Building @MiddCooperating - working with visionary people and organisations to transform our local community/economy in Middleton. Also at @mark37m.bsky.social
Middleton, Manchester
Joined May 2013
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Mark Fraser retweeted
Prime Minister Andy Burnham came to Lambeth yesterday to promote Sainsbury's workfare scheme for 10,000 young people to work for free in their supermarkets.
Sainsbury's cut 3000 jobs last year while simultaneously posting a £1 billion profit.
Strangely the Leader of Lambeth Council was not invited.
Lambeth's young people deserve better than this; quality apprenticeships and training that provide them with the skills, experience and pay to live and thrive in our borough.
Andy Burnham promised to "end neoliberalism" but supporting a scheme to provide free labour for Billion pound companies will only serve to perpetuate it.
ALT Andy Burnham s dressed as a Sainsburys worker
Mark Fraser retweeted
We're calling on @andyburnham - rethink the strategy. Stop listening to the landlords telling you how well they're doing. Speak to SHAC & other tenant & resident representative bodies to get a true picture & some real solutions or you'll never touch the housing emergency.
SHAC Article - Peabody Was Convicted. It Took a Resident to Make it Happen
The real story here is that regulation & enforcement is left to individuals.
shaction.org/2026/08/27/peab…
As David says, "No council brought this case. No regulator brought it. I did after other routes had failed to make Peabody comply with the law."
There is a devastating faultline within the housing sector - plenty of authorities to give the illusion of state oversight, but in reality, tenants and residents are on their own.
Join us to hold all landlords to account.
Mark Fraser retweeted
Burnham had said Starmer's £39bn housing fund should be "dedicated to council homes." Now, it's only 60% for *social homes* - the rest for private housing like shared ownership.
It's time to stop back-tracking. Rent controls now. Public money spent on public housing!
Mark Fraser retweeted
I’ve written to the Government calling for rent controls.
Rip-off rents are the elephant in the room of the cost-of-living crisis.
You can’t live your life or spend on the high street when you’re paying someone else’s mortgage.
Give renters a break. Control rents.
Mark Fraser retweeted
More support for people facing street homelessness is desperately needed.
The government also needs to get serious about ending the housing crisis that pushes people into homelessness. That means cutting rip-off rents with rent controls and investing in council housing now.
Mark Fraser retweeted
One point I will always adamantly insist on is that it's entirely possible to live a joyful and exuberant life in the midst of this abusive dystopia.
There's a pervasive, unexamined notion throughout revolutionary politics that there's some kind of nobility in being miserable. If it isn't seen as noble, it's at least seen as rational, because everything is so unjust and unhealthy.
There's a widespread assumption that your level of political awareness should have an inverse correlation to your level of personal happiness, because of all the tyranny, injustice, poverty, genocide and ecocide. That it would be selfish to be happy in a world so deeply troubled.
But that's rubbish. Nobody is helped by your misery. By depriving yourself of joy, you are only depriving the world of that much joy. Being more joyful makes you more energized, more helpful, and more useful to the cause, and it brings joy to everyone around you.
Being joyful is a skill, and like any other skill it takes practice. But it's something we all have access to if we want it.
Being joyful doesn't entail hiding from the misery of the world or compartmentalizing away from the reality of what's happening; quite the opposite, in fact. It entails opening yourself all the way up to what's happening in each moment and feeling it all with the heart of a poet. It means becoming MORE sensitive, not less, because a stripped-open sensitivity is where ubiquitous beauty is found.
We always have access to joy because we always have access to beauty. Beauty is everywhere. Even in dystopia. Even in this slow-motion armageddon we now find ourselves in. Even in the exhaust fumes and the flashing screens. Even in the polluted oceans and falling bombs. Everywhere you look, everywhere you feel, everywhere you listen, an overpowering beauty shines forth.
They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but that's false. Beauty is in everything. The FAILURE to see beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is just another word for the experience of having truly seen something. If the eye is failing to see the beauty in a given moment, the fault lies with the perceiver, not with the perceived.
You know that feeling when you're showing someone your favorite movie for the first time, and it's at your favorite part, and you look over at them to see their response, and they're missing the whole thing because they're looking at their phone?
Most people live their whole lives that way. Missing all the best parts while fixating on empty nonsense. Keeping their attention wrapped up in their mental monologues of judgement and worry. In their endless search to distract themselves from the present moment. In their doomscrolling and other addictive behaviors.
They're missing moment after moment of radiant, electrifying beauty, and they're trading it all for so very, very little. They're going to look back on their lives from their deathbeds and realize that they weren't really there for it. That they missed all the best parts while chasing their goals, running away from their aversions, and trying to distract themselves from the tedium of it all.
