From Manchester to Liverpool: The New Gentrifiers

It started in Manchester.
When the City of London and its satellite sectors realised remote work could be done from anywhere, the privileged layers, labour aristocracy and 'white collar' professionals (tech, finance, media) looked north. Manchester became the “second city” for corporate capital: cheaper land, lower wages, and a ready-made cultural scene built off the bones of a once-industrial working class.

Those remote London workers, still on southern salaries, flooded in. Developers followed, selling the “northern lifestyle” through glass towers and build-to-rent schemes. Rents exploded. Local workers were priced out of their own neighbourhoods while being told it was “regeneration.”

The numbers prove it: Manchester now has more build-to-rent homes than any city outside London — over 13,000 units across 34 schemes. Average private rents hit £1,319 a month in 2025, up nearly 5% in a year and far above local wage growth. City-centre population has more than doubled since 2001, driven by high-income professionals, while Salford and Ancoats house prices have tripled over a decade. Meanwhile, the number of affordable homes built lags far behind demand. Liverpool is now showing the same pattern: office take-up up 12.5% in 2024, average rent rising 9.4% year-on-year, and average house prices climbing 11.7%, while thousands sit on social housing waiting lists.

Now, Liverpool is next in line.
Office take-up is surging. Prime spaces snapped up by insurers, tech start-ups, and regional branches of London firms. Property prices climbing faster than wages. The city centre refitted for tourists, students, and the new corporate middle class.

This is the latest stage of Britain’s managed gentrification: the transformation of once-industrial, working-class cities into playgrounds for capital. Corporate money doesn’t “revive” these cities, it colonises them. The industries replacing dock work and factories aren’t building livelihoods; they’re building portfolios.

Liverpool, like Manchester before it, is being sold as a “success story” of post-industrial Britain. But regeneration for who? The same class that gutted these places now returns to profit from their shells. The native working class is still locked out—by rent, by wages, by design. As in London and Manchester, Liverpool’s workers are being pushed to the edges of their own city, priced out of the centre they built. The poorer districts are left to rot, overseen not by councils but by landlords, contractors, and private firms who now run what’s left of public life. What once belonged to the people is now divided up by whoever can turn a profit from the decay.

From empire to empire-builders: the City of London didn’t forget the North—it came back to buy it.

The Class Consciousness Project

Our comrade Paul has written an enlightening article on the history of India and the long struggle for independence.

Be sure to share this around!

https://classconsciousnessproject.blog/2025/11/11/the-long-struggle-of-india/

Solidarity with the Canadian GM workers!

https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/union-threatens-to-seize-cami-auto-plant-if-gm-removes-machinery

Our comrade Vikki explores why life under late stage capitalism is crap and will only get crapper until we overthrow the parasitic ruling class.

http://classconsciousnessproject.blog/2025/11/17/capitalism-is-crap/

Solidarity with the Canadian GM workers.

https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/union-threatens-to-seize-cami-auto-plant-if-gm-removes-machinery

The media has been working hard to cultivate an ‘outsider’ image for Nigel Farage, framing him as an ‘anti-establishment disrupter’ in the hopes that this will entice workers back towards putting their faith in the electoral system and accepting the Farage/Reform (bourgeois) narrative that immigrants and immigration are the cause of all their economic and social ills.

https://thecommunists.org/2025/11/01/news/rise-of-reform/

Ronnie Clayton heading Blackburn Rovers' 78th-minute equaliser against Liverpool, FA Cup 6th Round, 1 March 1958. Ally MacLeod scored Rovers' winner a few minutes later. Crowd of 51,000 in Ewood Park.

The mental health crisis is constantly talked about but seldom actually addressed. Various media talk constantly about the issue but always avoid addressing the fact that it is decaying capitalism which is the root cause. If workers are promised nothing but a life of permanent scarcity, atomisation and alienation then this will only lead to greater mental health problems. To address these we need a system that provides a basic level of security in terms of the essentials of life including (vitally) job security. We need community and solidarity to be promoted, not rabid and pointless individualism. None of this can be delivered by the rotting corpse of capitalism. We need socialism as the the current system is making us sick.

All of this will be explored in a forthcoming article by our comrade Luke which will be up on our website later today.

The Rock, Dumbarton.

In our latest article Comrade Luke explored the link between the escalating mental health crisis and the decay of capitalism.

http://classconsciousnessproject.blog/2025/11/22/mental-health-and-capitalism/

England Vs Scotland squads. Euro '96.

This disgusting bit of anti-Irish colonial propaganda is presumably part of Suella Braverman’s future bid for Tory party leadership.

Braverman is again justifying the slaughter of civilian republican civil rights demonstrators by the “2 Para” (2nd parachute) regiment in 1972. She stops just short of mentioning the Bloody Sunday massacre, but the pictures of that bloody rampage are unmistakable. She is speaking against the Bloody Sunday Inquiry tribunal outcome – and prime minister David Cameron’s mealy-mouthed ‘apology’, which was the British government’s admission of Guilt.

Essentially, she’s saying every republican Irishman is a terrorist and that murdering protestors in cold blood is lawful action when taken by the British state. Since those murdered were British (albeit colonised) citizens, she’s defending the right of British imperialist state forces – the police and army — to murder British citizens with absolute impunity.

European court of human rights or no, these actions will always be illegal and immoral, and the perpetrators of these cold-blooded murders will always be butchers, not “heroes”.

Braverman’s deliberate posing alongside a mural that shows solidarity between the Irish republican movement and the people of Palestine is no accident.

It was Braverman, after all, who instructed police to clamp down on anti-genocide pro-Palestine protestors in Britain, even as prime minister Rishi Sunak was embracing Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and endorsing the zionists’ Jdam bomb attack on al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City in October 2023.

Braverman speaks to and for the brutal and bloodthirsty British imperialists. She is auditioning for her next role; to be allowed to continue facilitating the ruling class’s attacks on the workers of Britain and the world.

The message to British workers could not be clearer: this entire rotten system is ripe for overthrow.

https://twittervx.com/SuellaBraverman/status/1990841657680421190