Proper Gander: The luxury gap (2026)

The Proper Gander column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

There’s a hint of pornography about Channel 4’s documentary series Inside The World’s Most Luxurious… in that it presents an idealised version of something in order to titillate. The first three episodes each show off the highest of high-end vehicles: cruise ships, motor-homes and yachts. These are the most extravagant and technologically advanced ways of getting from A to B available, albeit only to those who can fork out £8,000 a night for a voyage on a liner. On the Seven Seas Grandeur, this would get you one of their ‘most exclusive’ suites, which comes with its own butler. The ship boasts seven restaurants (with Versace-designed crockery), a 470-seat theatre and an art gallery containing 1,600 exhibits, including a doted-on Fabergé egg. More compact are the motor-homes featured in the second episode. These are ‘jaw-dropping palaces on wheels’, one of which even includes a garage in which you can park your Ferrari. A hi-tech cockpit leads on to a sleek seating area, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom, even a roof terrace. The Element model of motor-home sells for over £2 million, although this sounds like a bargain compared to the £12 million cost for a flat of the same size (732 square feet) in Knightsbridge, London. The third episode showcases ‘the super elite’s ultimate status symbol’: yachts. We’re told that ‘these floating palaces redefine the meaning of opulence’, with one example being the £80 million Titania, which runs to 73 metres long and has six decks (containing a massage room, jacuzzi, gym and grand piano) joined by a glass lift. This ‘pinnacle of bespoke luxury’ is only rarely used by its owner, the billionaire founder of Phones4U John Caudwell, and otherwise can be hired out for £600,000 per week.

The series describes rather than attempts to analyse the extravagances, not that this means it gives an objective or neutral account, as illustrated by the gushing adjectives used in the narration. While the monetary value of the vehicles is often mentioned, more emphasis is placed on the attention to detail and the skills involved in manufacturing them. The motor-homes and yachts are made to order, with the specifications chosen by the beaming couples who commission them and built by hand by specialist firms. The talents of the designers, welders, plumbers, electricians, and hundreds of others are evident, and the yachts and motor-homes are certainly inspiring as technical achievements. The positive impression the programme engenders also extends to the owners, who seem personable enough, and the creators and crews who want to do a good job in making and running the craft. We are only shown the staff while they’re on duty and on camera, though, so we don’t hear if their opinions are always so committed. Despite the occasional wry inflection in the voice over, the programme’s affirming tone doesn’t encourage us to question the context in which these lavish objects exist. Still, it’s obvious that the lifestyles depicted in the programme don’t bear much relation to those of its audience. The extraordinary feats of design and engineering are tainted by the elitism which the vehicles represent.

In a socialist world, maybe more people will want to live in yachts or motor-homes or their future equivalents? Without the financial and bureaucratic constraints which in capitalism usually tie us to a particular location whether we want to be there or not, the freedom to travel around would be one of the principles of a socialist society. Some people, groups or communities may prefer to spend time travelling with or without a fixed home, and why not do this in the most comfortable way possible? This leads to the familiar argument against socialism that it is unrealistic and unsustainable because ‘what if everyone wanted their own luxury yacht or motor-home?’. An assumption behind this is that given the opportunity, people will tend to choose the most full-on option. Personal greed is an attitude encouraged by the relative scarcities of capitalism, whereas socialism wouldn’t create the conditions for an outlook as narrow. Wanting better isn’t necessarily the same as wanting more, and even in capitalist society, our aspirations are varied. If an individual or group in a socialist world wanted to produce a top-notch yacht or motor-home, they wouldn’t be able to make this happen through financial clout, but only by engaging the cooperation of many others. With resources and manufacturing capabilities owned and run in common, people will have to decide how to allocate them using whatever decision-making processes are most democratic, representative and practical. Without the wasteful production which comes with propping up capitalist infrastructure, a socialist society would be able to focus on satisfying people’s needs and wants. Whether or not this would involve behemoths like those featured in the documentary would depend on what provision and motivation are available at the time. A socialist society’s early period would have to prioritise ensuring the global population’s basic needs are met in a sustainable way. Maybe motor-homes and yachts or their future equivalents could be available on a pool-type basis, with people booking them to use for a while and then being available for someone else. This kind of arrangement would no doubt be alongside networks of more communal travel by land, sea or air. The technology and skills to create efficient, pleasurable means of transport are already here, as demonstrated by Inside The World’s Most Luxurious…, even if our current society limits this to the super-rich, as the programme also reminds us.

