join them, understanding that if they were able to outnumber and intimidate the people of Manchester it would be a serious statement to the country. From what I saw, counter-protesters did outnumber Britain First, but from the people I recognised and met, coupled with the videos I’ve seen, the counter-protesters were almost all from the North and it’s not sitting well with me.

I rarely talk about the North-South divide. It’s so well-established by so many different metrics that we are forced to accept it and push for change. But where I did not expect to see the divide manifest is when it comes to standing up to fascists. Perhaps I’m expecting too much, but when I look at social media and media in general, I didn’t see people from outside Manchester condemning Britain First.

Am I going crazy to expect that groups of thugs walking through the streets of one of the country’s major cities should be condemned by the Prime Minister and members of the cabinet?

Maybe it’s because I’m looking now on Sunday and was so caught up in it all on Saturday, but I can’t see any Guardian coverage of the march – any chance of a denunciation of the people who went out onto our streets and frightened our children?

The BBC have reported that police are reviewing videos after altercations of between groups but no mention of the reasons behind it. Nothing to do with Britain First demanding the deportation of our loved ones while terrorising our streets? Perhaps that could be a reason why tempers are flaring?

But it feels like more than that. Forget the mainstream media, that’s why we’ve set up The Northern Rose. But what has let me down is the lack of in person support from the South. I’ll credit Jeremy Corbyn and The Green Party for sending Mothin Ali while they do their bit in Gorton & Denton, among others like Amnesty and The Canary, but where was everyone else? I see so much talk on social media about fighting fascists from London based profiles, but did I just miss all their virtual support? I didn’t see it physically.

Saturday was a real chance for people of the country to show just how outnumbered Britain First are but outside of Manchester, it feels like the whole thing was barely mentioned. There was support from other areas of the country – and north Wales - but not really from the South. And that would be ok, but being from Manchester whenever London calls, we are expected to answer. Bang the drum for an anti-austerity march in London, Manchester turns up.

There’s a ‘Together’ march planned in London for the 28^th March and people from Manchester are organising coaches. Happy to get up, spend the money and their weekends to show solidarity. Do Mancunians want to go to London for yet another rally? Probably not, but they will. The people here understand how important it is to show solidarity to those in need of it.

My question is, where was the show of solidarity from the South when we were looking the fascists in the eyes?

The UK has a serious housing crisis. Housing is growing increasingly unaffordable for many Brits. Despite numerous governments acknowledging the problem, all have failed to fix the issues.

Singapore offers a solution. Around 80% of Singapore’s population lives in publicly built housing, and most of those residents own their homes. This is the result of deliberate state intervention.

What Did Singapore Do?

Singapore gained self-government in the late 1950s, and housing conditions were awful. Much of the population lived in overcrowded slums or informal settlements. Fires, disease, and poor sanitation were common.

The government recognised that leaving housing to market forces would entrench inequality and social instability. Housing reform therefore became central to government strategy.

Singapore’s established the Housing and Development Board (HDB) in 1960. Unlike housing authorities in many other countries, the HDB were enabled to:

1. Build and maintained housing at massive scale.

2. Acquired land compulsorily at low cost.

3. Set prices and eligibility rules.

4. Coordinate housing with transport, schools, and jobs.

HDB housing was not only for the poorest but designed for the majority of the population, including middle-income households.

Singapore solved its housing shortage by building at scale and building fast. The state directly constructed hundreds of thousands of flats over several decades, ensuring supply consistently matched population growth.

Because the government controlled land and construction, it could prevent land speculation, keep prices stable, and avoid property bubbles that are common in private housing markets.

Housing supply was treated as infrastructure, similar to roads or utilities, rather than as a financial product.

The Result?

In Singapore, most public housing is owner-occupied, not rented. Residents buy long-term leases (typically 99 years) at subsidised prices. The result is high home ownership without reliance on risky private mortgages or speculative lending.

To ensure that housing does not become a speculative asset class—as it has done in the UK—the government maintains restrictions on who can buy public housing, minimum occupancy periods before resale, taxes on second properties and foreign ownership, and limits on how many properties an individual can own.

Housing is allowed to appreciate in value, but within tightly controlled bounds. The state intervenes whenever prices rise too quickly, prioritising social stability over investor returns.

Can The UK Copy Singapore?

