I have just come from the website of the Workers Party of Britain, where I signed its declaration against compulsory military service. While there, I had a look through its Manifesto. I was impressed by what I found, if not wholly convinced. Here is my review.

This manifesto is not addressed to me, and it makes no attempt to flatter people like me. It is explicitly socialist. It speaks without embarrassment of redistribution, public ownership, and class power. Even twenty years ago, I would have rejected it unread. I would not have troubled anyone with an explanation. Socialism was then an ideology that proposed to expand the State in a country where the State still had room to grow.

That is no longer our situation. Britain is already one of the most statist countries in the developed world. In 2023, the British State spent £1,189 billion of money taken in taxes, borrowed, or printed. That figure amounts to roughly 44 per cent of gross domestic product. There is no meaningful sense in which Britain can now become more statist. The only remaining question is who controls this apparatus, for whose benefit it is exercised, and against whom it is deployed. On that narrower and more relevant question, this manifesto is unexpectedly frank.

Foreign Policy: Naming the Business Model

The most important section of the manifesto concerns foreign policy, because this is where the ruling-class consensus is tightest and most destructive. The document states that British foreign policy is dressed up in moral language but is in reality driven by profit. It dismisses “simplistic slogans about an ‘ethical’ foreign policy that invariably ends up with us either bombing or supporting the bombing of the innocent in defence of so-called liberal and democratic values,” and then adds the essential clarification: “Most of this is just cover for the profits of bankers and arms dealers.”

There is nothing rhetorical here. This is a straightforward description of how British foreign policy has functioned since at least the end of the Cold War. Iraq was not a mistake. Libya was not a misunderstanding. Afghanistan was not a tragic necessity. Each war transferred wealth upwards, entrenched the security state and produced no benefit to ordinary British people. Labour and the Conservatives differ only in tone. The Liberal Democrats add sermons. The Greens have discovered that deindustrialisation sells better when accompanied by bombs.

Against this, the manifesto states: “We are not pacifist but we oppose all war that is not defensive in purpose,” and declares itself an enemy of “profit-seeking international military-industrial interests with a stake in war.” This is not pacifism. It is an attempt to reintroduce the concept of national interest into a foreign policy that has been outsourced to contractors, financiers, and American strategic priorities.

A libertarian does not need to share the manifesto’s enthusiasm for alternative blocs or international institutions to recognise that this diagnosis is correct. Britain’s current place in the world is that of a subordinate power, supplying diplomatic cover and muscle for conflicts that do not serve British interests. On this point alone, the manifesto is more realistic than anything produced by the established parties.

NATO and the American Alliance

The manifesto goes further and calls for a referendum on NATO membership, describing the alliance as “a clear and present danger to the security of the British population.” This is not the language of polite politics, and that is its merit. NATO is not a defensive alliance in any meaningful sense. It is an enforcement mechanism for American strategic and commercial interests. Membership has involved Britain in wars and threats of war that have nothing to do with national defence and everything to do with maintaining a global order favourable to finance and armaments.

My own view is one of strict neutrality and non-intervention. I have no interest in choosing between American imperialism and its rivals. But if Britain is to have a foreign policy at all, withdrawing from NATO and closing American bases would be a rational first step. The manifesto’s position here aligns with British interests even if its wider ideological framing does not.

Censorship and “Buro-Fascism”

Domestically, the manifesto identifies what it calls “buro-fascism,” defined as rule by “legislation, regulation, lawfare, cultural engineering and attempting to ‘chill’ dissent through police action.” This is an accurate description of the modern British system. We do not live under classical censorship. We live under a regime in which dissent is suppressed indirectly through employment sanctions, financial exclusion, platform denial, and selective policing.

The manifesto commits to reviewing speech legislation so that only intimidation and bullying, rather than “robust opinion,” are subject to sanction, and to dismantling emergency powers accumulated to suppress political opposition. One is entitled to doubt whether a socialist government would honour such commitments indefinitely. Socialists have a long record of discovering the usefulness of police powers once in office. But again, comparison matters. Every other major party either celebrates censorship explicitly or treats it as an administrative necessity. This document at least recognises it as a structural problem.

There are contradictions. The manifesto also speaks of regulating media ownership and criminalising denial of platforms. These proposals are not libertarian and carry obvious risks. But they arise from a correct observation: speech control in Britain is now exercised less by statute than by licensed oligopolies acting in concert with the State. A libertarian may reject the remedy while conceding that the target is real.

