Bread, Circuses and Balance Sheets: The IFR’s State of the Game and the Crisis of Capitalist Football

The Independent Football Regulator’s State of the Game report presents itself as a sober, technocratic assessment of English football’s financial health. In reality, it is an extraordinary document: a 244-page anatomy of a social institution hollowed out by capitalist irrationality—and an unwitting indictment of the very economic system the regulator exists to stabilise. Its authors describe a “paradox” at the heart of the sport: unprecedented wealth alongside systemic insolvency. A Marxist analysis shows there is no paradox at all. What the IFR calls a puzzle is simply capitalism’s logic asserting itself with brutal clarity.

English football today is the clearest example of competitive accumulation. Clubs are compelled to spend beyond their means—not because they are reckless or poorly managed, but because the industry’s structure leaves them little choice. Since 1992, Premier League revenue has grown thirty-fold, far outpacing the wider economy, while costs have risen even faster. Ninety-four per cent of clubs in the top five divisions lose money. This is not a departure from capitalist norms; it is their fulfilment. The IFR cannot acknowledge this, because doing so would mean admitting that the crisis is systemic, not accidental.

The report’s own data show how sport has been transformed into a financial asset class. Labour-power is converted into amortised capital, future transfer fees are sold off as fictitious capital, grounds and badges are pledged as collateral, and a handful of lenders extract value regardless of sporting outcomes. Football has become a site of financialisation, governed not by sporting logic but by the imperatives of debt, leverage and speculative investment. The IFR documents this process in forensic detail while refusing to confront its implications.

Ownership patterns point to the same reality: global capital, multi-club networks, and North American investment groups dominate the game. Returns are overwhelmingly negative, yet capital keeps flowing in—not for sporting reasons, but because football offers global reach, cultural legitimacy, and opportunities for speculation, soft power, and, as the report notes, money laundering.

The regulator’s role is not to challenge this system, but to preserve it. Its proposals amount to managerial tinkering that keeps the Premier League dominant and the pyramid intact, while leaving the underlying relations of ownership, finance, and exploitation untouched. Rather than resolve football’s contradictions, the IFR merely catalogues them, revealing the need for a fundamentally different model.

The so‑called paradox: wealth without stability

David Kogan’s foreword presents English football as both the world’s richest, most competitive league system and one on the verge of collapse. The figures are stark: clubs generated £9 billion in revenue last season, yet 94 per cent of those in the top five divisions lost money. No other major industry could report such figures without prompting immediate questions about systemic failure. Yet the IFR treats this as a managerial problem: poor governance, inadequate oversight, and clubs failing to “live within their means.” This is the ideological reflex of bourgeois regulation: to blame crises on individual actors’ behaviour rather than on the system's structure.

A Marxist analysis begins from the opposite premise. When nearly every firm in an industry fails in the same way, the cause lies not in management but in the structure of accumulation. Marx explained long ago that competition forces capitalists to expand, invest and outspend their rivals to survive. The capitalist does not accumulate because he is greedy or irrational; the system compels him to. English football clearly illustrates this dynamic. Clubs spend beyond their means not because they are reckless, but because they have to. Falling behind in the competitive arms race risks relegation, lost broadcast income, collapsing commercial revenue and, ultimately, extinction.

The IFR’s own data confirm this. Since 1992, Premier League revenue has grown thirty-fold, far outpacing the wider economy, while costs have risen even faster. Wage bills, transfer amortisation, agent fees, stadium financing, and debt servicing have all increased alongside revenue. The report presents this as a failure of “financial management,” as if clubs could spend less without jeopardising their competitive position. But in a system driven by accumulation, restraint is punished. A club that refuses to overspend isn’t prudent; it gets relegated.

This is why the IFR cannot acknowledge the crisis’s real nature. To do so would mean admitting that the contradictions it describes are not deviations from normal capitalist functioning, but its inevitable outcome. The regulator must therefore frame the crisis as a technical problem—liquidity, governance, and risk—rather than a structural one. It must pretend that stress tests, action plans, and “enhanced oversight” can correct football's financial instability, rather than fundamentally transforming ownership, finance, and distribution.

The report’s language reflects this ideological constraint. Kogan describes a “paradox”: unprecedented wealth alongside systemic insolvency, as though the two were unrelated phenomena that mysteriously coexist. But there is no paradox: wealth and insolvency are two sides of the same process. The more revenue the game generates, the more capital flows in. The more capital flows in, the sharper the competitive pressures become. As those pressures intensify, clubs must spend more, and their losses deepen. The IFR describes the symptoms while refusing to name the disease. 

The Political Economy of Football’s Financialisation

To understand the IFR’s findings, we should place English football within the broader political economy of late capitalism. Over the past three decades, it has undergone the same transformation as other major sectors of the global economy: a shift from production to financialisation, from profits generated through activity to profits extracted through ownership, leverage and speculation. Once a commercial entertainment industry, football has become a financial asset class, governed less by sporting logic than by the imperatives of capital accumulation.

This transformation did not happen overnight. Football’s first metamorphosis—from a working-class pastime to a commercial commodity—came in the early twentieth century. Its second, from commodity to global media product, gathered pace with television and culminated in the Premier League’s 1992 reorganisation. But the decisive shift came after the 2008 financial crisis, when the collapse of productive investment across advanced capitalist economies pushed capital into new fields of speculation. With its global reach, predictable revenue streams and intense brand loyalty, football became an ideal arena for financial expansion.

Financialisation means that profit comes less from producing goods or services and more from manipulating financial instruments. In football, it turns every aspect of the sport into a tradable asset. Player contracts are amortised like industrial machinery; future transfer fees are sold as receivables; and stadiums, training grounds and even club badges are used as collateral. Multi-club ownership groups operate like private equity portfolios, moving players, revenues and liabilities across borders to maximise returns. Debt is no longer a temporary burden but a permanent operating condition.

The IFR’s own data show the scale of this transformation. Transfer factoring has increased fourteen-fold in four years, and £1.2 billion in future transfer receipts has already been monetised. Interest payments have quadrupled as borrowing costs have surged, while five lenders now control almost the entire transfer finance market. This is no marginal development; it is a structural reorganisation of the sport, driven by the dominance of finance capital.

Marx, Hilferding and Lenin all described how, once dominant, financial capital subordinates productive activity to its own logic. That logic now governs English football. Clubs borrow not to invest in long-term development, but to keep pace with the competitive arms race. They sell future transfer fees not out of prudence, but because the system compels them. Financialisation does not stabilise football; it destabilises it, creating fragility, dependency and exposure to shocks. Relegation clauses mean sporting failure can trigger creditor seizure, reducing clubs to shells through which capital circulates.

Why football? Because it offers what late capitalism craves: scarcity, global visibility, emotional attachment and cultural legitimacy. It is one of the few sectors where losses can be tolerated for years because the club retains symbolic value as an asset. As the IFR notes, the sector is also vulnerable to money laundering, offshore structures, and opaque sponsorship arrangements. Distressed clubs become conduits for capital flows unrelated to sport.

The IFR documents this transformation with forensic detail while refusing to confront its implications. It describes the symptoms of financialisation, debt dependency, factoring, and multi‑club networks, but treats them as technical problems rather than structural ones. It cannot admit that English football’s crisis is not a deviation from capitalist functioning but its fulfilment. To do so would be to question the very model the regulator exists to preserve.

From commodity to media product to financial instrument

Football’s first transformation from a working-class pastime into a commercial commodity occurred in the early 20th century, as clubs evolved from voluntary associations into businesses selling gate receipts, advertising space, and professional players’ labour-power. Its second transformation from commodity to media product followed the rise of television and culminated in the Premier League’s 1992 reorganisation. Broadcasting turned football into a mass-produced cultural product, shaped by scheduling, advertising, and global distribution. But the decisive shift came after the 2008 financial crisis, when football became a financial instrument.