Singapore’s success does not mean its model can be easily copied. For us to have any chance of achieving the change we need then we will require strong state capacity and political continuity. There will need to be public acceptance of extensive government intervention and the ownership of vast amounts of land by the state.

Housing policy plays an important role in social cohesion. Housing is a human right and shapes the social fabric of the nation. If we do not deal with the crisis then British society will continue to fracture. As housing becomes increasingly expensive and the wealthiest buy up more of the housing stock as speculative assets then public disaffection with politics will continue to grow.

We need a party that will deliver high quality, publicly built housing. With political will and energy, as well as public mass support, a British government could institute its own HDB to build the homes and regulate the market. Even fixing this one issue would make the government historically consequential.

Your vote is important, perhaps more now than ever before. If you want that vote to go to the right place, make sure to vote for the party that has a clear vision for the future of British housing.

We discuss the rapid rise of social media and digital platforms as primary news sources, the decline of editorial standards in legacy media, and how this has created fertile ground for misinformation and disinformation. Unlike traditional newspapers or broadcasters, algorithm-driven platforms personalise news feeds, removing the randomness that once exposed people to a wider range of views and stories.

The conversation explores how customised news shapes opinions, reinforces existing beliefs, and changes the way political and social issues are understood. We also ask what responsibility platforms, regulators, and journalists have in rebuilding trust and protecting the public interest in an age where algorithms increasingly act as editors.

This episode is essential listening for anyone interested in media literacy, journalism, democracy, and the future of news in the UK.

With a senile orange sex offender in the White House looking to start a war with the EU over Greenland, it is important that the UK and EU finally recognise the urgent need to move away from the US internet infrastructure and technology. UK and EU digital public infrastructure runs overwhelmingly on American technology. This dependency is not only an economic issue, where US companies collect rent from European consumers and capitalists just for existing on these platforms or services, it has become a democratic, legal, and geopolitical vulnerability.

Growing political tensions prove that the US must now be considered an unreliable ally. Trump has demonstrated that he will use whatever tools he has available to him to achieve his political agenda, and therefore, we must not rule out his willingness to use our infrastructure vulnerabilities and data against us. The UK government has signed numerous contracts with US technology company, Palantir, despite fears that it will give the US government power over our data. The Swiss are smart enough to recognise this and refused to sign contracts with Palantir for this very reason. We have placed ourselves in a precarious situation and the sooner we cancel these contracts the better.

US technology companies now threaten the political stability of our democracies, and our politicians are terrified at the consequences of regulating their enormous power. Powerful Hitler fan and child pornography distributor, Elon Musk, is seemingly able to endlessly interfere with our national political environment with absolute immunity. Even his refusal to prevent child pornography being distributed on his platform has only led to an Ofcom investigation, with there likely being no consequences owing to our government’s fear of retribution from the Trump administration.

Building a new, non-US technological infrastructure will not be cheap, but it is essential. Fair redistribution and introducing proper taxation on the wealthiest will bring in revenues that would enable us to build this infrastructure, create jobs, and upskill our workforce. UK and EU cities that have been left behind could be reinvigorated with investment to build the new technological infrastructure and companies we will need to be self-reliant from US technological hegemony. The profits generated from these companies will then be redistributed into local economies and not siphoned off to US billionaires who actively seek to destabilise democracies.

Greater Manchester could be a leading region in this regard with the building of Atom Valley and the Northern Powerhouse Rail project, the North of England could become a hub of innovation and creation in EU and UK technological independence. In a globalised economy, it is impossible to detach from the rest of the world, and it is not desirable to pursue insular politics, but we need to be more resilient and resistant to the unfortunate growth of authoritarianism. The EU is not perfect, but the more democracy there is, the more resilient we are to the fascism we are seeing in the US.

Before we get into it, it is worth saying that it’s being reported that Zahawi has defected to Reform because he was not offered a peerage (a lifetime honour granting access to the House of Lords) by the Conservatives. This is in keeping with Nadeem Dorries who also defected to Reform after being refused a peerage — showing the quality of the politicians within the Conservative Party and now Reform.

Back to the title question, Reform and Farage have built their brands on being anti-establishment and offering something politically fresh. So why do they keep on appointing former Tory ministers like Nadhim Zahawi to their ranks?