Deindustrialisation by Design

Economically, the manifesto commits to reversing deindustrialisation. It states that Britain’s industrial collapse was not an accident of comparative advantage but the result of deliberate policy. This is correct. Manufacturing did not drift abroad because markets demanded it. It was driven out as part of an attack on an autonomous working class that had become inconvenient between 1945 and 1979.

From the 1980s onward, Britain was remodelled into an economy that offers opportunities to people like me—people with credentials, capital, and mobility—but none to those with nothing to sell but unskilled or semi-skilled labour. The result is a national income pyramid with a narrow apex and a broad base of insecure service work, further depressed by subsidised mass immigration.

The manifesto’s proposed remedies—state-led reindustrialisation, worker participation, tariffs, socialist planning—are not economically elegant. My own preference would be a genuinely free market with low taxes and a financial sector constrained by old laws that prevented it from metastasising into a casino. That is not on offer. Given the existing scale of the State, letting it build steel factories that produce little but pollution behind a tariff wall may be less damaging than the present system, which produces nothing but consultants and precarity. The primary object should be the recreation of an autonomous working class. Everything else can be repaired later.

Net Zero and Environmental Policy

The manifesto supports a referendum on Net Zero targets and opposes schemes such as ULEZ. This alone distinguishes it from the entire political class. The green agenda is not about the environment. It is an excuse for taxation and behavioural control imposed on ordinary people while exempting the wealthy and well-connected. A referendum would at least allow dissenters to explain that there is no man-made climate emergency requiring economic suicide.

Abandoning Net Zero alone would probably fund a substantial increase in pensions and a reduction in taxes. That the manifesto recognises this trade-off is to its credit.

Cash, Finance, and Control

The manifesto commits to preserving the right to use cash. This is not a minor point. Abolishing cash is one of the final steps in turning citizens into supervised dependants, subject to financial discipline by algorithm. Any party that resists this deserves attention. Talk of “community control” is vague and potentially dangerous, but the core commitment—to prevent total financial surveillance—is sound.

Taxation and Wealth

The manifesto proposes raising the personal tax threshold for low-paid workers and imposing a one-off wealth tax on large estates. I see no practical objection to this. Every large fortune in Britain rests on state privilege of some kind. Shifting the tax burden away from working people and onto those best able to pay it is not unjust. If this results in the departure of mobile foreign wealth, so much the better. The very rich are always a source of political corruption.

My own preference would be something like the Athenian liturgies—forcing the rich to choose between taxation and funding public goods directly. But taxing them out of the country would be an acceptable substitute.

Banking, the NHS, and Pharmaceuticals

The manifesto proposes working-class representation in the governance of the Bank of England. Any change here would be an improvement. The Bank has spent decades destroying savings and transferring wealth upwards. It might print less money if exposed to some form of external pressure.

On the NHS, the manifesto proposes full renationalisation. This is sensible. The past thirty years of “reform” have consisted of diverting public money to consultants and contractors. The first step towards a rational health system is to renationalise everything and then decide what to do next.

The proposal to take a decisive role in pharmaceuticals is also unobjectionable. An entirely private pharmaceutical industry operating alongside a public health system invites profiteering and malpractice. Recent history provides sufficient illustration.

Policing and Order

The manifesto calls for a refocus of policing priorities on street and estate crime rather than “policing by Twitter.” This is welcome. Britain is becoming a country in which honest families barricade their doors while the police monitor speech. That arrangement serves no legitimate interest. Restoring basic order is not authoritarian. It is a precondition of liberty.

Palestine and the Middle East

The manifesto supports Palestine and calls for a single state with equal rights. My own preference is strict neutrality. The Middle East is not a British interest. But if Britain must have a position, supporting a single state with equal rights is more humane than providing unlimited diplomatic cover to the Netanyahu government. In any case, withdrawing from intervention would be preferable to any specific alignment.

The Political Context

The manifesto describes itself as an alternative to a Labour Party that has become “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” That is accurate. Labour is a managerial party committed to censorship and war. The Conservatives are no alternative. Reform is an adjunct of the same personnel and interests. There is no serious opposition within the existing parliamentary cartel.

This manifesto does not offer salvation. It offers a partial and contradictory challenge to a system that has otherwise closed ranks. On war, censorship, financial coercion, and deindustrialisation, it is plainly better than the alternatives. That does not make it right. It makes it preferable.

Voting does not redeem systems. At best, it alters the direction of travel. Compared with the rest, this manifesto points—imperfectly and inconsistently—away from some of the worst features of our present condition. That is not everything. But it is enough to justify attention in a political environment otherwise composed entirely of administrators of decline.

And if it all goes wrong, at least we shall have failed in a direction other than permanent war abroad and managed obedience at home. That alone would be a novelty.