This is not a metaphor; it is literal. Clubs borrow against future transfer fees. Contracts are amortised like industrial machinery. Clubs pledge grounds and badges as collateral. Revenues are securitised. Multi-club groups operate like private equity portfolios. Every component of the sport- labour, infrastructure, intellectual property, and future income- is converted into an asset that can be traded, leveraged, or used as security. The IFR’s data show the scale of this transformation with forensic clarity: transfer factoring has risen fourteen-fold in four years, £1.2 billion of future receipts have already been sold, interest payments have quadrupled as the cost of debt has surged, and five lenders control almost the entire market for transfer finance. This is not a marginal development; it is the sport's structural reorganisation under the dominance of finance capital.

What Hilferding described in *Finance Capital*- the fusion of banking and industrial capital into a financial oligarchy that extracts value regardless of productive outcomes- is now evident on the balance sheets of English football clubs. Lenin’s analysis of how these oligarchies dominate entire sectors and turn them into instruments of speculation applies with almost uncanny precision. English football has become one of those sectors.

Financialisation means profit comes less from producing goods or services and more from manipulating financial instruments. In football, this shows up in the conversion of every aspect of the sport into tradable assets: player contracts become depreciating capital goods, transfer fees become receivables, stadiums become collateral, clubs become vehicles for debt-fuelled expansion, and multi-club networks become platforms for arbitrage, talent extraction, and regulatory evasion.

The consequences are profound. Financialisation does not stabilise football; it destabilises it, creating fragility, dependency and exposure to shocks. Relegation clauses mean sporting failure can trigger creditor seizure, while clubs become shells through which capital circulates. The IFR documents this fragility but cannot explain it, because doing so would require acknowledging that the instability is structural, not accidental.

Why football? Because it offers exactly what late capitalism craves: scarcity, global visibility, emotional attachment and cultural legitimacy. Few sectors can absorb years of losses while their core asset- the club- retains symbolic value. As the IFR itself notes, football is also vulnerable to money laundering, offshore structures and opaque sponsorship arrangements. Distressed clubs can become conduits for capital flows unrelated to sport.

Financialisation also helps explain why capital continues to flow into football despite negative returns. The IFR reports an average indicative return of minus 41 per cent across clubs, yet ownership is becoming more global, institutional and concentrated. This is not irrational; it reflects financial capital’s pursuit of control over assets it can leverage, securitise, or use to anchor broader commercial ecosystems. A Premier League club is more than a football team: it is a content engine, a data-harvesting platform, a global brand, a political instrument and a financial vehicle.

The IFR describes the symptoms of this transformation- debt dependency, factoring, and multi-club networks- but treats them as technical rather than structural problems. It cannot admit that English football’s crisis is not a deviation from capitalism but its fulfilment. Doing so would mean questioning the very model the regulator exists to preserve.

Why football?

Football is uniquely suited to financialisation because it possesses characteristics that make it a coveted prize for capital. Few industries offer such a potent combination of global reach, emotional intensity, predictable revenue, scarcity and cultural legitimacy. These features are not incidental; they are precisely what make football attractive to finance capital in an era of stagnation, falling productive investment and the search for new fields of extraction.

Its global reach is unmatched. The Premier League reaches hundreds of millions of homes, giving capital access to a ready-made global consumer base. In a world of saturated traditional markets, football offers immediate access to audiences on every continent. Its emotional connection is even more valuable. Football clubs command a level of brand loyalty that no commercial product can replicate. Supporters do not switch allegiances based on price or quality. Their loyalty is inherited, irrational and lifelong. For capital, this is ideal: a captive market whose consumption is driven by identity rather than choice.

Football also offers predictable revenue streams. Broadcast rights, sponsorships, merchandise, digital content and hospitality packages bring in recurring income that can be securitised, borrowed against and bundled into financial products. Predictability is the lifeblood of financialisation. Then there is scarcity. Only a handful of elite clubs exist, and there is just one Premier League. Scarcity drives valuations, intensifies competition among investors and ensures that even failing clubs retain symbolic and financial value.

Finally, football enjoys cultural legitimacy. It presents itself as tradition, community, and heritage, masking the extraction taking place beneath the surface. This legitimacy gives political cover to private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds, and multinational corporations. In a low-growth economy, football offers something rare: an asset class with global visibility and political utility. It serves as a vehicle for surplus capital, a platform for soft power, and, as the IFR itself notes, a conduit for money laundering through offshore structures, opaque transfers, and sponsorship. Football’s financialisation is no accident. It is structural, and the IFR merely catalogues its symptoms.

Financialisation as crisis

Financialisation does not stabilise football; it destabilises it. The IFR’s own data reveal a sport whose financial architecture has been reshaped around debt, leverage and speculative instruments. Debt dependency, transfer factoring, leveraged ownership and sprawling multi-club networks do not build resilience; they create fragility. They tie clubs to financial obligations that become more burdensome precisely when sporting performance declines. Relegation clauses now embedded in most Premier League loans mean sporting failure can trigger creditor seizure when a club is at its weakest. A bad season becomes not just a sporting setback but a financial catastrophe. Clubs stop being community institutions and become shells through which capital circulates.

Factoring shows this dynamic with brutal clarity. When a club sells future transfer receipts to raise cash now, it mortgages tomorrow’s income to cope with today’s pressures. This is fictitious capital in Marx’s strict sense: value that does not yet exist, monetised and traded as if it were already real. The IFR reports that factoring has increased fourteen-fold in four years, with £1.2 billion in future receipts already sold. This is not prudent financial management; it is a symptom of systemic desperation. Clubs are not planning for the future; they are consuming it.

Leveraged ownership compounds the instability. Owners buy clubs with borrowed money, load the debt onto the club, and extract returns through management fees, refinancing, and asset sales. Multi‑club networks extend this logic across borders, treating clubs as nodes in a financial ecosystem rather than as sporting entities. Players move to meet balance‑sheet needs rather than tactical ones. Revenues are shifted to optimise tax and regulatory arbitrage. The club becomes a financial vehicle first and a football team second.

The IFR’s report is, unintentionally, a catalogue of these contradictions. It describes a sport that generates enormous wealth but cannot sustain itself, because financial channels siphon that wealth away before it can stabilise the system. The crisis is not accidental; it is structural. Football’s financial instability is not caused by mismanagement, incompetence or isolated excess. It is the predictable result of reorganising the sport around the imperatives of financial capital. The regulator documents the symptoms but cannot name the cause. Doing so would mean acknowledging that English football’s crisis is not a deviation from capitalism but an expression of it and that no amount of technocratic oversight can resolve contradictions rooted in the system itself.

Labour as a cost, labour as an asset, labour as a battleground

The report’s treatment of labour is revealing. The report presents players almost exclusively as a cost, a liability to manage, rather than as the producers of the commodity behind the game’s enormous revenues. Wage bills have risen 33 per cent across the Premier League pyramid, 32 per cent in the Championship, 71 per cent in League One, and 63 per cent in League Two. Twenty clubs spend more than 80 per cent of their revenue on salaries. The regulator’s response is predictable: cost control, wage restraint, “responsible spending.” In other words, disciplining labour.

First, players are not simply workers; they are labour-power converted into financial assets. Modern football treats labour not just as a production cost but as a capitalised resource. Contracts are amortised like industrial machinery: depreciated over time, securitised, borrowed against and used as collateral in complex financial arrangements. Agent fees, now £584 million, are part of this same machinery, serving as transaction costs in a financialised market for labour-power. The doubling of amortisation to £2.6 billion is no accounting quirk; it marks the conversion of labour into fictitious capital: value that exists only on balance sheets, yet is traded and leveraged as if it were real.

This transformation is central to football’s financialisation: labour-power becomes a financial instrument, with its value fluctuating according to market conditions, performance metrics, and speculative expectations. The IFR describes this process without understanding it, treating amortisation as a technical matter rather than as a structural reorganisation of labour under finance capital.