There is one obvious answer, that both Reform and Farage are not anti-establishment and the projection of that image is entirely inauthentic, but there is another reason for appointing so many Tories.

Farage and the Establishment

Farage went to Dulwich College, one of the most expensive independent schools in the country, where he repeatedly racially abused other students. After leaving school, Farage went to work as a commodities trader in the City of London. This is perhaps unsurprising considering his father Guy Justus Oscar Farage (surely a man of the people) was a stockbroker, suggesting a hint of nepotism.

Farage joined the Conservative Party in 1978 and only left in 1992 because of the Tories willingness to work with the European Union. However, Farage has continued to flirt with the Tories who are his establishment friends. Ultimately, it’s Farage’s love of the establishment and the fact he is friends with many Conservative Party insiders that explains his willingness to bring them on board. He doesn't care about the image it sends to the public, it is the fact that these are the people he likes to spend his time around, he wants to be respected by, and assert power over.

Reform’s embrace of Tories

Reform is now populated by former Tory councillors, MPs, advisers, and activists who have simply changed colours rather than politics. Reform is not about offering new politics, just rebranding the old, worn out establishment politics they are supposed to oppose.

The Conservative Party is in crisis. Years of austerity, corruption scandals, broken promises, and economic mismanagement have left it toxic. Kemi Badenoch is useless and unpopular. But, there are many powerful interests who want a party that stands for the exact things that the Tories have historically supported, just without the baggage. For ambitious politicians and right-wing donors, Reform offers continuity without accountability.

Reform allows ex-Tories to rebrand themselves as rebels and attempt to escape being linked to decades of failure. By ‘swapping’ sides they can sidestep their own role in enabling the national decline. In this sense, Reform is a lifeboat for a sinking political class.

This helps explain why Reform’s leadership, candidates, and councillors so often share the same ideological DNA as the Conservatives they denounce. The language may be angrier, the tone more populist, but the ideology is familiar: low taxes, hostility to regulation, scepticism of redistribution, and a deep reluctance to challenge entrenched wealth and power. That continuity is now visible in local government. They promise to reduce taxes and cut “inefficient” government, yet all councils controlled by Reform have raised taxes, despite their campaign pledges.

The irony is sharp. Reform campaigns nationally on anger at elites, at taxation, at a system “rigged against ordinary people.” Yet in power, the party has shown no appetite for structural reform. Instead, it has adopted the language of change while offering continuity.

Conclusion

Reform’s instinct is managed decline rather than challenge the causes. Just like the Tories. Reform’s transformation into a party of ex-Tories is not accidental but structural. It reflects the limits of right-wing populism in an era of deep wealth inequality and austerity. Without a credible economic alternative, anti-establishment politics quickly becomes establishment politics with a mask on.

For voters, the lesson is a familiar one. A change in party label often does not mean a change in politics. Reform may talk like a revolt against the system, but it’s the same people, the same decisions, and the same costs passed on to those least able to afford them.

The move may backfire, but only time will tell. In the meantime we all need to do our bit to make sure that this information is known. The current mainstream parties might seem disappointing, but Reform are not offering new ideas, and they are not the answer.

Some political encounters begin in briefing papers or council offices. Others begin on doorsteps, at allotments, or in draughty community halls. Over the years, I have met Kate Green - the most senior local politician responsible for policing oversight - in all of those places: campaigning on my doorstep, tasting questionable homemade wine at our local allotment and at a Labour branch meeting in Urmston where I spoke about the worsening mental health crisis in Manchester.

I begin here, because starting from a human place matters. When people are no longer seen as individuals but as a problem to be managed, something dangerous happens very quickly. That loss of humanity was starkly evident this week outside the 4C Community Centre in Ashton-under-Lyne.

After a long day supporting people in therapy in my NHS role, the last thing I wanted was a near 50-minute drive in freezing rain to stand in the cold waving a Unite flag. But conscience has a way of overriding comfort. We were there because of the dire situation in Gaza, the appalling treatment of the so-called Filton 24 - at least two of whom are Manchester residents - and the serious condition of peaceful protesters currently on hunger strike.

Two of those hunger strikers, Heba Muraisi and Kamran Ahmed are close to death. Please remember their names. There has been little visible compassion or engagement from the Labour government.

