The United Kingdom (UK) appears to be flirting with communism in various ways.

First there’s justice communism. In July 2025, a man called Sir Brian Leveson reviewed the criminal courts and concluded that radical modernisation was the only way to tackle delays. Included in his advice was greater use of judge-only trials for less serious cases.

In November 2025 he passed his odd – and offensive – advice to a man called David Lammy, who was the Foreign Secretary until September 2025. Lammy is not an especially clever guy, so he used the advice as foundation for something called “swift courts”, in which cases expected to result in convictions lasting just a few years would be heard by a single judge, saving time.

The dismantling of jury trials erodes the rights located in judicial tradition dating back to the UK’s founding document, the Magna Carta. What should be of equal concern is the content of the judicial guidance mandated upon judges through the Judicial College. As part of the Judicial Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (2026-2030), the Pre-Application Judicial Education Programme, or PAJE, the judges are presented with materials – “resources” – focusing on “diversity and supporting under-represented groups with training in equality ethics”. Charged with assault by way of defending his family from a burglar, a father may not take reassurance from the news that the sitting judge was recently awarded a gold star in an unconscious bias test.

Jury trials will still remain for the most serious of offences, namely, rape, murder, assault with the intention to inflict grievous bodily harm, aggravated burglary, and, because it is the UK, calling someone a retard on social media.

Gender Communism

There’s gender communism. The war in Iran exposed the precarious state of UK military investment – the result of successive administrations failing to understand the threats of hostile actors, or a conviction that they could rely on the military might of the United States. These truths were laid bare in documents detailing a £28 billion hole in the department’s finances, prompting an urgent memo to Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer: send money now.

Upon receipt of the memo, Reeves, not an especially clever woman, decided she'd rather give £10 billion over four years. When asked if she had misunderstood, or if she was mad, she is reported to have replied, “Why should I give money to a department that is so far from gender parity?” Reeves is reported to be particularly concerned that diversity policy documents demand that 50% of senior roles and ranks demand female representation, but currently only sit at between 10% and 15%. The shortfall saddens her.

Downing Street mumbled an excuse but did not refute the allegation. If it is true – and all the evidence suggests so – then social engineering’s rap sheet must be expanded so that in addition to destroying young minds and creating unnecessary, toxic divisions, it is a demonstrable threat to national security.

Housing

There’s housing communism. With UK 10-year gilts having crossed the 5% klaxon this week, the International Monetary Fund having already downgraded the country’s growth by 0.5% and the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NEISR) warning of a recession later in the year, Reeves’ office has come up with an inspired idea to insulate the public from an even more enhanced cost-of-living crisis: rent control.

Rent controls are ridiculous, desperate imposters that can’t succeed because they distort fundamental market incentives. By capping rents below equilibrium levels, landlords and developers are subjected to depleted returns on investment, discouraging new construction and forcing existing landlords to convert rental units into owner-occupied properties. Or, as is the case under Reeves’s management of the UK economy, withdraw them from the market entirely.

Empirical evidence supports this. A 2018 Stanford study of San Francisco’s rent control expansion found landlords reduced rental supply by 15%, contributing to a 5.1% rise in citywide rents as pressure shifted to unregulated units.

Controls also lead to reduced maintenance and declining housing quality: faced with dwindling finances and the cycle of costs rising faster than legislated rents, landlords aren’t particularly enthused about the prospects of repairs. Rent controls also create shortages by increasing demand while suppressing supply, misallocate housing (tenants stay longer, blocking turnover for newcomers), and often benefit higher-income incumbents.

As soon as Reeves mentioned this, the markets reacted predictably: shares in property companies and housebuilders cratered. The Treasury then issued a denial, walking back the very impression it had earlier allowed to fester.

Hallucinating

It is not difficult to notice that the UK governing class are experiencing seductive hallucinations. Half the government are fans of Zohran Kwame Mamdani in New York; the other half are terrified of Zack Polanski, leader of the radical UK Greens, and are wondering whether to ape some of his features, potentially to avoid losing their seats. But there remains some awkward discomfort about taking the flirtation one step further, leaving the public guessing, or anxious, at the infantile spectacle of this political, just-the-tip exploration.

The strange thing here lies in the numbers of a broader study of communism. Just as the South African Communist Party (SACP) commands a paltry 0.3% support – citizens who recognise it as their political representation  – the actual Communist Party of Britain (CPB) only has 1 220 members. It's probably okay to speculate that these people watch events from a distance with a sense of excitement before some atavism, and the return to anger and sadness.

The argument for a full plunge has two points of merit. Firstly, cynics will argue that little could be worse than the present circumstances. Second, in the event an emboldened government shrugged off its reticence and thrust with abandon – everything – the damage would be so monumental, so catastrophic, that it would take roughly 500 years for the words “true communism just hasn’t been properly tried before” to be uttered again. The lesson, in other words, would be learned.

A political class drowning in failure at the same time tempted by excess. Impossibly stupid people fiddling with the architecture of highly complex systems. Toes dipped in the waters of known dangers. Everything is positioned exactly where it needs to be in the disaster sequence.

So just do it already.