Second, wage restraint is class struggle. The PFA’s successful challenge to salary caps in 2020, and its current High Court action, are not “governance friction.” They are organised workers resisting an attempt to fix their share of the surplus. The IFR cannot admit this because it would require acknowledging that labour has interests irreconcilable with capital. The regulator’s framework assumes harmony among stakeholders, owners, leagues, players, and fans, and treats conflict as a managerial problem. But wage restraint is not a governance issue. It is a matter of class power.

The report’s language exposes this ideological blind spot. It describes wage inflation as a “risk,” a “pressure,” and a “threat to sustainability.” Nowhere does the IFR consider that rising wages reflect labour’s bargaining strength in a sector where workers create enormous value. The regulator’s job is to protect clubs’ financial stability, not workers’ living standards or bargaining power. As a result, it frames wage growth as a pathology rather than as a sign of labour asserting itself.

Third, the category “player wages” masks profound stratification. A Premier League star earning £300,000 a week has little in common with a League Two professional on a precarious one-year deal. Yet the IFR treats “player wages” as a single category, obscuring class divisions across the labour force. The report focuses on elite wage inflation while overlooking the conditions most football workers face: academy staff, cleaners, stewards, groundskeepers, analysts, youth coaches, and hospitality workers. The analysis renders these workers invisible. The IFR’s framework counts their labour only where it intersects with financial risk.

This invisibility is ideological. It reflects the regulator’s assumption that players perform the “real” labour of football, and that the “real” costs are those that affect balance sheets. The thousands of workers who make football possible maintaining stadiums, training youth players, cleaning facilities, managing logistics, providing security, and running matchday operations are treated as background noise. Their exploitation goes unanalysed because it is not financialised.

The most devastating statistic is the one the IFR buries: seventeen EFL and National League clubs would lose money even if they paid their players nothing. That fact alone undermines the report’s central claim that wage inflation is the root problem. If clubs cannot break even without paying a single player, wages are not driving insolvency; the business model is. Ownership structure, reliance on debt, value extraction through financial channels, volatile revenue streams, and the competitive arms race drive the crisis.

But the IFR cannot say so. To do so would mean admitting that labour is not the problem; capital is. It would mean acknowledging that the financialisation of football has created a system that blames workers for a crisis caused by owners, lenders, and speculative investors. It would also mean recognising that wage restraint is not a solution but an attack on labour. The report thus treats labour as a cost to be controlled rather than a source of value. It documents the symptoms of exploitation but refuses to name the exploiters. It catalogues the contradictions in football’s labour market while defending the system that creates them. In doing so, it reveals regulation's limits under capitalism: labour can be disciplined, but capital cannot be challenged.

Finance capital takes control.

The report’s most explosive revelations concern finance capital’s penetration into every pore of the sport. What the IFR documents, often without grasping its significance, is English football’s near-total subordination to the logic of financialisation. Transfer factoring has increased fourteen-fold in just four years. £1.2 billion in future transfer receipts has already been sold- income that does not yet exist, monetised and spent before a single pound has been earned. Interest payments have surged from £97 million to £455 million as the cost of debt has tripled. Five lenders control 93.6 per cent of transfer finance, with one lender alone controlling nearly half. This is not a competitive market. It is an oligopoly.

None of this is accidental. It is the predictable outcome of reorganising football according to the imperatives of finance capital. Hilferding, writing more than a century ago, described how banking and industrial capital fuse into a single financial oligarchy that extracts value regardless of productive outcomes. Lenin showed how such oligarchies dominate entire sectors, turning them into instruments of speculation. English football is now one of those sectors. The IFR’s data could have been lifted directly from Finance Capital or Imperialism.

Factoring future fees is fictitious capital in Marx’s strict sense: money raised today against value that does not yet exist. Clubs sell tomorrow’s transfer income to survive today’s pressures, mortgaging their future to remain competitive in the present. This is not prudent financial management. It is systemic desperation. The club consumes its future to survive its present.

The collateralisation of heritage assets is equally revealing. Grounds, badges, and training facilities, the physical and symbolic infrastructure of the people’s game, are increasingly pledged as security for loans. The IFR notes that 60 per cent of Premier League clubs have relegation‑triggered repayment clauses. This means sporting failure can trigger creditor seizure. A bad season is no longer merely a sporting setback; it is a financial catastrophe. The club’s identity, history and community assets become bargaining chips in negotiations with lenders.

Leveraged ownership compounds the instability. Owners acquire clubs with borrowed money, load the debt onto the club itself, and extract returns through refinancing, management fees and asset sales. Multi‑club networks extend this logic across borders, treating clubs as nodes in a financial ecosystem rather than as sporting institutions. Players move to meet balance‑sheet needs rather than tactical ones. Revenues are shifted to optimise tax and regulatory arbitrage. Clubs become shells through which capital circulates.

The IFR’s report is, unintentionally, a catalogue of these contradictions. It shows a sport that generates enormous wealth yet cannot sustain itself because financial channels siphon that wealth off before it can stabilise the system. The crisis is not accidental. It is structural. Football’s financial instability is not the result of mismanagement, incompetence or isolated excess. It is the predictable outcome of reorganising the sport according to the imperatives of financial capital.

The regulator documents the symptoms but cannot name the cause. To do so would be to acknowledge that English football’s crisis is not a deviation from capitalism but its expression and that no amount of technocratic oversight can resolve contradictions rooted in the system itself.

Ownership without roots, capital without loyalty

The IFR’s ownership data show a sport transformed into a global asset class. English football is no longer a national game but a marketplace for international capital. Non‑domestic owners now control 75 per cent of Premier League revenue. North American capital controls nearly half of the entire pyramid. Eighty‑five per cent of Premier League clubs belong to multi‑club or multi‑sport groups, integrated into sprawling corporate networks that treat football teams as interchangeable units within a global portfolio. This is not cosmopolitan modernisation. It is the sport's financial colonisation.

The most striking fact is that returns are overwhelmingly negative. The IFR reports an average indicative return of minus 41 per cent across clubs, with only 21 of 76 making a positive return. Yet capital continues to flow in. The report cannot explain this. It treats negative returns as a puzzle, as though investors were behaving irrationally. But a Marxist analysis can. Capital does not enter football to earn conventional profits. It enters because football offers value extraction, political leverage, and speculative opportunity unavailable in the productive sectors of a low‑growth economy.

Football offers speculative opportunities. Promotion windfalls can transform a club’s valuation overnight. Leveraged buyouts let owners acquire clubs with borrowed money and load the debt onto the club. Asset stripping selling stadium land, training facilities, or intellectual property can generate returns even when the club loses money. The IFR notes that distressed clubs are particularly vulnerable: their financial weakness makes them easy targets for acquisition, refinancing and exploitation. The “community club” becomes a conduit through which capital passes, its heritage assets collateralised, its future income securitised, its identity commodified.

Football also offers soft power. Sovereign wealth funds, oligarchs, and politically connected investors use clubs to project influence, launder reputations, and embed themselves in Western cultural institutions. Ownership becomes a diplomatic tool. The club becomes a platform for geopolitical branding. The IFR acknowledges this obliquely, noting concerns about “suitability” and “integrity,” but it cannot confront the political reality: English football has become a theatre for state power.

Then there is the laundering of surplus capital. In a low‑growth economy, productive investment yields diminishing returns. Capital seeks outlets to move, disguise, or recycle money through complex financial structures. Football provides precisely this. As the IFR itself notes, the sport is exposed to money laundering through offshore ownership, opaque sponsorship deals, and transfer arrangements routed through tax havens. Transfers often involve multiple intermediaries, shell companies, and inflated valuations, providing ideal mechanisms for moving capital across borders. Sponsorship deals from offshore entities allow funds to enter clubs with minimal scrutiny. Distressed clubs, desperate for liquidity, are the easiest entry points.