Around twenty of us gathered peacefully. Most were older, many in our late fifties. Two of us represented Unite branches. We waved Palestinian flags, spoke calmly, and posed no threat.

Inside the venue, Andy Burnham and Kate Green were present, alongside very senior Greater Manchester Police officers. One may have been the chief constable Sir Stephen Watson himself but couldn’t be sure through the freezing downpour. The room had a large glass frontage and they could see us clearly.

When I arrived, I greeted a couple of police officers and the atmosphere felt relaxed. Given our age, numbers, and demeanour, I expected the evening to pass quietly.

About five minutes after the speakers began, a senior officer visibly received instructions. What followed was sudden, aggressive, and frightening.

Some protesters may have been told to move, but these instructions were not communicated clearly or consistently to the group as a whole. There was no collective explanation, no warning and no attempt to ensure everyone understood what was being asked.

Instead, officers in riot-style gear rapidly formed a line and charged. They shouted obscenities, pushed people to the ground, and forced us onto a narrow path beside the busy Oldham Road. People tripped over those already fallen. Elderly protesters were shoved and knocked down.

This all happened at speed, with an aggression that felt not just excessive but performative. Some officers appeared to relish the shouting and physical dominance. All of this unfolded in full view of senior Manchester politicians and police leaders.

Terrified, I began filming on my phone, hoping that the presence of a camera might offer some protection.

After an elderly man was pushed to the ground, a young lad shouted to distract officers and stop people being trampled. An officer immediately screamed “get back”, grabbed the teenager in a headlock, and forced him to the ground by the neck using his body weight. Several officers then restrained and arrested him.

Watching a teenager pinned down like that was horrifying. Sadly, I felt a moment of relief when other officers arrived, because the officer who initiated the headlock was so visibly hostile that I feared what might happen if he remained alone with the young man. That same officer screamed that we were “fucking pricks” and pushed multiple people, including an older man with mobility difficulties, to the ground.

None of this was necessary. Had the police clearly and calmly communicated with the group, people would have complied immediately. We might have grumbled, yes, but there would have been no refusal and no risk of confrontation.

After we were forced onto the narrow path beside Oldham Road - a move that indicates no risk assessment was conducted by the police - officers again received instructions that we were “too noisy”. Whether those instructions came from inside the event, from senior officers, or from political figures present, I do not know and dread to think.

What I do know is that the response was again reckless.

Without warning, officers organised and charged to seize a speaker. Officers jumped from higher ground, over a wall, and directly into the middle of our small group next to the busy road. People were trampled. Elderly men and women were crushed. One elderly gentleman was punched in the face and later required an ambulance after suffering heart complications.

The police may claim these injuries were accidental. But when large officers leap into a dense group of older protesters, harm is entirely foreseeable. Again, all that was required was a simple request to turn off the speaker. We would have complied instantly.

Afterwards, I witnessed officers laughing and giggling in our direction. What was painfully clear is that they no longer saw the humans behind the flags and chants.

This incident cannot be seen in isolation. Over the past year, Unite members and allies across progressive movements in Greater Manchester have repeatedly witnessed peaceful protesters being kettled, tightly controlled, and treated with hostility, while right-wing agitators and self-described “citizen journalists” are allowed to roam freely, provoke abuse, and monetise harassment online.

As a union representative - and as someone with a close family member in the police - I have always resisted simplistic narratives about policing. I was uncomfortable hearing chants of “fascist police” at early protests I attended, believing officers to be fellow workers and potential allies in movements rooted in anti-racism and compassion. But experiences like this make that belief increasingly difficult to sustain.

Our Unite branch has now agreed to campaign for a review of how protests are policed in Greater Manchester. Kate Green holds responsibility for policing oversight, and she, Andy Burnham and senior police officers within Greater Manchester were present and witnessed what happened.

We are writing to Kate Green, Andy Burnham and Sir Stephen Watson to ask for an urgent and meaningful review of protest policing in Greater Manchester. We want this review to include engagement with unions, anti-racist groups, peace campaigners, environmental activists, and community organisations - and it must lead to positive change.

We want to live in a city where peaceful protest is actively protected. A city where families feel safe attending demonstrations, and where children can learn that standing up for justice does not mean risking injury at the hands of the state or those on the other side of the barrier.

