Burges Salmon’s note to its construction and infrastructure clients went out on 1 October, the day after Labour’s conference in Liverpool closed. It reads the Prime Minister’s announcements the way a firm like that reads anything, for what they will mean to the people paying for the advice, and it finds “significant opportunities” if the proposals become funded programmes. The new equity loan, Your First Home, lends a first-time buyer a fifth of the price of a new build on a 2.5 per cent deposit, and the firm sees in it more demand for new housing and a longer pipeline of work for developers. A sensible reading, and a calm one, written for clients who expect to be building whatever the Budget on 28 October ends up paying for.
Water was the centrepiece. Burnham told the hall on 29 September that a strengthened Water Bill would repeal Thatcher’s ideological ban on public ownership; the Water Act 1989 caps the state’s holding in each of the major water and sewerage companies at between one and three per cent. Water was the symbol of what has gone wrong with Britain, he said, a service where the shareholders never lose and the public never win. Where private companies serve the public interest, the government will support them. Shares in Severn Trent, Pennon and United Utilities closed the day between 0.9 and 1.6 per cent lower. Thames Water, the one company whose condition would put any of this to work, is where the government has moved least. The company has warned its money could run out by the end of the year, the government still will not say whether it will approve the creditors’ £10bn takeover or put Thames into special administration, and the creditors are preparing a revised offer with deeper write-offs.
At the ACR summer camp at the end of August, with a quiz sheet on Burnham still on the table, the talk turned to proportional representation, and I reached for the gym. I am in favour of going every day. I had not gone that day, or the day before, and in any operational sense I was against it. Burnham is in favour of proportional representation in the same way. At conference he promised a manifesto commitment and a national commission, which puts any change beyond the 2029 election, from a government whose majority could legislate for it this session. The promise does its work now, on the Liberal Democrat voters and the Green Party of England and Wales voters Labour wants back, and the reform waits for a parliament nobody has yet elected, which is roughly where the water announcements leave Thames.
Dave Kellaway saw the shape of this before most of us. Writing in International Viewpoint at the end of June, he refused the easy reading that Burnham changes nothing. Burnham, unlike Starmer, has an actual political project, rooted in the Manchester work and in what he calls the politics of place, with the Preston model behind it, and water is on the table where Starmer kept it off. “Socialists will need to adapt our campaigns and demands to relate to the new political issues and debates that are emerging,” he writes, and we “still need to build our eco-socialist alternative independent of the Labour Party and the Greens”. Liverpool bore out every word, and his conference follow-up catches both halves of it, real shifts on electoral reform and public control and policies that are still mostly promises. A left that greets a real differentiation by announcing that nothing has changed has stopped doing analysis and started doing liturgy, and Dave has done as much as anyone in the ACR to keep us out of that habit. An opening is not yet a programme, and a document from 1977 shows what a serious left did with an opening once it had one. Livio Maitan read the PCI’s Proposta di progetto a medio termine that summer and gave his reading to a seminar in Turin over 3, 4 and 5 September. His first move is to concede. A medium-term project drawn up by the workers’ movement, political and trade union alike, is “by no means to be rejected”, and the Leninist tradition always refused the sterilising separation between a programme of immediate demands and one attached to the conquest of power. He then reads it clause by clause.
Then comes the question that decides the matter. A transitional programme, “far from concerning itself with respecting certain ‘compatibilities’, tends to heighten the ‘incompatibilities’”. The PCI’s planners went hunting for compatibilities, and their text handed the evidence over in a clause its authors thought reassuring. Expansion and reconversion of the productive base imply profound changes in social relations, it says, “but such an undertaking can be achieved only through consent”. Consent from whom? A programme that must command the assent of both classes has drawn its boundary in advance, short of the point where capital’s return stops working. The drafters set the boundary down in the chapter on social relations, a few lines from the passage on new ideals.
The test can be checked against the people whose compatibility is at issue. On 27 December 1977 the CIA circulated a memorandum on the economic consequences of a larger Communist role in Italian government. Bankers would not react adversely. “The commitment of the PCI to austerity is strong,” it reads, “and admission of the Party to the parliamentary majority would enhance the ability of PCI leaders to sell austerity to the Party base.”
