James Wakefield

Dad & partner. Union activists & social worker.

[James Wakefield @JamesPWakefield]

@Keir_Starmer Awful.

[James Wakefield @JamesPWakefield]

@TheCinesthetic Any of David Simon’s other shows … Treme, We Own This City, Generation Kill.

[James Wakefield @JamesPWakefield]

@richardpbacon Absolutely. David Simon’s books Homicide and The Corner achieve that. Love narrative nonfiction!

[James Wakefield @JamesPWakefield]

@DermotMurnaghan Very sad news, grew up watching him present the news. RIP x

[James Wakefield @JamesPWakefield]

@mikoh123 Proper meltdown.

[The Associated Press @AP]

BREAKING: The White House called FIFA’s Gianni Infantino to review Team USA’s Folarin Balogun’s red card, AP source says. https://t.co/ZM1M8IIf01

[James Wakefield @JamesPWakefield]

Other-race effect- How the pain gap lasts for a lifetime (The Guardian), Jul 03, 2026
https://t.co/mmFgw7AakR

[James Wakefield @JamesPWakefield]

Starmer apologises for British state’s role in historical forced adoptions (The Guardian), Jul 03, 2026
https://t.co/SFV1SePMLW

[James Wakefield @JamesPWakefield]

@StevenJMethven @ZackPolanski Nailed it. It’s all about vibes and not actually using her power.

[Zoe Gardner @ZoeJardiniere]

You are *literally* in charge of regulating this place, you coward🤦‍♀️

[James Wakefield @JamesPWakefield]

@carolecadwalla Absolutely, you’ve nailed it. It’s all about the vibes and not actually using that power.

[Andrea Egan UNISON General Secretary @AndreaEganGS]

Andy Burnham has a historic opportunity to rebuild Britain in the interests of the majority.

But with a Chancellor committed to the same approach that’s already failed, that chance will be squandered.

Ed Miliband is most likely to enact the kinds of policies we so badly need

[James Wakefield @JamesPWakefield]

@DropSiteNews I’ve always found the name Pod Save America ironic. It belongs to a group of Obama bros who are just as responsible for America’s current mess. Lol.

[James Wakefield @JamesPWakefield]

@implausibleblog Pathetic attack line. No substance. Wasn’t she part of Starmer’s solution to Labour’s walloping in the May elections.

[James Wakefield @JamesPWakefield]

@tom_watson lol.

[Andrew Feinstein @andrewfeinstein]

Starmer expelled more Jewish members of the Labour Party ‘to combat antisemitism’ than all previous leaders combined. That’s like expelling people of colour to fight racism. He destroyed the left on a lie, he won power on lies & he resigned with more lies about his time in office!

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Every British PM’s nightmare

With Keir Starmer expected to fall on his sword shortly, here is my take on the conundrum facing Andy Burnham, indeed any and every British PM.

The true nature of Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the United States has far more to do with American financiers’ willingness to keep borrowing to purchase British government debt than with history, culture or Britain’s defence needs. This is the burden under which every UK Prime Minister must labour.

Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they get hit”. The same could be said of prospective British prime ministers, especially after Liz Truss's spectacular defenestration. They all have a plan until the guilt market hits them. Andy Burnham, Nigel Farage, my friend Zack Polanski will have to face this, if they ever move into 10 Downing Street. I think they know it. But I doubt whether they appreciate the true magnitude or nature of their predicament.

Conventional wisdom has it that the bond market comprises people looking to invest their savings in a government's debt. They seek the right balance between a higher interest rate and the increased risk this implies. For example, higher bond yields may signal that the market expects future inflation to reduce the value of the fixed interest payments that their bonds will yield. Worse still, it may foreshadow a risk of government default, as occurred in Argentina and Greece.

That’s more or less what first year economics and finance students are taught. And it’s all true. Except that, in the case of the United Kingdom, this story misses the most fascinating and worrying aspect of its government bond or gilt market: The British government’s ability to refinance its public debt of almost 3 trillion pounds does not depend on savers choosing to invest in gilts. In fact, the British government’s ability to sell gilts hinges heavily on the willingness of numerous US-based financial institutions to borrow substantial sums of dollars to purchase British gilts, which they then use as collateral to borrow for their own purposes within the US.

And there’s the rub. There is a world of difference between needing to borrow from savers and from relying on speculators who borrow themselves to lend you. Savers who lend to you focus on your long-term ability to repay them. They may tolerate your desire to make infrastructural investments that could increase your debt in the short term, in return for future profits that will help you repay them when their bonds expire. However, speculators who borrow in order to lend are a different beast entirely. They are much jumpier and prone to margin calls: situations where, if the bonds they purchased from you begin to lose value, fearing they will not be able to repay their own creditors, they dump your bonds thus turning their decline into a crash.