Mike Foster

Why we can’t support Your Party (2026)

From the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Over the weekend of 29-30 November some 2000 attendees at a conference in Liverpool founded a new political party called simply ‘Your Party’.

After Labour lost the 2019 General Election long-time left-winger Jeremy Corbyn resigned as leader and was succeeded by the man who is now the Prime Minister. During the four years during which he was leader Corbyn had tried to steer the Labour Party towards the left. Starmer decided not just to reverse this but to turn the Labour Party into a mainstream capitalist party, even to the extent of describing itself as a better ‘party of business’ than the Tories.

Corbyn himself was suspended as a member of the Parliamentary Labour Party (though not of the Labour Party itself). Starmer could have let him stay a member (as Corbyn would have wanted) but he and those around him were adamant. They wanted to completely change the Labour Party by in effect lopping off its leftwing. Corbyn’s supporters were expelled. Corbyn himself was not allowed to stand as a Labour candidate in the 2024 general election. They put up a candidate against him; which meant that as he stood against a Labour candidate he was automatically expelled from the Labour Party. He won, easily, as an Independent.

From that point on, there were calls for Corbyn to support the formation of a new left-of-Labour party which would in effect be the Labour Party’s former leftwing as a separate political party. Whatever the reason Corbyn dithered and another suspended Labour MP, Zarah Sultana, precipitated things by announcing in July that she was resigning from the Labour Party to co-lead a new leftwing party with Corbyn. This was an announcement that a lot of people had been waiting for and up to 800,000 were said to have expressed an interest in the new party, though by the time of the conference only some 53,000 had actually joined.

Sortition

A new party cannot be created just like that. It has to have a statement of what it stands for and a constitution. Corbyn and his advisers drew up a plan which, in theory, seemed reasonable enough (as long as the provisional committee played fair).

A provisional committee is set up to draft a statement of aims and a constitution both to be put to a founding conference. These would be subject to amendments suggested by meetings of members. Those attending the conference are to be chosen by lot (now called sortition) from the membership. Conference will debate the finalised documents and selected amendments. These will be voted for or against online, not just by those chosen to attend the conference but also by the rest of the membership on the basis of one member one vote.

This — including sortition — seems a democratic way of going about founding any new party whatever its aims. Choosing those attending a founding conference by lot should ensure that they will be a representative cross-section of the membership and reflect the views of the average member and not just of an activist minority. More generally, it is an alternative to election but still a democratic way of choosing people to carry out particular tasks (as it already is today for choosing trial juries) and could have a wider use in a classless socialist society.

This, however, did not go down well amongst the activist minority made up of the various Trotskyist groups that had decided to ‘enter’ the new party (as in the past they had ‘entered’ the Labour Party). They argued that this would exclude experienced activists like, er, themselves.

In the event, it didn’t exclude them. It just ensured that they were represented in accordance with their proportion of the new party’s members. The Trotskyist groups were pleasantly surprised that quite a few of their militants were chosen to attend, even some from the more obscure grouplets

Do as I don’t

The Trotskyists also objected to a provision in the proposed constitution barring dual membership with another political party. This was in fact already in the application form to become a member and take part in the founding process. This, however, wasn’t enforced and members of the SWP, the old Militant Tendency (now calling themselves SPEW) and most lesser Trotskyist groups joined and participated freely in the pre-conference Your Party meetings.

One objection to Trotskyists being in the new party was set out by the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Britain, Robert Griffiths, in an article in the August issue of their paper Unity, where he criticised ‘the readiness of the ultra-leftist sects to infiltrate broad-based mass movements in order to divide them, pose as a “left opposition” to the leadership and recruit from those they influence and mislead’.

Which is indeed what Trotskyists plan, though it’s a bit of a cheek coming from the CPB as it’s what its antecedents used to be good at. (Incidentally, the CPB position is not to join the new party but to vote and campaign for its candidates under certain circumstances).

The Trotskyists lost no time in forming a ‘left opposition’ and campaigning to make the constitution of the new party as democratic as possible. This was not because they believe in democratic organisation but because it would give them a wider opportunity to work and recruit within the new party. They joined a ‘Socialist Unity Group’. One of its constituents calls itself the ‘Bolshevik Tendency’; which would have been a better name for their faction.

They are hypocrites because their own organisations are not organised democratically. Take the SWP, for example. It is run by a Central Committee which is chosen in this way:

‘The outgoing Central Committee selects and circulates a provisional slate for the new CC at the beginning of the period for pre-Conference discussion. This is then discussed at the district aggregates where comrades can propose alternative slates. At the Conference the outgoing CC proposes a final slate (which may have changed as a result of the pre-Conference discussion). This slate, along with any other that is supported by a minimum of five delegates, is discussed and voted on by Conference’.

