Bev gets elected Greater Manchester mayor on a 25% turnout.

 

There were over 2 million people eligible to vote in the Greater Manchester (2026) Mayoral Elections and just over 500,000 bothered to do so. The turnout was just over 25%. This was the lowest turnout since 2017. 

Can Bev Craig really say that she got a ringing endorsement from the voters of Greater Manchester or that she's got any mandate? If she intends to be the mayor for everyone, then she needs to escape from the LGBT bubble that she's in. She must look further than canal street and widen her horizons. 

Last December, two homeless men, Michael Heaton and Anthony Horn, were found frozen to death on the streets of Manchester. One was found dead on a car park and the other under a bridge next to the canal. Despite these appalling deaths, Bev, has been talking about an exclusive housing project for the LGBT community and how Labour are turning Manchester into a gender-neutral world. This is all nonsense upon stilts - trendy left politics. Affordable rented housing should be allocated on the basis of need. Being a 'gay' person shouldn't give you a priority for housing in Greater Manchester. The vast majority of people who live in Greater Manchester are not homosexuals. Eradicating homelessness, low pay and child poverty, is what Bev Craig needs to focus on.

Piccadilly Gardens is now called Crackadilly, because of the drug users who hang around the place. There's a ghastly Victorian underclass that inhabits the place. Like Balzac's Second Empire Paris, wealth and poverty sit cheek by jowl in Labour controlled Manchester, now known as Dubai on Deansgate. Bev Craig needs to clean the place up so decent people can use it. I can remember a time when people sat in deckchairs in Piccadilly Gardens.

Rosa Luxembourg & the dictatorship of the proletariat.

 

Louis Auguste Blanqui

It was the nominal President of the Paris Commune, Auguste Blanqui, who coined the term the "dictatorship of the proletariat" to mean rule on behalf of the common people. But most of the Communards were not socialists. 

The Paris Commune of 1871, was Marx's main model for popular self-government, but it only lasted three months until it was suppressed by the regular French army. Lenin used phrases like "all cooks shall govern" and "all power to the Soviets" but I don't think that he believed a word of it. He wasn't even in favour of workers' control. 

Rosa Luxembourg warned Lenin that revolution can move swiftly from the dictatorship of a class to the dictatorship of a party, to be followed by the dictatorship of a committee of the party and eventually by the rule of a single man who will soon enough dispense with that committee. Her Cassandra like prediction and warning, is exactly what occurred in Soviet Russia. Before Rosa Luxembourg, the Russian socialist Alexander Herzen, had said that communism was just Russian autocracy turned upside down. 

The Marxist German SDP preached international working-class solidarity but when war broke out in 1914, they supported the war and became jingoistic. The Marxist, Karl Liebknecht, was the only member of the Reichstag to vote against Germany's participation in the war and he campaigned against the war. As a punishment, he was sent to the front, despite his immunity as a member of parliament.