The 2026 version needs no clandestine service. Irwin Mitchell’s head of international, writing for overseas investors on 30 June, set out the condition in a sentence: global capital is comfortable with active government “provided rules are clear and returns are predictable”. The Chancellor gave the answer from the conference platform. John Healey reminded the hall that on his first day as Chancellor he had called fiscal discipline his first duty, and that “it underwrites every promise this Government makes”. His audience was the gilt market.
Housing is the clearer case, because there the instrument is built and explains itself in print. The National Housing Bank opened inside Homes England at the end of March with up to sixteen billion pounds of debt, equity and guarantees. Homes England’s prospectus says what the sixteen billion is for: it has the “potential to unlock over £50 billion of additional private capital”. On the equity products the bank “will require a return appropriate to the risk taken and will seek to unlock a significant multiple of the public sector’s investment from private sector partners”. Its own portfolio returns will “only seek to cover the cost of government borrowing used to capitalise and operate” it. Its first deal was a hundred-million-pound partnership with Aviva for build-to-rent homes, the first sites in Liverpool and Manchester, an insurer’s rent roll with public money underneath it. Read it from the other side of the class line. The state takes the cost of its borrowing, the private partners take a return appropriate to the risk, the ratio runs at better than three private pounds to every public one, and the council houses arrive as a consequence of that arrangement paying. Your First Home adds a public loan at the buyer’s end, Osborne’s Help to Buy revived with a smaller deposit. Whose returns the public purse underwrites was settled before a brick was laid, in the section on products.
“The Buses Have Gone Yellow” said the franchised network left nobody with anything except a timetable. That was too harsh, and the way it was harsh is worth more than the sentence. Bee Network drivers at Metroline and Stagecoach were on £19.06 an hour this spring. Nearly six hundred at Go North West, on Bee Network routes out of Bolton, Denton, Heywood and Wigan, were on £15.51 for the same job, and in May they balloted for strikes. The deal they accepted on 16 June takes them to £18 from April 2026, £19.50 from April 2027 and £21 in 2028, between twenty-three and fifty-six per cent across three years depending on grade. No strike was needed. The ballot was enough, and the company settled two days before the Makerfield poll.
What the franchise gave them was a published rate for the identical job a few miles up the road, and a public authority with its name on the vehicle. The transitional content sat in what the franchise made fightable, the drivers were the ones who noticed, and a reading of franchising as service delivery keeps none of that in the ledger.
Manchester Airports Group settles the argument, because there the public ownership exists. Manchester City Council holds 35.5 per cent, the nine other Greater Manchester boroughs twenty-nine per cent between them, IFM Investors of Australia the remaining 35.5. In the year to March 2018 the group paid the councils £107.1m, £58.9m of it to Manchester and £5.4m to each of the others. The councils are lenders as well as owners: in November 2017 Rochdale’s cabinet approved up to £11.3m of shareholder loans for the terminal programme, so part of what the ten receive arrives as interest. When Covid emptied the terminals the councils put about £260m back in, some £143m from Manchester and £13m from each of the nine, and Tameside was still asking in February 2025 for the dividend to return sooner than the 2028–29 it had been told to expect. The investor report for the year to March 2026 records £134.4m leaving for the shareholders: £47.6m of shareholder loan interest in September 2025, a c-share dividend of £4.5m to the council shareholders that same month, £47.6m more interest the following March, and £34.7m of deferred interest with it. Passengers were up 3.6 per cent to 32.3m and £1.3bn had gone into doubling Terminal 2. Maitan’s parenthesis on electricity in 1962 was that paid nationalisation transfers the asset and leaves the wealth behind. In Greater Manchester nobody had to buy anything. Ten councils own an airport, and ten council budgets now have an interest in the aircraft movements going up.
So the demands have to put their claim on control.
