Solidariogb | 19th August 2026
From an anti-imperialist pen
On 20 July 2026, Andy Burnham crossed the threshold of Downing Street with a promise that already sounds like the epitaph of an era: to return to the regions what London had seized from them during fifteen years of austerity. A month later, reality imposes itself with the cruelty known only to powers in retreat. The United Kingdom is not a country choosing between progress and reaction; it is a minor empire agonising between the managed, humanised decline offered by Burnham and the fascistic temptation of those who promise to restore a greatness that was never the property of its people.
Burnham arrived with an advantage. For the first time in eighteen months, the Labour Party overtook Reform UK in the polls—24 per cent to 22 per cent, according to YouGov in mid-August—and Burnham himself leads Farage by 22 points as preferred Prime Minister. Two in five Britons say their opinion of the former Mayor of Manchester has improved since he took office. The £2 bus fare, the cancellation of early release for seven thousand prisoners, and a discourse that names the North of England as a priority have woven a honeymoon that, for the first time in years, is not pure rhetoric.
Yet the honeymoon already shows cracks. The poll of 16–17 August returned Reform UK to first place on a technical 24 per cent, level with Labour on 22 per cent. Patrick English of YouGov sums it up without euphemism: “The British public still does not believe the government is addressing their concerns over the cost of living and immigration.” Burnham may be more popular than Farage, but his cabinet—John Healey at the Treasury, Ed Miliband at Foreign Affairs, Shabana Mahmood at the Home Office—has not touched a single key of the imperial architecture. Healey protested, not against military excess, but against the low defence budget. NATO remains unblemished. The “special relationship” with Washington remains the unspoken dogma. Burnham is not a rupture; he is a safety valve for a regime that needed oxygen after seven Prime Ministers in ten years.
Meanwhile, Nigel Farage and Reform UK do what they do best: wait. They led more than three hundred consecutive polls from April 2025 until Burnham’s arrival. Their tactical dip in August has not altered their capacity for mobilisation. Farage remains the most polarising figure in British politics, and that, in a country where half the electorate feels no party represents them, is an asset, not a flaw. His digital machine, his discontented base, and his skill at converting economic frustration into racial hatred keep him as a structural challenge. Reform UK does not need to win elections; it needs Labour to fail to materialise its promises. And on that score, recent history plays in its favour.
The British Left: A Broken Mosaic
If the British Right has a formidable adversary in the mirror, the Left has one in its own fragmentation. Your Party, the project of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, capitalises on the Muslim, pro-Palestinian, and anti-system vote, but is paralysed by the fracture between “The Many” and “Grassroots Left,” condemned to remain an electoral niche without capacity for national articulation. The communist parties—the CPB, CPBML, RCPBML, PCR—maintain stable but atomised positions, with no mass presence.
In that desert, the CPGB-ML and the World Anti-Imperialist Platform (WAP) represent the only pole attempting to weave a coherent line. Joti Brar, President of the CPGB-ML since its 10th National Congress in April 2025 and WAP spokesperson, has been a constant voice against the genocide in Gaza, NATO’s war in Ukraine, and the looting of Venezuela. The 10th International Anti-Imperialist Conference in Nairobi (9–10 May 2026), co-organised with the Communist Party of Kenya (Marxist), defined lines that shake the board: condemnation of French neo-colonialism in Africa, explicit support for the Axis of Resistance, rupture with NATO, and the characterisation of the war as a Third World War driven by imperialism.
But that coherence carries a price. The KKE and orthodox sectors of the international communist movement accuse the WAP of opportunism for an alleged “tactical collaboration” with conservative sectors—including those around Trump—against the “globalists.” It is a criticism that cannot be ignored, for it points to a real tension: how far can the anti-imperialist front extend without dissolving its principles into an anti-imperialism of convenience?
Venezuela: The Trial by Fire
No topic has tested the coherence of the anti-imperialist Left so harshly as the Venezuelan crisis. On 3 January 2026, US forces seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores in Caracas, transferring them to New York. That same day, the Venezuelan Supreme Court ordered Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez to assume the interim presidency, which she did with the backing of the National Assembly and the Armed Forces.
Since then, a storm of accusations has swept through Chavismo. Radical voices such as Mario Silva, historic host of La Hojilla, have branded Rodríguez’s government “cowardly” and “treacherous” for opening the oil sector to US companies. The Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV)—which since 2020 has distanced itself from Maduro, formed the Popular Revolutionary Alternative, and suffered a judicial intervention in 2023—has accused Rodríguez of operating under “subordination and colonial dependence” on Trump. International analysts such as Antonio De La Cruz do not mince words: “Delcy Rodríguez betrayed, and in criminal organisations betrayal is paid for.”
In response, the CPGB-ML and the WAP have maintained a position of institutional recognition of Rodríguez and have rejected the narratives of betrayal as an imperialist disinformation operation to divide the movement. The independent analyst Craig Murray—whose theses have been disseminated by media close to the CPGB-ML—argues that Trump wants Rodríguez known as his “puppet” because that forms part of his narrative of victory, and that the real intention is “to divide and weaken the socialist movement in Venezuela.” The CPGB-ML demands the liberation and return of Maduro, the end of sanctions, and the repatriation of Venezuelan gold held in the Bank of England.
It is a tactically understandable position: in a context of covert occupation and oil plunder, the division of the anti-imperialist front strengthens Washington. But it is not without risks. Defending Rodríguez in a scenario where sectors of Chavismo itself and the PCV accuse her of collaborationism may isolate the WAP within the left spectrum. And if the accusations have a material basis—something that to date has been neither conclusively demonstrated nor refuted—the platform would be closing ranks with those who, objectively, facilitate the delivery of national resources to the empire. The line of “we do not need more enemies amongst ourselves” is seductive, but historical materialism is not suspended for the sake of tactics.
Peripheral Nationalisms and the Spectre of NATO
In Scotland, John Swinney promises a referendum for 2028, though he knows the cost of living is the only thing that moves votes. In Wales, Plaid Cymru is shaping up as the majority autonomic force. In Northern Ireland, the DUP unionist blockade persists. The CPGB-ML rejects Scottish and Welsh separatism, considering it a “trap within the EU” that divides the British working class. It is a position that honours territorial unity as an anti-imperialist base, though it ignores that, in declining powers, peripheral nationalisms often express a legitimate rebellion against metropolitan centralism.
The truth is that none of these forces—neither Burnham’s Labourism, nor Farage’s ultra-Right, nor the peripheral nationalisms—question NATO membership or subordination to Washington. The British radical Left is, today, the only voice that names the elephant in the room: the United Kingdom is not a sovereign nation choosing allies; it is a satellite power that finances, with the blood and treasure of its people, the wars of the American empire from Ukraine to Gaza, from the Sahara to the Caribbean.
Synthesis
The United Kingdom of 2026 is not a country moving towards a solution. It is a post-Brexit regime in crisis, where the alternation between Labourism and the ultra-Right conceals an unbreakable imperial continuity. Burnham offers management; Farage offers rage; neither offers sovereignty. The British Left, atomised and without mass presence, depends on initiatives such as the WAP to keep a coherent anti-imperialist line alive, though that coherence is today subjected to its hardest test: the capacity to distinguish between the defence of a people against external aggression and the uncritical alignment with a leadership that, at best, navigates between unsustainable contradictions.
What happens in London is not a distant spectacle. It is the pulse of a minor empire that decides, each day, whether its decline will be slow and managed, or rapid and explosive. And in that decision, the weight of the anti-imperialist Left—British and worldwide—has yet to be felt with the force that history demands.
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