Forwarded from Class Consciousness Project
From Manchester to Liverpool: The New Gentrifiers
It started in Manchester.
When the City of London and its satellite sectors realised remote work could be done from anywhere, the privileged layers, labour aristocracy and 'white collar' professionals (tech, finance, media) looked north. Manchester became the “second city” for corporate capital: cheaper land, lower wages, and a ready-made cultural scene built off the bones of a once-industrial working class.
Those remote London workers, still on southern salaries, flooded in. Developers followed, selling the “northern lifestyle” through glass towers and build-to-rent schemes. Rents exploded. Local workers were priced out of their own neighbourhoods while being told it was “regeneration.”
The numbers prove it: Manchester now has more build-to-rent homes than any city outside London — over 13,000 units across 34 schemes. Average private rents hit £1,319 a month in 2025, up nearly 5% in a year and far above local wage growth. City-centre population has more than doubled since 2001, driven by high-income professionals, while Salford and Ancoats house prices have tripled over a decade. Meanwhile, the number of affordable homes built lags far behind demand. Liverpool is now showing the same pattern: office take-up up 12.5% in 2024, average rent rising 9.4% year-on-year, and average house prices climbing 11.7%, while thousands sit on social housing waiting lists.
Now, Liverpool is next in line.
Office take-up is surging. Prime spaces snapped up by insurers, tech start-ups, and regional branches of London firms. Property prices climbing faster than wages. The city centre refitted for tourists, students, and the new corporate middle class.
This is the latest stage of Britain’s managed gentrification: the transformation of once-industrial, working-class cities into playgrounds for capital. Corporate money doesn’t “revive” these cities, it colonises them. The industries replacing dock work and factories aren’t building livelihoods; they’re building portfolios.
Liverpool, like Manchester before it, is being sold as a “success story” of post-industrial Britain. But regeneration for who? The same class that gutted these places now returns to profit from their shells. The native working class is still locked out—by rent, by wages, by design. As in London and Manchester, Liverpool’s workers are being pushed to the edges of their own city, priced out of the centre they built. The poorer districts are left to rot, overseen not by councils but by landlords, contractors, and private firms who now run what’s left of public life. What once belonged to the people is now divided up by whoever can turn a profit from the decay.
From empire to empire-builders: the City of London didn’t forget the North—it came back to buy it.
The Class Consciousness Project
It started in Manchester.
When the City of London and its satellite sectors realised remote work could be done from anywhere, the privileged layers, labour aristocracy and 'white collar' professionals (tech, finance, media) looked north. Manchester became the “second city” for corporate capital: cheaper land, lower wages, and a ready-made cultural scene built off the bones of a once-industrial working class.
Those remote London workers, still on southern salaries, flooded in. Developers followed, selling the “northern lifestyle” through glass towers and build-to-rent schemes. Rents exploded. Local workers were priced out of their own neighbourhoods while being told it was “regeneration.”
The numbers prove it: Manchester now has more build-to-rent homes than any city outside London — over 13,000 units across 34 schemes. Average private rents hit £1,319 a month in 2025, up nearly 5% in a year and far above local wage growth. City-centre population has more than doubled since 2001, driven by high-income professionals, while Salford and Ancoats house prices have tripled over a decade. Meanwhile, the number of affordable homes built lags far behind demand. Liverpool is now showing the same pattern: office take-up up 12.5% in 2024, average rent rising 9.4% year-on-year, and average house prices climbing 11.7%, while thousands sit on social housing waiting lists.
Now, Liverpool is next in line.
Office take-up is surging. Prime spaces snapped up by insurers, tech start-ups, and regional branches of London firms. Property prices climbing faster than wages. The city centre refitted for tourists, students, and the new corporate middle class.
This is the latest stage of Britain’s managed gentrification: the transformation of once-industrial, working-class cities into playgrounds for capital. Corporate money doesn’t “revive” these cities, it colonises them. The industries replacing dock work and factories aren’t building livelihoods; they’re building portfolios.
Liverpool, like Manchester before it, is being sold as a “success story” of post-industrial Britain. But regeneration for who? The same class that gutted these places now returns to profit from their shells. The native working class is still locked out—by rent, by wages, by design. As in London and Manchester, Liverpool’s workers are being pushed to the edges of their own city, priced out of the centre they built. The poorer districts are left to rot, overseen not by councils but by landlords, contractors, and private firms who now run what’s left of public life. What once belonged to the people is now divided up by whoever can turn a profit from the decay.
From empire to empire-builders: the City of London didn’t forget the North—it came back to buy it.
The Class Consciousness Project
👏2
Forwarded from Ian Foster ☭
Whenever the right of Imperialism designs policies and optics to appeal to working class voters you should be very sceptical and avoid it like the plague. The material base of their agenda will be pro status quo, they will not challenge the economic system, the relations of production will not be questioned. This is the deception of Reform UK. It is the consequence of liberal formalism, in reality you can choose who to vote for, but not what to vote for. It's all form and excludes substance. The core Imperialist policies are baked in and not amenable to democratic tampering.