If this incident should be referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct, then that should happen. But doing nothing is not an option.

Because when peaceful protesters are treated as enemies, and the aftermath of violence is met with laughter, something is going badly wrong. When the people supposed to protect us are the ones causing us harm, then we must ask how we’ve got to such a stage and who is responsible. If this is how protest is policed while senior politicians watch from behind glass, we should all be deeply concerned about what happens when they are not watching.

Greater Manchester Police were contacted for comment. At the time of publication, no response had been received.

More from The Northern Rose: 40 Days on Hunger Strike: Why Activists Are Protesting Outside a Labour MP’s Office

Drawing on findings from their study, the conversation explores how harassment, intimidation and violence shape women’s experiences of public space, exercise and safety.

We discuss what the data reveals about the scale and normalisation of abuse and why responsibility is so often placed on women to adapt their behaviour rather than on men to change. The episode also looks at the structural factors behind the problem and what meaningful change could look like.

The discussion closes with a reflection on why the researchers undertook this work in the first place, and how academia can be used not just to study injustice, but to challenge it.

This episode is essential listening for anyone interested in gender equality, public safety, women’s sport, and the role of research in driving social change.

Links mentioned in the podcast:
- The Abuse Of Women Runners: Perceptions, Fears and Experiences: https://www.n8prp.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/315/2024/03/N8-Final-Report_Abuse-of-women-runners-project-final.pdf
- JogOn: https://www.westyorkshire.police.uk/jogon
- VAWG (Violence Against Women & Girls) strategy to better protect children from misogyny and abuse: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/vawg-strategy-to-better-protect-children-from-misogyny-and-abuse

Comments have been turned off by request, but if you would like to get in touch with us, please contact: thenorthernrosenews@gmail.com

For years, politicians have insisted that the NHS is “not being privatised.” What they rarely mention is that privatisation no longer arrives in the dramatic, Thatcher-era fashion most people imagine. It arrives slowly, quietly, bureaucratically - through procurement frameworks, funding “transformation plans,” and the gradual diversion of NHS budgets away from the public sector and into private or corporate hands. Mental health care has become the test case for this new model of privatisation by stealth.

Under what is now branded Community Transformation, local commissioners across England are being encouraged - and in reality pressured - to redirect between 25% and 50% of community mental health budgets into VCSEs (Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise organisations) and private companies. On the surface, this is framed as innovation: “community-led,” “holistic,” “place-based support.” But the deeper pattern is one of fragmentation, outsourcing and an ideological shift that positions NHS services as outdated and interchangeable, while private delivery partners are cast as modern, flexible, and essential.

What is happening in practice is very different from the rhetoric. Many of these organisations have little to no experience in delivering complex mental health interventions. They succeed in winning contracts not because they provide better care, but because they are better at navigating procurement processes designed with them in mind. Larger VCSEs (some with multimillion-pound turnovers) are now competing directly with the NHS for mental health contracts - and winning - often despite offering less expertise, less accountability, and in some cases virtually no measurable outcomes at all.

Meanwhile, the NHS services left behind are expected to pick up whatever is left: the high-risk, high-complexity, or resource-intensive care that no private or third-sector provider wants. The result is not a “community-led revolution,” but a quiet redirection of public money into profit-driven or corporate-style organisations at the exact moment NHS teams are being hollowed out.

A Rhetoric of “Transformation” Built on Workforce Collapse

The entire Community Transformation agenda depends on something commissioners rarely acknowledge publicly: the NHS no longer has enough staff to deliver its own services. Instead of addressing this workforce crisis - by improving pay, conditions, training pipelines or retention - policymakers have chosen a path of replacement. They describe this as “integrated care” or “multi-agency support,” but what it often means in practice is diluting clinical services with cheaper, less qualified roles.

“Living Well” teams are the clearest example. On paper, they sound innovative: multidisciplinary groups led by people with “lived experience,” community connectors and wellbeing coaches. In reality, they have been used in many areas as a way to mask the absence of clinicians. The message is simple: if you can’t staff NHS teams, redefine what a team is.

None of this is to dismiss the value of peer support or community workers - both have huge strengths when used correctly. But replacing qualified roles with unqualified ones is not integration; it is displacement. And it is a displacement driven not by evidence, but by political convenience.