What this means is that the SWP is run by a self-perpetuating group that in effect renews itself by co-option. The slate ‘selected’ by the outgoing committee is virtually assured of winning. It was how the Politburo of the CPSU was chosen in the old USSR. Their constitution also states that ‘permanent or secret factions are not allowed’.

When the SWP led a move to ‘seize control’  of the conference agenda by means of an emergency resolution, the conference organisers took this literally as a call to storm the platform and invoked the paper ban on dual membership to expel the leaders of the SWP (and hire a security firm to guard the platform).

In the end, the conference voted not to endorse a complete ban on dual membership but to make acceptance of being in another party more difficult. So the Trotskyists are still there.

What does the new party stand for?

Before adopting a constitution the conference also adopted a Political Statement setting out its general aims. This began:

‘Your Party is a democratic, member-led socialist party that stands for social justice, peace and international solidarity. Our goal is the transfer of wealth and power, now concentrated in the hands of the few, to the overwhelming majority in a democratic, socialist society’.

This is rather vague and says nothing about how quickly — or how slowly — this ‘transfer of wealth and power’ is to take place nor what the end result will be like. It is what the Labour Party promised in its election manifesto for the February 1974 general election. In fact, it is even rather less radical in terms of rhetoric as that manifesto talked about ‘a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families’.

The Statement doesn’t go into what they envisage this ‘transfer of wealth and power’ as involving but it will be much the same as Attlee set out in 1932 (Will and the Way to Socialism, p. 42):

‘A Labour [read: Your Party] government, therefore, not only by the transference of industry from profit-making for the few to the service of the many, but also by taxation, will work to reduce the purchasing power of the wealthier classes, while by wage increases and by the provision of social services it will expand the purchasing power of the masses’.

So, different private profit-making sectors of the economy are to be gradually brought into some form of ‘public ownership’; taxes on the rich increased; services provided by central and local government expanded and improved, and money wages increased. All this to take place initially within the framework of the existing mixed private/state capitalist economy. The end result — several decades down the line — would be a society where people’s incomes and what they owned would be more equally distributed than now and in which they would be working for some ‘public enterprise’ paying them a good wage and be provided with well-funded public services and amenities.

This is the old Fabian dream of the gradual transformation of capitalism into a more equal society by means of nationalisations and social reforms. It’s not as if it has not been tried, and failed. It always was impossible because it involves trying to make capitalism work in a way that it cannot.

What drives the economy under capitalism is the pursuit of profits to be accumulated as more capital invested for more profit. If a government interferes with this, the result will be a slowdown in the economy depriving the government of the tax revenues to proceed further towards a more equal society. Based as it is on profit-making, the capitalist economy cannot tolerate a growing increase in the purchasing power of workers and their families at the expense of what is the source of the purchasing power of the rich, profits.

The last time it was tried

All reformist governments with such a programme have failed everywhere, the most recent, spectacular one being the Syriza government in Greece in 2015. This failure is particularly significant as Your Party has a lot in common with Syriza, whose name is an acronym in Greek for ‘Radical Coalition of the Left-Progressive Alliance’ and which included Trotskyist groups as constituent parts.

Leftists explain the failure of Syriza either by a lack of determination or by a sell-out. In fact, it failed because the leftwing government came up against how capitalism works and realised that if it continued to try to apply its policy it would make things worse (they reasoned that if things were going to get worse it would be better that this should be managed by them, who had some sympathy for the working class, rather than by their political opponents who didn’t). A Your Party government would face a similar dilemma.

It is all very well Zarah Sultana saying, as she did in her closing speech to the Conference:

‘We are not here for tweaks of a broken system. We are not here just to lower some bills and sprinkle a wealth tax. We are here for a fundamental transformation of society’.

It got her a standing ovation and it will on May Day and at the end of the next Conference and similar ceremonial occasions but, in practice, in between, Your Party will be campaigning just for ‘tweaks’ and ‘sprinkles’ and seeking votes and popular support on this basis. It will be yet another reformist party. Support built on that basis will be of no use in furthering the cause of socialism. Which is why we cannot support the reformists who have formed what we can only call ‘Their Party’.

Adam Buick

Classic Reprint: Income tax and the wage struggle (2026)

A Classic Reprint from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Given the recent budget from Rachel Reeves and the debate about income tax rates and thresholds, we reprint this article as it will have some resonance.