Multi‑club ownership networks intensify these dynamics. They let capital move players, revenues, and liabilities across borders, exploiting regulatory differences and arbitrage opportunities. Clubs become nodes in a global financial ecosystem, with their sporting identity secondary to their role in the network. The IFR describes this trend but cannot analyse it. It treats multi‑club ownership as a governance challenge rather than a structural expression of financial imperialism.

The regulator’s data reveal a sport whose ownership model is not merely globalised but financialised. Clubs are not owned to win matches. They are owned to extract value, launder capital, project influence and anchor wider commercial ecosystems. The IFR catalogues these realities but cannot name them. To do so would be to admit that English football is no longer a sport governed by sporting logic but an asset class governed by the imperatives of global capital.

The regulator as the ideal collective capitalist

Engels described the capitalist state as the “ideal collective capitalist”: an institution that manages the bourgeoisie's common affairs, sometimes against individual capitalists, to preserve the system as a whole. The IFR fits this description precisely. Its first goal is to protect the hierarchy. The report’s distribution aims begin with preserving the Premier League as the world’s leading league and the Championship as the leading second tier. Inequality is to be eased, not ended. The top club earns 605 times the revenue of the smallest National League club.

The industry welcomes the regulator. The Premier League endorsed the report and claims its own proposals already meet the IFR’s objectives. A regulator embraced by the dominant firms is not a regulator that threatens them. Its tools are mild: action plans, stress tests, risk assessments. No hard liquidity floors until 2028–2030. No limits on transfer‑finance exposure. No challenge to debt dependency, multi‑club ownership or the private model itself. Fans receive a voice, not power. Clubs must “consider” supporters’ views. The model allows no mutual ownership, 50+1, or public stakes. Supporters remain consultees, not owners. Even Kogan’s stated fear that the supply of owners and media money may dry up reveals the limits of the IFR’s worldview. The worry is that capital might stop flowing in. No one ever asks whether capital should run the game at all.

The IFR has produced the most detailed evidence yet of how English football has been transformed into a financial asset class. Its data, often presented with bureaucratic neutrality, amount to a devastating indictment of the system the regulator exists to preserve. But its prescriptions aim only to make the commodity sustainable, not to liberate the sport from the market. The IFR’s task is not to challenge capital’s domination of football but to ensure that domination continues in a more orderly, less visibly chaotic form.

A Marxist programme begins where the report ends. To reclaim football as a social institution rather than a financial instrument, we must dismantle the foundations of the current model. That means pooling broadcast income across the entire pyramid to end the grotesque inequality that makes competitive overspending inevitable. It means capping debt and banning factoring so clubs can't mortgage their future to survive the present. It means supporter and worker ownership on a 50+1 basis or stronger, ensuring that those who produce and sustain the game control it. It also means public or community ownership of grounds, removing heritage assets from finance capital’s collateral chains. Finally, it means recognising all club workers—not only players—as producers of the game, with rights, protections, and democratic power.

These measures are not utopian. They are the minimum required to reverse the financialisation documented in the IFR’s own report. They would transform football from an asset class back into a public good. They would replace extraction with stewardship, speculation with solidarity, and debt dependency with democratic control. The regulator can manage symptoms. It cannot cure the disease. It can stabilise insolvency, not prevent it. It can discipline labour, not restrain capital. It can protect heritage assets as collateral, not as community property. It can preserve the hierarchy, not democratise it.

The IFR’s State of the Game is therefore more than a report. It is a mirror held up to a decaying system. It shows a sport that generates extraordinary wealth yet cannot sustain itself because financial channels siphon it off. It shows a regulator tasked with preserving a model that produces crisis. And it shows, unintentionally, that the only real alternative lies outside market logic. Football must be reclaimed as a social institution, not a financial instrument. Only then can the contradictions the IFR describes be resolved, not through technocratic oversight, but through democratic control, collective ownership and the abolition of football’s subordination to capital.

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Arsenal’s Redundancies and the Real Face of Football Under the Billionaires

 The announcement that Arsenal Football Club intends to axe up to 60 jobs just months after winning its first league title in 22 years and posting record revenues is a devastating exposure of the class logic governing modern football. It reveals, with clinical clarity, billionaire ownership's priorities and the ruthless mechanisms through which capital restructures every sphere of social life, including the world’s most popular sport.

On October 14, chief executive Richard Garlick informed staff that dozens of commercial, administrative and operational workers would be made redundant. The coaching staff, first‑team performance departments, academy, Arsenal Foundation, security teams and the women’s football set‑up were exempt. Instead, the axe falls on the ordinary workers who keep the club functioning: ticketing staff, retail workers, office administrators, and back‑office personnel. These are not high‑earning executives or elite athletes. They are workers on modest wages in one of the world's most expensive cities, facing a cost‑of‑living crisis that has already pushed millions to the brink.

The timing of the announcement is no coincidence. It clearly reflects the priorities of Kroenke Sports & Entertainment (KSE ), the American conglomerate that owns Arsenal. The club has just completed one of the most successful seasons in its modern history, recording record revenues of £691 million for 2024/25 and an overall loss of just £1.4 million, effectively breaking even. A week before the redundancies were announced, manager Mikel Arteta signed a new contract reportedly worth £20 million a year, making him the Premier League’s highest-paid coach. Over the summer, Arsenal spent £150 million on Christos Tzolis, Bruno Guimarães and Ezri Konsa.

The club’s wage bill through May 2025 was £346.8 million. Even if all 60 workers earned £50,000—a generous assumption—the total savings would be around £3 million: less than 1% of the wage bill and a fraction of a single star player’s annual salary. The cuts are not financially necessary; they are a political and class decision.

The Consultants’ Axe: Manufactured Inevitability

The redundancies did not emerge organically from the club’s internal operations. Arsenal hired management consultants from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to review operations and identify “efficiencies.” BCG is a global firm whose interventions in corporations and governments routinely end in job losses. Its presence is a warning sign in any workplace. It provides owners with a veneer of technocratic legitimacy: the cuts are not the owners’ decision; they are the result of an “audit,” a “review,” a “recommendation.”

This is a familiar tactic. In 2020, during the pandemic, Arsenal made 55 staff redundant, including Jerry Quy, the long-serving employee who played the club mascot Gunnersaurus, even after first-team players took a 12.5 per cent pay cut on the understanding that staff jobs would be protected. The pandemic is long over, revenues have soared, and the club is richer than ever. Yet the same owners are wielding the same axe.

The statutory “consultation” process now under way is a legal formality. It gives management a procedural framework to implement decisions already made. It does not give workers a veto. It does not provide democratic control. It manages dissent and absorbs anger.

Football Under Capital: A System of Extraction

Arsenal is not an isolated case. Under Sir Jim Ratcliffe, Manchester United has cut hundreds of jobs in successive rounds of restructuring. Workers were told the club was facing ruin, even as vast sums continued to flow into transfers and stadium plans. Across the Premier League, revenues from broadcasting rights, sponsorship deals and ticket prices, which increasingly price working-class fans out of the grounds, continue to climb. Yet the workers who sell the shirts, staff the offices, maintain the stadiums and keep the clubs functioning are treated as expendable.

A draft “State of the Game” report from the new Independent Football Regulator found that 94 per cent of clubs in England’s top five divisions lost money last season, despite combined revenues of around £9 billion. Clubs spend this money on transfer fees, star salaries, and servicing debt. Rising player-asset values enrich owners, while ordinary staff bear the risk. “Losses” on paper sit alongside billion-pound valuations. The British state-established regulator does not challenge this arrangement. Its purpose is to stabilise it.

Football is now fully integrated into the global financial system. Clubs are treated as assets whose value is measured not by their social role or community significance, but by their ability to generate revenue streams, attract global sponsorships, and appreciate. Billionaire owners do not view clubs as institutions rooted in working‑class communities. They see them as vehicles for accumulating capital.