The best parts that get missed are the parts our minds tend to dismiss as boring and unworthy of our attention. The daily commute. The wait in the elevator. The kitchen cleanup. The hanging of laundry. The sights outside the window. The sounds inside the room. The feeling of the floor under the feet and the air in the lungs. Every single moment of this is packed full of staggering beauty.
I insist that this is true. Insist on it. If we were fighting holy wars over this principle, I would happily die on the front lines defending it. There are very few things in life that I hold a rock-solid uncompromising view on, but the fact that there is beauty in everything is one of them. Anyone who disagrees is simply wrong, and I will tell them so with great vehemence in my voice.
Don't waste your precious time here missing the beauty of each moment. This is more important now than ever, because we don't know how long humanity's adventure on this miraculous blue world will last. Tomorrow has never been guaranteed to any of us, but these days it's not even guaranteed to our species.
We are all going to die. Maybe we will die one by one, or maybe we will all die together in one frightening moment. In either case, we owe it to ourselves and to our world to try our very best to deeply appreciate every moment of every day of the time that we have left.
Just keep bringing your attention back to what's here and now, and keep looking for the beauty in it. I swear to you it's there. It's there in the feelings in the body. It's there in the sights, sounds and smells of everyday living, no matter what else is happening in your life or in our world. Keep looking for it, and you'll get better and better at seeing it.
That's how life becomes more joyful. Not by chasing the highs or running from the lows, but from learning to relish the beauty that's inherent in terrestrial sensory experience every single moment of your life, no matter what else happens to be occurring.
Learn to do this, and you can live the rest of your life knowing that even if it all comes crashing down one day, at least you'll know you tried your very best to make sure you didn't miss the miraculousness of your time here.
Mark Fraser retweeted
There's been lots of chatter about Burnham's speech and ending "factionalism" or "hyper-factionalism" in the Labour Party.
The problem with the discussion is that it's too vague, imprecise and ignores the actual mechanisms of "hyper-factionalism." It also overlooks that there are already very clear and concrete proposals for how to end it: the recommendations of the Forde Report that the NEC under Starmer largely rejected. If people in the Labour Party want to truly end factionalism, they should be calling for Forde to be actively consulted on how to implement his findings.
The idea you can, or even want, to end the existence of factions in the Labour Party is silly. The Labour Party is home to lots of members, affiliates and MPs who belong to different intellectual and political traditions, who have different views on how society should be run. That should be a good thing. It's good to have a Party where there is robust competition about ideas and contests about how they will be implemented.
It's also just the cut-and-thrust of politics for people to organise collectively inside parties to achieve their objectives. There is nothing wrong, fundamentally, with a Party including Momentum and Progress and Mainstream, and for those groups to put together slates and campaign for their tradition to win. It's also not necessarily wrong, even if it might be unpleasant, for those factions to seek political advantage by securing positive media coverage for their positions and (within reason) media critiques of competing factions. That's politics.
The "factionalism" that people are looking to end, and which the Party does need to end, is when the Party's over-powered bureaucracy intervenes to stifle debate or rig democratic outcomes. That's what happened in 2015-2018 and again from 2020-2026. It involved one faction using the bureaucracy to do things like put CLPs into "special measures" on flimsy complaints because they produced results a factionalised bureaucracy didn't like; or the bureaucracy secretly diverting Party funds to back factional candidates in safe seats during General Election and thus depriving seats that actually needed the money to contest elections; or, as happened under McSweeney, MP candidates being nobbled through dodgy "due diligence" bureaucratic manoeuvres (like Faiza Shaheen); or delegates being suspended on the eve of Labour conference on nonsense charges to influence floor votes; or members being suspended, like Neal Lawson, on the basis of such rubbish evidence; like Labour Together, running a multi-year unlawful campaign that systematically misled voters and members so as to procure their views as a precondition to seizing the Party bureaucracy and purging left-wingers.
The use and misuse of bureaucratic power is what Forde identified and investigated in his report. He critiqued how factions fought battles bureaucratically and not democratically. His most important and overarching recommendation is that the Party should restructure itself so that the bureaucracy acts like a neutral civil service that sees its role as fairly and competently overseeing and facilitating democratic disputes.
As I wrote in The Fraud, this was explicitly rejected by Starmer and the NEC overseen by Shabana Mahmood. The NEC published a response to Forde's recommendations saying that they believed the entire bureaucracy and Party staff must take exclusive direction from the Leadership. It was one of the many outrages of the Starmer leadership that was not reported properly at the time. It effectively codified and reinforced the underlying politico-legal mechanisms that made hyper-factionalism so toxic in the Labour Party.