The tragedy is that these changes are being introduced at the exact moment that serious mental illness is rising, acuity is worsening, and outcomes are deteriorating. Instead of investing in clinical capacity, the government and NHS England are restructuring services so that clinical capacity appears less necessary. The consequences, already visible, will take a generation to undo.

Manchester as a Case Study in Failure

Manchester provides a stark illustration of how these structural changes are playing out at ground level.

The £3 Million Employment Support Contract That Delivered Almost Nothing

One of the most infamous examples is a multimillion-pound employment support contract awarded to a private provider with minimal experience in serious mental illness. The contract - worth more than £3 million - was intended to support people into work through specialist coaching. In practice, the provider delivered next to nothing.

Frontline teams repeatedly expressed concerns: poor engagement, minimal client contact, weak understanding of mental health, poor outcomes. Despite this, the contract was extended. The logic seemed to be that failure was irrelevant because the success of the contract was never measured by clinical outcomes — only by adherence to the procurement process.

Meanwhile, NHS teams were forced to absorb the consequences: more crises, more relapses, more people deteriorating without the support they were promised.

The Disappearance of £1.03 Million from Early Intervention Services

The Early Intervention Service (EIS) - one of the most effective and evidence-based components of mental health care - has been left dangerously underfunded in Manchester. £1.03 million identified as necessary for the service simply never materialised.

Instead, EIS was told to “innovate,” “restructure,” and “work differently,” while thresholds were raised and caseloads increased. The result is predictable: rising untreated psychosis, longer Duration of Untreated Psychosis (DUP), and greater long-term disability - all while commissioners talk about “improving outcomes.”

Private Bed Providers: The Black Hole of Mental Health Spending

Few areas reveal the absurdity of privatisation more clearly than inpatient beds. Across the country, NHS mental health trusts are now spending hundreds of millions per year on private hospital beds — often poor-quality, far from patients’ homes, and in many cases linked to avoidable harm or neglect.

These beds cost significantly more than NHS equivalents. They continue to expand not because they provide good care, but because NHS bed numbers have been cut and no government has reversed the trend. When the NHS cannot accommodate people in crisis - which is increasingly common - the private sector steps in, charges inflated rates, and delivers poorer outcomes.

This is privatisation at its purest: public money flowing into private hands because public infrastructure has been allowed to collapse.

The Ideological Shift Behind the Procurement

The transformation agenda is not simply a managerial failure. It is an ideological project, based on the belief that the NHS is incapable of reforming itself and must therefore be reshaped through market dynamics and external competition.

The language is revealing:

· “Choice” instead of investment

· “Diversity of provision” instead of adequate staffing

· “Community partnerships” instead of properly funded NHS teams

The aim is to reduce the NHS to a coordinating body rather than a service provider. The long-term implication is a two-tier system where “light-touch,” low-quality provision becomes the norm for most people, while clinical expertise becomes a scarce and rationed resource.

Fragmentation as a Systemic Risk

Mental health care depends on continuity: long-term relationships, consistent professionals, unified records, clear clinical responsibility. Fragmentation undermines all of this. When responsibilities are split between multiple providers - each with their own contracts, payment mechanisms, and targets - patients fall through the gaps.

We see this already:

· people being bounced between teams

· unclear responsibility during crises

· delays caused by referral loops

· clinicians unable to communicate with outsourced services

· patients assessed repeatedly because information is not shared

This is not innovation. It is chaos disguised as modernity.

Privatisation Isn’t Coming. It’s Here.

The most dangerous misunderstanding about NHS privatisation is that it will be obvious. It won’t. It is already happening through the incremental redirection of budgets, the downgrading of roles, the outsourcing of core functions, and the erosion of NHS capacity. The public still sees the NHS brand and believes the service remains intact. But behind the logo, the structures have changed dramatically.

Mental health care is the front line of this shift. Because mental health was already underfunded, it became the easiest part of the system to restructure without resistance. But the consequences will not remain confined to mental health - they will spread into primary care, community services, and ultimately acute hospitals.

If we allow this direction of travel to continue, the NHS will remain free in name only. The care itself will be increasingly fragmented, increasingly privatised, and increasingly unaccountable.

This is not an abstract policy debate. It is a lived reality for patients and staff today - and unless it is challenged, it will define the future of healthcare in England.