Water and energy run by the workers who operate them and the households that depend on them, accounts open to both. The bill going to Parliament lifts a shareholding cap and gives mayors powers it has not defined. Control is the half a programme built on consent cannot accommodate, because planning by agreement means planning the partners can accept. The bill covers England only. Cymru has run its main water company since 2001 through Glas Cymru, a company limited by guarantee with no shareholders and its surpluses kept for customers, which is the nearest working answer to the question of what public control looks like when nobody is paid to own the pipes.
Free public transport across Greater Manchester, paid for out of the airport dividend. The present arrangement runs the other way, with the dividend underwriting the absence of everything else. Inverting it claims the airport’s surplus and takes the growth incentive out of ten treasurers’ hands.
Conversion decided by the people doing the work, hours cut and no loss of pay as the form the transition takes for them. Maitan made the redistribution of existing work the central axis because it takes hours out of capital’s hands and returns nothing. No employer concedes that in a crisis of profitability. Which is the point, or near enough to it: the fight over the working day puts the question of who decides in front of people who were not asking it, which is also why it stays out of the programme.
The Italian timetable is worth having in view. PCI abstention gave Giulio Andreotti’s monocolore, a single-party Christian Democrat cabinet with no other party in government, its confidence in August 1976, 258 in favour, 44 against, 303 abstentions, under the formula non sfiducia, “non-no-confidence”, which let the Communists keep a government in office without voting for it. A year of sustaining measures the party had campaigned against. Municipal compatibilism, or what the Italian comrades would have called bankruptcy, dressed as prudence. Then the medium-term project in June 1977, as the thing to show the members. The metalworkers moved ahead of the leadership, the FLM calling a mass strike and demonstration in Rome late that year against the party’s public warnings, strong enough to push the Communists into demanding more from Andreotti, which produced a cabinet crisis running to March 1978 and ending in a reshuffle that brought the same people back with a few independents added. An ultimatum in 1979, answered by early elections and a four-point fall. Fiat in the autumn of 1980, thirty-five days, Agnelli’s victory.
Dave’s answer to the difficulty is the one the ACR works with, and I have no better one to put beside it. Relate to the new contest, push from the openings, keep the ecosocialist alternative independent. Maitan’s Italy had something Britain does not have. The FLM could put hundreds of thousands on the streets of Rome against its own party’s wishes, and that is why there was a cabinet crisis to lose. The ACR could mobilise a few hundred people, and the Socialist Campaign Group issued demands that a coronation made it unnecessary to answer. Unite won six hundred drivers a pay rise worth having and could not have forced a crisis over water with it, and the distance between those two facts is what the test cannot touch, since it tells you what a programme costs capital and nothing about who is available to make it cost more, which leaves a method without an instrument, and this article without an answer to that.
The obvious reading is that the Budget settles it. The numbers arrive on 28 October and the programme can be marked. Half of that holds. Caution about prejudging a Budget nobody has seen is good practice, and the figures will matter. The other half runs into Maitan’s narrower claim: a programme can be read before the fight from its own documents, because the documents already say where the line falls. The prospectus is public. The investor report came out in July. The devolution package of 31 July has already told us what kind of transfer the mayors will get, a share of income tax from 2028 in place of grants, so that an area keeps more when its tax base grows, which settles one of the questions this piece meant to ask before the Chancellor stands up.
Maitan’s programme was never carried into a fight, so it left no record and cannot be marked. The PCI’s was. Manchesterism is being implemented, which puts it in the scoreable column, and the remaining criteria are cheap to set down now: whether an equalisation mechanism arrives with business rates retention, and whether the water money buys Thames or pays for an administration with the debt honoured in full. Under them sits one question. Does anything in the package raise a claim on capital’s control, or only on its returns? That much can be done inside forty-eight hours of the Budget, and done together. The other half of Maitan’s argument cannot, and nobody in 1977 managed it either.
Interesting analysis I think you need to develop the issue of democratic workers control a bit more in nationalised industries. My dad worked on the track at Longbridge for basically all his life when the Austin was nationalised he used to say they didn’t change his gaffer or the speed of the track. This doesn’t mean that changing the ownership isn’t correct but that in its own it’s not sufficient. The late 60s International Group did some really good work on Revolutionary Self Management which might be a good reference point.