It is popularly supposed to be a virtue in a government not to impose income tax on low-wage workers. So each government tries to claim credit for having made alterations in the income tax which have the effect of freeing some workers from tax liability entirely, or at least of reducing the amount of it. This claim was made by the Labour Party following its six years in office after 1945 and was repeated by the Conservatives at the 1959 election.

Both the claims are so framed as to be distinctly disingenuous.

It was quite true, as the Conservatives claimed, that the raising of the tax allowance exempted millions of people from tax, but it was equally easy to see that, as wages rise, the exempted millions came into tax range again. And when the Labour Party Handbook 1951 claimed that a youth earning £3 a week in 1951 was paying less income tax than would have been levied on a wage of £3 in 1938 it would have been appropriate to point out that £3 in 1951 would buy only about half what it would have bought before the war.

And both governments refrained from stressing the fact that since the war income tax (Pay As You Earn) has been brought down to lower pay levels to take in millions more wage and salary earners than before the war. The number of people paying tax was under four million in 1938, 12 million in 1945, over sixteen million at the end of Labour’s term of office, and up to nearly twenty million in 1961-2. The Tory budget of 1963 removed nearly four million from liability but with every wage increase some will be coming into the range again.

So if it is a merit not to make workers pay income tax neither the Labour Party nor the Tories can match up to the performance of the National Government in 1938; and none of them can compare with the governments in the nineteenth century which exempted practically the whole of the industrial workers and clerks from liability. An article in the summer number of Public Administration, by Mrs. Olive Anderson, shows that in the middle of the century the minimum level of pay liable to tax was about £3 a week, while the wages of even the most highly skilled craftsmen were under 30s. a week, and clerks’ wages were under 40s. a week.

Interest attaches to the comparison because during the Crimean War tax reformers campaigned to get the taxable level brought down so that the mass of workers would be brought in, one suggestion being to make the tax payable on all wages of 6s. a week and over. One of the arguments was that as it was the town workers who were so keen on the war, why shouldn’t they help to pay for it through income tax?

The proposed changes were not adopted, chiefly because of the difficulty and cost of collecting small amounts of tax from millions of individuals, many of whom often changed their jobs and moved to different towns. Below a certain level the tax costs more to collect than the yield to the government.

Later on tax collection became more efficient and more and more people were brought into tax liability by the twofold movement of the lowering of the exemption limit (from £160 in 1899 to £130 in 1915) and the upward movement of prices and wages.)

But what is there in the common belief that the working class as a whole gain from a lowering of income tax and would gain still more if they were entirely exempt? The answer is, nothing at all! The condition of the working class, apart from possible short term effects when changes are introduced, is not the result of taxation whether in the form of income tax or the so-called indirect taxes, Purchase Tax, etc.

To start with, were the working class better off in 1938 when most of them were exempt from income tax and the rate was only five shillings (1s. 8d. on the first £135), than they have been since the war when nearly all of them are within the tax range and tax is at a higher rate? The evidence points to the fact that as a class they were rather worse off in 1938. And to go further back, were they better off in 1900 or 1850 when they paid no tax at all? Again, the answer is No!

In the latest year for which figures are available there were about 23 million wage and salary earners (including company directors) whose total income was about £14,000 million and who paid a tax of £1,200 million. If we take the industrial workers and shop assistants only, with a total wage bill of about £9,000 million a year, the amount of tax might perhaps be in the region of £300 million to £400 million a year.

Of course those who now have tax deducted would find their take home pay correspondingly increased when the deduction was reduced or ceased, and would for a while be better off; but in the general struggle between workers and employers over wages, this reduction of tax would be a factor in stiffening the attitude of the employers. In the situation of recent years, with fairly continuous low unemployment and increasing prices, such a reduction of tax would operate like any slackening in the rise of prices, it would make it that much more difficult for wage claims to make headway against the employers’ resistance.

Conversely, changes which have brought more and more workers into the tax range, or have increased their rate of tax. had consequences similar to rises in the cost of living: they have stiffened the pressure of the workers for higher wages especially when unemployment has been low. In other words now that millions of workers have tax deducted they have come to think in terms of ”take home pay” and to struggle for the maintenance or increase of that, rather than to look at the wage before deduction.

Mrs. Anderson, whose article has already been referred to, has found that a similar situation may have existed during the Crimean War. One of the reasons why income tax was not then extended to take in wage earners was that with the shortage of labour caused by the war it was feared that to whatever extent tax was levied on the workers the employers would be forced to raise wages to keep take home pay at its former level.

In short, struggling to raise wages is in line with working class interests, campaigning over taxation is not.

H. (November, 1963)