The Class Logic of Arsenal’s Cuts

Arsenal’s operating costs have risen sharply from £148 million to £201 million, and wages continue to climb. The club has posted losses for seven consecutive years, despite record revenues. Ownership is using this to justify restructuring. But the cuts target only the lowest‑paid workers, not the structural drivers of cost.

The logic is simple: invest heavily in the asset (the squad), and ruthlessly cut the labour that doesn't directly generate market value. The workers being made redundant do not increase the club’s valuation. They do not attract global sponsorships. They do not produce highlight reels or social media engagement. They are therefore expendable.

This is capital's logic in every industry. It has driven mass layoffs across technology firms, media companies, logistics giants, and public services. It has produced record profits for corporations and record hardship for workers. Football is not immune. It is a microcosm of capitalism's broader crisis.

The Anger of Supporters  and Its Limits

Many supporters reacted with anger. On fan sites, many pointed out that a single top player earns in a week what several of the threatened workers earn in a year. Others asked whether the consultants’ fees cost more than the jobs being cut. The anger is justified. But it cannot be channelled into appeals to the “Arsenal family” or to the goodwill of billionaires.

KSE’s purpose is not to run a community institution. Its purpose is to increase the value of a global sports asset alongside the Kroenke family’s other franchises. It is not accountable to supporters. It is not accountable to workers. It is accountable only to capital.

What Is Needed: Independent Organisation and Democratic Control

The 60 Arsenal workers should not have to fight this alone or rely on a management-controlled consultation process. They need their own independent rank-and-file committee: a democratic body, free from management and trade union bureaucracy, and able to organise collective resistance. The committee should demand: No job cuts. Full pay for all workers. Publication of the BCG report, consultant contracts and ownership finances. Solidarity from matchday staff, stewards, supporters and workers at other clubs facing similar cuts.

Players, staff, and millions of working people who pay for tickets, subscriptions, and merchandise produce football's wealth through their labour. As long as billionaires own the sport and run it for profit, every record revenue figure will be followed by another round of “efficiencies” for those at the bottom.

Defending these jobs is part of a broader struggle: to take football and the economy out of the hands of the financial oligarchy and put them under democratic control. Arsenal’s redundancies are not an isolated event. They are a symptom of a system that prioritises profit over people, valuation over community, and capital over labour.

 

The Witch-Hunt and the Revolution: Class Struggle, Social Crisis, and the Limits of Marion Gibson’s Witchland

Marion Gibson’s Witchland is a humane, meticulously researched, and often moving account of the largest witch-hunt in English history. At its heart is a powerful act of historical restitution: bringing back into view the hundreds of people “wrongly persecuted, wrongly killed, and then largely erased from history” who were hunted down in the 1640s, when Britain was convulsed by civil war, economic breakdown, and the collapse of traditional authority. Gibson’s work to recover their names, families, occupations, and everyday conflicts is both real and substantial. With admirable patience and care, she restores the lives of people who appear in the archive, if at all, as little more than entries in a witch-finder’s tally, drawing on fragmentary parish registers, court documents, and scraps of local records.

Yet Gibson's conceptual framework for situating this material does not adequately account for the historical forces at work. The witch-hunt cannot be explained by “moral panic,” free-floating misogyny, or a generalised climate of fear. These categories separate the witch-hunt from the revolutionary crisis in which it unfolded and reduce the political landscape to a timeless tableau of communal anxiety. The 1640s were not merely years of heightened emotion; they were the decisive decade of the English Revolution, a confrontation between an absolutist monarchy rooted in the old landed order and a rising commercial gentry, merchants and yeomanry whose interests required the overthrow of royal prerogative. The war shattered the machinery of justice, disrupted the assize circuits, empowered local Puritan elites, and created conditions in which freelance interrogators such as Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne could operate with near impunity. Their methods of “watching and walking,” enforced sleeplessness, and template-driven interrogations produced confessions that reflected the interrogators’ own demonological assumptions rather than the accused’s lived experience.

The witch-hunt was no inexplicable eruption of mass hysteria. It was a distorted expression of the English Revolution itself: a class struggle refracted through Puritan providentialism and intensified by the collapse of the old social order. Its victims were overwhelmingly poor, socially marginal and economically dependent. Gender shaped their vulnerability, but class determined it. To understand why gallows rose in East Anglia in the mid-1640s, we must look beyond village frictions to the deeper transformation underway: peasant dispossession, the erosion of customary relief, and a ruling class divided against itself.

The Strength of Gibson’s Reconstruction

Gibson’s method is microhistorical. Each chapter centres on a particular place — Manningtree, Chelmsford, the Suffolk villages, or the Scottish Lowlands — and rests on painstaking archival research. Drawing on fragmentary parish registers, court documents, and scraps of local records, often “incomplete or barely legible,” she reconstructs the lives of the accused. Her portraits of impoverished women, often elderly, widowed, or reliant on neighbours’ charity, give substance to the well-established thesis of Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane: witchcraft accusations arose from the breakdown of traditional obligations of neighbourly charity. As enclosure, inflation, and the land market eroded the old village economy, poor people who still came to the doors of the better-off became objects of resentment and fear. The beggar turned away became the witch blamed for the misfortune that followed.

Gibson’s case studies show how war sharpened these frictions. The 1640s brought requisitioning, free quarter for soldiers, plundering, disrupted trade, harvest failure, and plague. The machinery of justice broke down. “Less qualified men sat in judgment.” Assize circuits collapsed. Local authorities, pressed by fearful parishioners, hired freelance witch-finders like Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne. Their methods — “watching and walking,” enforced sleeplessness, interrogations shaped by template questions — produced confessions that mirrored the interrogators’ own demonological fantasies. Gibson identifies these template questions as a key reason why so many confessions sound alike.

She also incorporates the Scottish dimension, showing how trials under the Covenanting regime in the early 1640s were ideologically—and sometimes personally—connected to the English hunts. The 1604 Witchcraft Act, passed under James VI and I, provided the legal basis for prosecution. Together, these developments formed a transnational witch-hunting movement, shaped by shared religious and political anxieties. Gibson’s reconstruction is humane and conscientious, restoring dignity to people history tried to erase. But the question her book raises—and only partly answers—is a historical one: why did the largest witch-hunt in English history erupt in the midst of the English Revolution?

The Limits of “Moral Panic”

The American subtitle of Witchland invokes “a deadly moral panic,” and the publisher’s descriptions speak of polarisation, fanaticism and “a country ripped apart by fear.” This language is not entirely misplaced, but it is fundamentally insufficient. The term “moral panic” is a sociological category developed in the 1970s. It describes a pattern of exaggerated public alarm, but it offers little historical explanation. It treats the witch-hunt as an eruption of mass irrationality, a kind of cultural fever that swept across communities without deeper cause. It reduces the violence of the 1640s to a psychological pattern rather than a historically specific social crisis. Most importantly, it places Royalists and Parliamentarians on the same plane, as two equally hysterical factions locked in a culture war, and it detaches the witch-hunt from the revolutionary transformation of English society that made such persecution possible.

The English Revolution was not a culture war but a historically progressive struggle that destroyed absolutism, executed a king, and opened the way for capitalism to develop in Britain. The conflict between Crown and Parliament reflected a deeper class struggle: an absolutist monarchy rooted in the old landed order opposed a rising commercial gentry, merchants, and yeomanry whose interests required the overthrow of royal prerogative. The war was fought not only over constitutional forms but also over the future of English society—the survival of feudal structures and the emergence of capitalist ones. This revolutionary confrontation created the conditions for witch-hunting to flourish.

The witch-hunt was not an inexplicable eruption of fear. It was the product of a definite social crisis, of a breakdown in the old structures of authority and of a state apparatus temporarily in the hands of local Puritan elites who saw in the war a struggle against the forces of the Antichrist. The collapse of the assize circuits, the absence of central oversight and the ideological fervour of Puritan magistrates created a vacuum. The witch hunters' methods of enforced sleeplessness, “watching and walking,” and interrogations shaped by template questions produced confessions that reflected their own demonological assumptions rather than the lived experience of the accused. The machinery of justice had been fractured by war, and in that fractured space the most vulnerable members of society became targets of state-sanctioned violence.