The question arises: Why are British bonds, or gilts, so much more reliant on American speculators borrowing money to buy them than German bunds, Japanese bonds, Italian bonds or Greek bonds? Why does every British government rely so heavily on American leveraged capital inflows?

It all started in the 1950s when the City of London discovered how to avoid following the British Empire down the road to oblivion. The trick was to carve out a niche for the City within the emerging dollar empire, which was institutionalised within the Bretton Woods system. American financiers faced rigid capital controls within that system, but the City of London was able to alleviate these due to three invaluable features.

First, London’s trading expertise and legal system offered American financiers efficiency with immunity from all sort of interventions, including democratic accountability. Secondly, Britain’s network of offshore jurisdictions offered fabulous tax-minimisation opportunities. And, thirdly, London quickly became the holding depository of a torrent of petrodollars and eurodollars, not to mention the shadowy dollars created outside the United States by foreign bankers.

Thus, the Great British paradox: while the UK's real economy was in decline, the City of London was flourishing. When the Bretton Woods system collapsed in the 1970s, American financiers discovered another use for the City: they borrowed dollars in the US short-term to buy long-term UK government gilts, which they then sold quickly to repay their loans. They would then repeat this process again and again to profit handsomely. This is how the British government became reliant on leveraged US institutions. In order to continue operating as usual, London today requires American balance sheets that are willing to expand through borrowing and use British gilts as collateral in order to maintain liquidity in the US.

Put differently, the flipside of the City’s success story is that, even though it borrows in a currency that it prints, the UK is not financially sovereign. Yes, the City occupies a strategically important position within the global dollar system but the price for this is that the UK government’s sovereignty is circumscribed by its priority to maintain the City’s central position in American finance. While this remains the priority, the occupant of 10 Downing Street is like the captain whose powers are limited to re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Is there an alternative to this peculiar form of financial subservience to US-based leveraged financiers? Yes, but it requires a willingness to accept a falling pound and falling house prices while increasing public investment through a new investment bank that issues bonds supported by the Bank of England.

Any Prime Minister who tries to maintain Britain’s financial servitude to US capital while also investing in public goods may well put Britain on a path towards the IMF, whose sole purpose, lest we forget, is to create the political leverage that will bring about – like it did in Greece – the permanent loss of sovereignty over tax and spending policy. The question is: Do the current contenders for Britain’s top job understand this?

https://t.co/xGrWjjcudY

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Keir Starmer was not merely a disappointment. He is a mendacious figure of ethical decrepitude, a man who won the Labour Party leadership based on promises that he jettisoned five seconds after winning - a Labour leader who dared banish from the Labour Party not only his predecessor but also remarkable human beings like director Ken Loach - the gentleman who has taken the historic Labour Party and transformed it into a vessel for the very oligarchy it was elected to restrain.

Consider the litany of Starmer’s moral and logical failures. He promised a 'different Britain', yet his actions were a masterclass in Tory-lite politics—using the same maxed-out credit card analogies that once served the austerity brigades to justify his own failure of vision. He promised a human rights lawyer’s approach but he embraced a racist-lite version of Farage.

On Europe, Starmer promised Brexiteers that Brexit is Brexit yet stood before those who yearn to rejoin the European Union, winked at them to make them feel that Britain would gradually reconnect, even rejoin, with the EU while offering nothing of substance. This is not leadership; it is a fraud.

And then there's the manner in which Starmer and his government rushed to offer Israel unequivocal support in pursuing its genocide in Gaza, sacrificing precious political and civil liberties in the UK by imprisoning grandmothers, priests and peaceful activists who dared support Palestine Action, an organisation that Starmer and his minions proscribed as terrorists for practising the usual activist tactics of trespassing to spray paint military planes that had demonstrably aided in the genocide. To add insult to injury, Starmer performed the diplomatic pantomime of recognising a Palestinian state, in a manner that ensured it would never happen.

But above all else, this is a government that has learned nothing from the post-2008 era. Starmer and his Chancellor are playing the same tired austerity game while enabling and empowering the Finance Curse perpetrated by the City of London, throwing in forgood measure cuts in international aid to fund a military spending trickle under the guise of a "Strategic Defence Review" . It is the same old doctrine: austerity for the masses, socialism for the financiers and the arms dealers.

History will remember Mr Starmer as a man without conviction, a Prime Minister who offers not a shred of honesty, but merely the cruel illusion of change. He is ethically decrepit because he had chosen, consciously, to abandon principle for power. And for that, history will indict him. Good riddance, I say.

https://t.co/sGfebPkDXR

[James Wakefield @JamesPWakefield]

@PhilipProudfoot Frankly, those defending him don’t seem to be grasping the full extent of the situation.

[Piers Morgan @piersmorgan]

How can anyone still support this Israeli govt when psychopathic monsters like Ben Gvir are ministers in it, advocating genocide in Lebanon? Disgusting.