💯1
Forwarded from Joti Brar
This little speech I gave to a Resist (remember them?) conference back in 2021) is a wee blast from the past. Reposting because the fundamental point I was making remains true:
We are not interested in 'uniting the (self-identifying, imperialist-friendly) left'. We want to unite the maximum possible number of workers AGAINST BRITISH IMPERIALISM.
Our allies in this struggle are not the bought-off Labour and trade union bureaucrats (who must be swept away) but the masses of exploited people all over the world who are facing the same murderous exploiters and colonisers.
Imperialism gains much of its domestic strength by looting the resources of the whole world. Its machinery of wealth extraction and social control must be dismantled from both ends if we are ever to know liberty; if our children and grandchildren are going to have the chance to grow up in peace and dignity.
Whenever anyone talks to you about 'unity', always remember to ask: WITH WHOM and FOR WHAT? Otherwise you will find you have been tricked into keeping quiet about everything important in the interests of not upsetting some group of charlatans who are actually working for your class enemies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZHY_JfOPw0
We are not interested in 'uniting the (self-identifying, imperialist-friendly) left'. We want to unite the maximum possible number of workers AGAINST BRITISH IMPERIALISM.
Our allies in this struggle are not the bought-off Labour and trade union bureaucrats (who must be swept away) but the masses of exploited people all over the world who are facing the same murderous exploiters and colonisers.
Imperialism gains much of its domestic strength by looting the resources of the whole world. Its machinery of wealth extraction and social control must be dismantled from both ends if we are ever to know liberty; if our children and grandchildren are going to have the chance to grow up in peace and dignity.
Whenever anyone talks to you about 'unity', always remember to ask: WITH WHOM and FOR WHAT? Otherwise you will find you have been tricked into keeping quiet about everything important in the interests of not upsetting some group of charlatans who are actually working for your class enemies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZHY_JfOPw0
YouTube
Forget about uniting the left
Workers Party deputy leader Joti Brar explains to delegates at Resist Fest how its not the self-identifying ‘left’ that we need to unite, but the genuine forces for socialism.
👏2
Forwarded from The Communists
Minister Zhao Fei from the Chinese Embassy addresses the CPGB-ML’s October Revolution celebrations in Southall tonight. Other speakers and guests tonight include the Cuban ambassador Ismara Vargas Walter and representatives from the Russian, Laotian, and Venezuelan embassies, fraternal party JVP from Sri Lanka, and comrades Vikki and Ranjeet from the CPGB-ML.
Standing room only in Saklatvala Hall!
Standing room only in Saklatvala Hall!
🔥2
Forwarded from Joti Brar
https://youtube.com/shorts/A83dHYvJ7F0?si=-QIowIdQwWZoHmnp
Anna Louise Strong’s work remains essential reading for those who want to know the reality of Soviet and Chinese socialism in the Stalin and Mao era. I especially recommend When Serfs Stood Up in Tibet and The Stalin Era.
Anna Louise Strong’s work remains essential reading for those who want to know the reality of Soviet and Chinese socialism in the Stalin and Mao era. I especially recommend When Serfs Stood Up in Tibet and The Stalin Era.
YouTube
Anna Louise Strong
An older video I made in collaboration with Esme Louisee of Kinky History in honor of Women's History Month! figured I should post it here. Miss Anna Louise ...
Forwarded from USSR Pictures
Formation of personnel of the 1st Guards Anti-Aircraft Artillery Regiment of the Black Sea Fleet. USSR, Sevastopol, 1944. Photo by Evgeny Khaldey
❤1
Forwarded from USSR Pictures
Soviet officers in front of the Motherland Calls monument in Volgograd. USSR, 1970s
❤2
Forwarded from USSR Pictures
Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, Joseph Stalin, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, and Stanislav Kosior among a group of soldiers and workers (1927)
❤2
Forwarded from Joti Brar
https://thecommunists.org/2025/11/24/leaflets/newark-leaflet-make-britain-great-for-workers/
The decline we are seeing in Newark is repeated across the rest of Britain’s former industrial heartlands, and it will not be reversed under conditions of capitalist imperialism. When we wake up and realise the con we have been subjected to, we must work together for a completely different type of society – one where people’s needs decide everything and the economy is organised rationally.
The decline we are seeing in Newark is repeated across the rest of Britain’s former industrial heartlands, and it will not be reversed under conditions of capitalist imperialism. When we wake up and realise the con we have been subjected to, we must work together for a completely different type of society – one where people’s needs decide everything and the economy is organised rationally.
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
- William Shakespeare
❤2