The witch-hunt must therefore be understood as a distorted expression of the revolution itself. It arose from the collapse of the old social order, mounting class tensions and the ideological weapons of a rising bourgeoisie waging its struggle in the religious guise of Puritanism. Its victims were overwhelmingly poor, socially marginal and economically dependent. Gender shaped their vulnerability, but class determined it. Most of those accused were women living on the edge of subsistence, dependent on neighbours’ charity and exposed to the resentments and anxieties fueled by enclosure, inflation and the collapse of customary relief. The men accused were likewise poor and dependent. The trials reveal not a timeless misogyny, but the vulnerability of those shut out of property and political power.

To understand why the gallows rose in East Anglia in the mid-seventeenth century, one must attend not only to village frictions but to the deeper social transformation under way. The dispossession of the peasantry, the erosion of communal obligations, the fragmentation of state authority and the ideological fervour of a rising class all converged in the 1640s. The witch-hunt was not a cultural fever. It was a symptom of revolution.

The revolution was led by a bourgeoisie and gentry who fought in the religious garb of Puritanism. Their worldview fused a genuine hostility to arbitrary power with intense providentialism — a belief that God and the Devil intervened directly in human affairs. In the hands of local elites suddenly freed from royal and episcopal oversight, they could turn that ideology against the most defenceless. This is the key to understanding the witch-hunt. The victims were overwhelmingly poor. They were socially marginal, economically dependent, and politically powerless. Misogyny played a role, but it was not the root cause. The victims were not simply women; they were poor women, and the men accused were poor. The contemporary academic tendency to treat gender as a self-standing cause obscures what the trials actually show: the vulnerability of those excluded from property and dependent on others’ goodwill. The witch-hunt was a weapon of class power, wielded by local elites in a moment of revolutionary upheaval.

The same revolution that produced the witch-hunt also produced the age's most advanced political currents. The Levellers demanded manhood suffrage and equality before the law. The Diggers, around Gerrard Winstanley, attacked private land ownership itself. Radical sectarians questioned the existence of a personal Devil. These movements represented the plebeian wing of the revolution — the embryonic political voice of those who would later form the working class.

As the revolution consolidated under the Commonwealth and the propertied classes reasserted control, the witch-hunt subsided. The Restoration of 1660 brought no revival on the same scale, and by 1736 the Witchcraft Act had been repealed. The witch-hunt was not a timeless expression of misogyny or fear. It was a product of a specific revolutionary conjuncture, and it disappeared when that conjuncture passed.

Lessons for Today

Gibson makes it clear that she wrote her book with the present in mind. She warns of a resurgence of political and religious hatreds, misogyny, nationalism, and persecution. She argues that remembering the victims of past injustice helps us recognise and resist such trends. Several reviewers have taken up the same theme.

The warning is justified. Across the world, ruling classes confronted by deepening economic crisis, war, and social inequality are turning to scapegoats: immigrants and refugees, Muslims, transgender people, the homeless and the poor. Governments and media manufacture internal enemies to divert mounting social anger away from those responsible. The mechanisms Gibson documents — suspicion of the outsider, official encouragement of informers, the legitimation of cruelty in the name of public safety — are recognisable.

But the lesson of the 1640s is not merely that “fear” and “polarisation” are dangerous, or that individuals should refuse to be swept along. Persecution of the vulnerable flourishes when the crisis of an old social order finds no progressive resolution, and when the oppressed are left without an independent political voice of their own. In the seventeenth century, Cromwell's Grandees crushed the plebeian radicals who could have offered such a voice. Today, resisting the modern witch-hunt requires conscious, international political mobilisation of the working class against the social system that breeds it.

Witchland is a humane, carefully researched, and readable book that restores dignity to people history tried to erase. Marion Gibson succeeds in bringing back into view individuals who have survived in the record only as names in indictments or as victims in the ledgers of witch-finders. She reconstructs their lives with sympathy and care, and she shows how accusations grew out of the frictions of everyday existence in a world strained by war, dearth and the collapse of traditional obligations. Her work gives substance to the rural poor of the 1640s, people who lived precariously on the margins of subsistence and whose vulnerability made them targets of suspicion when the social fabric began to tear. For this achievement, the book deserves a wide readership.

Yet Gibson's conceptual framework cannot capture the historical meaning of the witch-hunt. The language of moral panic, fear and fanaticism is not entirely misplaced, but it is too limited to account for the scale and timing of the events she describes. The witch-hunt did not erupt in a vacuum. It unfolded amid the English Revolution, when old structures of authority were breaking down, and new ones had not yet taken stable form. The war between Crown and Parliament expressed a deeper conflict between an absolutist monarchy rooted in the landed order and a rising commercial gentry, merchants and yeomanry whose interests demanded the destruction of royal prerogative. This struggle fractured the machinery of justice. Local Puritan elites, freed from central oversight, exercised powers they had never possessed before

The witch-hunt was therefore not simply a psychological phenomenon. It was a distorted expression of revolutionary crisis. The victims were overwhelmingly poor, socially marginal and economically dependent. Gender shaped their vulnerability, but class determined it. The trials reveal the anxieties of a society in transition, in which the old communal bonds were dissolving, and the emerging capitalist order had not yet established new forms of security. The dispossession of the peasantry, the erosion of customary relief and the intensification of economic pressures created conditions in which the most defenceless members of society could be accused of consorting with the Devil. The witch-hunt was one way a ruling class divided against itself projected its fears onto those who had no means of resistance.

This history is not confined to the seventeenth century. Gibson is right to warn of contemporary scapegoating, of the persecution of immigrants, religious minorities, transgender people, the homeless and the poor. The mechanisms she documents, including suspicion of outsiders, official encouragement of informers and the legitimation of cruelty in the name of public safety, are recognisable today. But the lesson of the 1640s is not only that fear is dangerous. It is that persecution flourishes when a decaying social order confronts crisis without progressive resolution and when the oppressed lack an independent political voice. In the seventeenth century, the plebeian radicals who might have provided such a voice were suppressed. Today, resisting new forms of witch-hunting requires the conscious mobilisation of the working class against the social system that produces them.

Witchland restores its subjects' humanity. To understand why they died, readers must supply the historical analysis that connects their fate to the revolutionary transformation of English society.

Bibliography

Books

Gibson, Marion. Witchland: A Tale of Witch Hunting and War in Seventeenth-Century Britain. London: Simon & Schuster UK, 2026.

Gibson, Marion. Witchland: A Deadly Moral Panic in Seventeenth-Century Britain. New York: Scribner, 2026.

Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971.

Macfarlane, Alan. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study. London: Routledge, 1970.

Winstanley, Gerrard. The Law of Freedom and Other Writings. Edited by Christopher Hill. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1972.

Articles, Reviews and Media

“Witchland.” Publishers Weekly, starred review, 2026.

“Witchland a Times Top 10 Bestseller.” Hardman & Swainson Literary Agency, 2026.

“Witchland.” Daily Mail, Book of the Week, 2026.

“The Thing About Witch Hunts.” Podcast interview with Marion Gibson, 2026.

“Witchland.” Kirkus Reviews, 2026.

“Witchland.” Witches Mass Bay Review, 2026.

Web Sources

Simon & Schuster UK. “Witchland.” Publisher’s catalogue entry, 2026.

Labyrinth Books. “Witchland.” US edition description, 2026.

Wikipedia contributors. “John Stearne (witch-hunter).” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, accessed 2026.

Historical Context and Background

Capp, Bernard. England’s Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and Its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Sharpe, James. Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1750. London: Penguin, 1996.

Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. London: Longman, 1987.