So if Burnham really wants to end factionalism, and if people want to mobilise on this point, there is a clear ask: revisit the Forde Report, invite him into the Party to give his views and then implement his clear and systematic proposals.
Mark Fraser retweeted
My piece for Tribune
Only Ed Miliband can stand up to Treasury orthodoxy as Chancellor. By not appointing him, Andy Burnham would be surrendering on day one. tribunemag.co.uk/2026/07/and…
Mark Fraser retweeted
Two important, maybe contradictory take-aways from this.
The first is that this is a change in tone that has been forced by the left exercising its power inside but mostly outside of the Labour Party. Burnham is in office because the Greens helped destroy the Labour Party in May's local elections, which has scared MPs and empowered parts of the Party that wanted a change of approach. So to the extent that this an improvement on Labour's position, it is a reflection of how an electorally relevant and competent force to the left of Labour does impact on our national discourse and forces Labour to humanise its messages. And a change in tone from an incoming Prime Minister does have some, at least limited, impact on shaping our national discussion on Israel's genocide.
The second point is that it is just tone. It's a three minute video for social media. It's not even set-piece for the cameras or in front of the national media. In the context of genocide, it's pretty thin gruel that many will undoubtedly find flippant and incidental.
Certainly, the contrition obscures that on substantive policy, this is no different to the Starmer government's approach. No significant increase in sanctions, strongly implying that there will be no ending the F-35 carve-out from existing arms license restrictions, hiding behind (and effectively misrepresenting) international court rulings to not call out genocide or war crimes, and certainly no steps towards accountability for complicity for domestic actors. It is little different to what Hamish Falconer has been telling Parliament for months.
And it is nowhere near enough. Doesn't even approximate being near enough, which will have to include a total and complete arms embargo, deproscribing Pal Action, and taking the concrete steps to prevent a genocide as required by the ICJ.
So the left must now organise and use the power it has gathered to itself in order to continuing demanding and extracting the concrete changes that are needed to end this genocide and secure justice and accountability. If Burnham wants to cohere an electoral left-alliance to save his skin, some hand-wringing and watery eyes won't cut it.
Mark Fraser retweeted
People with mental health problems often wait too long for (or never get) a really good conversation about why they're struggling & what help they need
I've written for @NewStatesman about how a 'same-day open access' model could transform outcomes newstatesman.com/spotlight/2…
Mark Fraser retweeted
A very good start by @andyburnham in Manchester.
His commitment to tackling the cost of living, challenging trickle-down economics, reindustrialisation, public control, building council housing, and decentralising power to regions represents a refreshing and exciting time for our movement.
In this context, we need a new focus on democratic ownership. The Thatcher era and the years that followed witnessed one of the largest transfers of wealth from working individuals to the affluent in the Western world, leading to many of the social challenges we encounter today. We can no longer afford to skirt around the edges.
Alternative business models, such as worker and employee ownership, an expanding cooperative economy, alongside public ownership of utilities and fairer taxation, could empower working families and their communities after years of feeling disenfranchised.
It would be an effective way to confront the populist right and their politics of division.
Mark Fraser retweeted
Fantastic to hear @andyburnham echoing what we've been saying: everything starts with a good home.
Rent caps are the next step.
Affordable housing isn't just good for our pockets, but good for our communities and the economy.
Mark Fraser retweeted
Great opportunity for Burnham to realise what an incredibly bad move it would be to keep on Mahmood in the cabinet, along with her horrible & horribly unpopular immigration policies
Yet another government source weighs in - this is a big pile on reflecting the chaos in government right now.
“Andy is going to have the same problem with Shabana that Keir has. She and her operation are totally out of control, and think rules only apply to others, not themselves. I give it six months.”
Feels like this story is a tipping point
Mark Fraser retweeted
We will know a lot when Burnham appoints his Chancellor.
If it's @Ed_Miliband, then there will be a basis for hope for a Labour government that has a serious response to the country's deep problems.
If it's Wes Streeting, then it will just be more of the same drift and decay.
Mark Fraser retweeted
“Greater Manchester, far from representing a story of a dynamic break with the neoliberal consensus, instead represents a crystallisation of it.”
Me on the contradictions of “Manchesterism” for the @NewStatesman .
newstatesman.com/politics/ec…
Mark Fraser retweeted
Hoy cumple 90 años un director al que le debemos mucho. Gracias Ken Loach por enseñarnos, como nadie a través del cine, que luchar por lo que es justo merece la pena.
Mark Fraser retweeted
The Court of Appeal will deliver its judgment on whether the Palestine Action ban is unlawful, at 11AM tomorrow.
The result will be live streamed. I'll post the link tomorrow morning.