 

Biggar and Tombs’ Our Islands’ Story: An ideological brief for an empire preparing for war

Nigel Biggar and Robert Tombs’Our Islands’ Story, published by Swift Press, is not a work of history but a political intervention presented in the language of scholarship. Its title deliberately echoes H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story (1905), the Edwardian children’s book that taught generations of British schoolchildren a sanitised story of kings, battles and imperial destiny. David Cameron named it his favourite childhood book. Biggar and Tombs now offer an adult version for a society in crisis, as the ruling class seeks to rehabilitate empire as part of a broader ideological mobilisation for war.

The publisher’s own description makes its purpose clear. The book is presented as a corrective to what it calls “fashionable” accounts of Britain’s past, which focus on its crimes while overlooking its achievements. One endorsement praises it for highlighting “the good things that Britain and her Empire have done.” This is not scholarship with political implications; it is political propaganda presented as scholarship.

Both authors come to the subject with long-established agendas. In Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023), Biggar weighed the British Empire’s moral record, balancing railways, legal codes, and the suppression of the slave trade against Amritsar, the Bengal famine, and the detention camps in Kenya. Tombs, author of The English and Their History, founded History Reclaimed to oppose what it calls “woke distortions” of Britain’s past. He was also a prominent academic advocate for Brexit. Our Islands’ Story brings these projects together in a single, readable volume for the general public.

The balance‑sheet method: petty‑bourgeois moralism as ideology

The balance-sheet method is the book’s organising principle. It presents empire as a series of discrete policies- some good, some bad- to be judged by an impartial moralist. In doing so, it obscures what defines empire: a system of exploitation driven by British capital’s need for markets, raw materials and investment opportunities. The Irish Famine, the opium wars, the Bengal famine of 1943, Amritsar and the partition of India were not lapses in an otherwise benevolent project. They were logical outcomes of a profit-driven system. Treating these events as isolated “mistakes” falsifies their meaning. They were not deviations from the norm, but expressions of it: the violence required to maintain a global hierarchy of labour, property and political domination.

The balance‑sheet approach is not simply inadequate; it is ideological. It rests on the fiction that empire can be morally audited, its crimes offset by its “achievements.” This is the language of accountancy applied to human suffering. It presupposes that the historian stands outside history, weighing actions on a timeless moral scale. But no such figure exists. The “impartial moralist” is not a neutral observer. It is a class position: the petty‑bourgeois intellectual who claims to stand above classes while in reality serving the ruling class by laundering its crimes into moral verdicts. The balance sheet is the ideological form of this pretence: a way of transforming structural exploitation into a series of moral transactions.

Trotsky demolished this posture in Their Morals and Ours, exposing the appeal to eternal moral truths as a device that invariably justifies the interests of the powerful. He insisted that morality is historically conditioned. The ruling class invokes “universal” principles only to sanctify its own domination. Biggar’s method is a textbook example. His earlier Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning framed empire as a moral puzzle: how to weigh railways against famines, legal codes against massacres. But this is not moral reasoning; it is apologetics. It treats the products of exploitation as moral credits and the consequences of exploitation as moral debits, thereby preserving the system itself from scrutiny.

Biggar’s theological background is not incidental. The balance sheet is a secularised theodicy: sins weighed against graces to vindicate the whole. Theodicy seeks to reconcile evil's existence with God's goodness. Biggar’s project is to reconcile imperial violence with the supposed beneficence of British civilisation. The structure is identical. The moral ledger becomes a way to explain away atrocities rather than explain them. The question is never why empire produced famine, massacre and dispossession, but how these can be integrated into a narrative of ultimate righteousness.

This method also serves a crucial ideological function today. By dissolving empire into moral fragments, it obscures the class relations that produced it. Empire was not the collective achievement of “the nation.” It was the instrument of a ruling class whose interests lay in global expansion. The British working class had no more control over the decisions that produced the Irish Famine or the Bengal famine than the colonised populations who suffered them. To weigh empire’s “benefits” and “costs” as if they were shared nationally erases this fundamental division.

The balance‑sheet method therefore serves two purposes. It sanitises the past by transforming systemic violence into isolated moral lapses. And it prepares the present by offering a usable past for a ruling class once again turning to militarism and great‑power conflict. A population taught to see empire as “on balance” a force for good is more easily mobilised for new imperialist ventures. The moral accountant becomes the state's ideological quartermaster.

The ideological work of “our”

The title’s possessive, Our Islands’ Story, performs essential ideological labour. It asserts a common national inheritance where none existed. The rhetorical move is simple but decisive: by placing the empire within the category of “our” history, Biggar and Tombs dissolve the class divisions that structured both the making of empire and its consequences. The British working class were not shareholders in empire; they were its domestic raw material, the source of the surplus value that financed imperial expansion. Their labour underwrote the industrial and financial power that enabled Britain’s global reach, yet they remained politically disenfranchised, economically exploited and socially subordinated. They had no more say in the decisions that produced famine in Bengal or massacres in Kenya than the peasants and workers who suffered them.

The ideological function of the possessive is therefore to universalise what was in reality a class project. Empire was not the achievement of a unified national community. It was the instrument of a ruling class whose interests lay in global expansion, the suppression of colonial resistance and the extraction of profit from subject peoples. To speak of “our” empire is to erase the fundamental division between those who benefited from imperial plunder and those who paid for it in Britain through exploitation and poverty, and across the colonies through dispossession, famine and repression.

This erasure is central to the book's political purpose. By claiming empire as a shared inheritance, Biggar and Tombs seek to bind the working class to the ruling class's ideological needs in the present. The appeal to national unity always precedes reaction. In periods of crisis, the ruling class turns to the myth of a common past to justify the demands it will soon impose: sacrifices for “national security,” acceptance of militarisation, and support for foreign policy adventures dressed up as moral obligations. The possessive in the title is therefore not a stylistic flourish but a strategic device. It lays the ideological groundwork for the argument that Britain’s imperial past is a source of pride, continuity, and collective identity.

But the “inheritance” Biggar and Tombs defend belongs only to those who profited from empire. The working class’s real inheritance is the history of struggle against exploitation at home and abroad: the Levellers, the Chartists, the 1926 General Strike, the solidarity of Lancashire cotton workers with the anti‑slavery cause. To reclaim that history is to reject the false unity of “our” islands and to recognise that the only genuine community of interest is the international working class, whose future lies not in reconciling with empire but in abolishing the system that produced it.

Slavery, abolition and the falsification of history

Although the book must be quoted directly once you have the text, its treatment of slavery and abolition is predictable. The standard apologetic line that Britain’s suppression of the slave trade redeems its earlier participation is a moral fable. It rests on the assumption that abolition was a spontaneous flowering of British civilisation, a moment when the nation’s conscience awoke and corrected its earlier sins. This is mythology. Enlightened rulers did not bestow abolition on enslaved people. It was the product of a specific historical conjuncture: the rise of industrial capitalism, which made slave‑based plantation production increasingly incompatible with British economic interests, combined with mass pressure from below, the working-class abolitionist movement, Caribbean slave revolts, and the political agitation of the oppressed themselves.

By the early nineteenth century, the economic foundations of empire were shifting. Industrial capitalism required wage labour, expanding markets, and new forms of investment. Plantation slavery, with its rigid labour system and limited consumer base, increasingly obstructed these needs. The ruling class did not abolish the slave trade out of moral revulsion but because British capitalism's economic logic was changing. At the same time, enslaved people were not passive recipients of emancipation. Revolts in Jamaica, Barbados and Demerara shook the foundations of colonial rule. The Haitian Revolution demonstrated that slavery could not be maintained without permanent military occupation and escalating violence. In Britain, working-class abolitionists, including Lancashire cotton workers who later supported the Union during the American Civil War, pressured the ruling class in ways it could not ignore.

Even after abolition, British capital continued to profit from slave‑produced cotton and colonial labour. Lancashire mills were fed by cotton harvested by enslaved workers in the American South. British banks financed slave economies across the Atlantic. Colonial labour systems indenture, forced cultivation, punitive taxation reproduced the essential features of slavery under new names. The balance‑sheet method hides this continuity. By treating abolition as a moral credit that cancels earlier crimes, Biggar and Tombs obscure the fact that exploitation did not end in 1807 or 1833; it merely changed form.

The apologetic narrative of abolition serves the same ideological purpose as the rest of the book: to present empire as a moral project, flawed but ultimately benevolent, rather than as a system of global exploitation whose violence was structural, continuous and indispensable.

India, Ireland and the logic of imperial violence

The same method distorts India’s history. The Bengal famine of 1943 was not a natural disaster but the result of wartime requisitioning, price manipulation, and the diversion of grain by a colonial administration that prioritised imperial military needs. The famine directly expressed imperial policy under crisis: grain was exported from Bengal even as millions starved; Churchill’s War Cabinet rejected pleas for relief shipments because it needed shipping elsewhere; and colonial officials insisted the market must be allowed to “regulate” supply. The result was the death of three million people. To treat this as a tragic lapse, an unfortunate misjudgment in an otherwise benevolent imperial record, is to falsify its meaning. It was the predictable consequence of a system whose overriding priority was prosecuting Britain’s global war effort and protecting imperial interests, not the lives of colonial subjects.

Amritsar, likewise, was not an aberration but the normal operation of colonial rule under conditions of political resistance. The massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians in 1919 was not the product of a rogue officer or a momentary breakdown in discipline. It was the logical extension of a regime built on coercion, surveillance and the suppression of dissent. The colonial state responded to mass political mobilisation with exemplary violence, designed to terrorise the population and reassert imperial authority. To isolate Amritsar as a “mistake” is to deny the structural character of colonial repression.

Ireland exposes the lie most starkly. The Great Famine was not a tragic misfortune but a social catastrophe produced by the enforcement of market discipline under colonial rule. British administrators refused to suspend grain exports, insisted that relief must not interfere with the “natural” operation of the market, and treated mass starvation as an unfortunate but necessary consequence of economic orthodoxy. The ideology of laissez‑faire was applied with lethal rigidity to a colonised population whose land, labour and political rights had already been stripped away. Any attempt to minimise or moralise the Famine as an unavoidable tragedy or a failure of compassion is the book’s most damning evidence of its ideological purpose. It reveals the balance‑sheet method for what it is: a device that dissolves structural violence into isolated moral episodes, preserving the legitimacy of the imperial system itself.

The treatment of India and Ireland thus exposes the core function of Biggar and Tombs’ project: to rehabilitate empire by severing its crimes from their economic and political foundations, transforming systemic exploitation into a series of unfortunate events that can be weighed, excused and ultimately forgiven.

Militarism and the ideological mobilisation for war

The timing of Our Islands’ Story is not accidental. The book arrives as governments across Europe pour money into rearmament and ideologically prepare their populations for war. In Britain, this mobilisation is inseparable from the ruling class’s role as NATO’s most aggressive European participant in the war against Russia, its surge in defence spending, and the media’s demand for an “end to the post‑Cold War peace dividend.” The political establishment speaks openly of a “pre‑war world,” of the need to rebuild munitions stockpiles, expand the arms industry, and prepare society for prolonged conflict. In such a climate, rehabilitating empire is not an academic exercise but an ideological necessity. A ruling class that seeks to wage new imperialist wars must first sanitise the old ones.

Militarism requires a usable past. A population taught to feel shame about colonial massacres is harder to mobilise than one taught that Britain has been, “on balance,” a force for good. The authors’ complaint about a “demoralising” view of history reveals more than it admits. Their concern is not historical accuracy but national morale. They object not to falsehoods but to truths that undermine the ideological cohesion required for war. The balance‑sheet method, with its moral credits and debits, functions as a psychological preparation: it reassures the public that Britain’s global interventions have historically been justified, even noble, and therefore that future interventions may be as well.

The book’s celebrity endorsements fit this pattern. John Grey, the philosopher of liberal disillusionment, praises it as essential reading. Its defence of empire as a remedy for “partisan narratives” speaks volumes about the state of official intellectual life. The liberal intelligentsia, having abandoned any serious critique of capitalism, now embraces a nostalgic nationalism that aligns seamlessly with the geopolitical aims of the ruling class. The ideological convergence between conservative imperial apologetics and liberal pessimism is not accidental. Both currents seek to stabilise a crisis-ridden social order by appealing to a mythologised past.

None of this means that the left‑liberal accounts Biggar and Tombs attack are the alternative. Much of what passes for “decolonising” history in universities substitutes moral denunciation and racial categories for class analysis. It leaves the profit system which produced both empire and its present‑day successors off the hook. The liberal critique of empire often frames itself as a struggle over national identity: whether Britain should feel pride or guilt. This is the mirror image of the right‑wing narrative, which insists on pride and rejects guilt. Both approaches treat history as a moral drama rather than as the unfolding of class relations and economic imperatives.

This symmetry is not new. As Nick Beams demonstrated in his analysis of Australia’s “History Wars,” both the revisionist right and its liberal critics treat history as a question of national identity rather than class struggle. The same pattern repeats here: both sides moralise, and neither offers class analysis. The right defends empire as a civilising mission; the liberal academy condemns it as a racial injustice. But both frameworks obscure the underlying reality: empire was a product of capitalism, driven by the need for markets, raw materials and strategic dominance. Its violence expressed class interests, not national character, whether noble or wicked. To frame empire as either national pride or national shame is to accept the nationalist premise that “the nation” acted as a unified subject. In reality, the British working class had no more control over imperial policy than the colonised populations who suffered its consequences.

The real history of these islands is not the story Biggar and Tombs tell. It includes the Levellers and the Chartists, the Irish national struggle, the 1926 General Strike, and Lancashire cotton workers’ solidarity with the anti‑slavery cause in the American Civil War. It includes the mass movements against imperialist war, the struggles of miners, dockers and engineers, and the internationalist traditions of the British working class. These movements were not marginal footnotes to the national story; they were the decisive expressions of the only social force capable of opposing imperialism: the working class. Their history shows that workers' interests in Britain never aligned with the ruling class's interests at home or abroad. The working class fought for democratic rights, social equality and international solidarity, while the ruling class pursued profit, domination and war.

This history points not to reconciliation with Britain’s imperial past but to the international struggle for socialism. The working class’s inheritance is not the empire but the fight against it: the strikes, mutinies, protests, and political movements that challenged capital's power and its global system of exploitation. Reclaiming that history means rejecting the ideological project embodied in Our Islands’ Story. It is to recognise that the only genuine community of interest is the international working class, whose future lies not in rehabilitating empire but in abolishing the capitalist system that produced it.

Our Islands’ Story is an ideological artefact of a ruling class preparing for war and seeking to rehabilitate its imperial past. Its method is moralistic, its history selective, its politics reactionary. Against this stands the working-class history, the only force capable of opposing imperialism and preventing the catastrophe toward which capitalism is driving humanity. The task today, as in every period of crisis, is to arm the working class with historical truth, not the sanitised myths of bourgeois historians. Only on that basis can a movement oppose war, defend democratic rights, and fight for a socialist future.

Bibliography

Marxist Theory and Method

• Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vols. I–III.
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
• Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours.
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• Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital.
• Nick Beams, “The ‘History Wars’ and the Politics of the Past,” World Socialist Web Site, 2000–2001.

World Socialist Web Site Analysis

• Tom Scripps, “British Imperialism and the Drive to War,” WSWS May Day Report, 2023.
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British Empire: Structure, Violence, and Political Economy

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Ireland and Colonial Political Economy

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India, Famine, and Colonial Rule

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Slavery, Abolition, and Capitalism

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Contemporary Ideology, Culture Wars, and Historical Revisionism

• Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent.
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• Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (primary source for critique).