A bleak year – but one with glimmers of hope, too. Novara Media’s contributors pick their top stories of 2025.

Grace Blakeley, writer and author of Vulture Capitalism.

The rise of Zack Polanski, and the related transformation of the Green party, is my big story of 2025.

It’s easy to forget how hopeless many socialists felt just a few years ago, after the decisive collapse of Corbynism and Keir Starmer’s war on the Labour left. But Polanski has shown that it’s possible to build an eco-socialist electoral project in the UK, despite the caprices of our majoritarian electoral system.

This reversal of fortunes wasn’t inevitable. Poor leadership, factionalism, and pedestrian incompetence could have stymied the left’s resurgence – as has been the case so many times in the past. Polanski has managed to combine rigid message discipline with an openness to debate and movement-building that is rare among left politicians. In doing so, he has built a movement that is organised, effective, and inclusive.

The Greens under Polanski’s leadership are beginning to look less like a pressure group with a few MPs, and more like a movement-party: an electoral project that can operate inside the state, while building power outside it. As I argue in my book Vulture Capitalism, we need to understand the state as a social relation – state institutions are yet another terrain of class struggle. If the left is serious about engaging on this terrain, we need political vehicles that can both coordinate our movements’ struggles on the ground, and organise them around a common electoral project.

This transition from electoral vehicle to movement-party will not happen automatically. A movement-party only exists if people treat it as such. If Polanski’s project is to succeed, the rest of us can’t just applaud it; we have to get involved.

Micha Frazer-Carroll, writer and author of Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health.

Keir Starmer got into a lot of messes in 2025. But if I were pushed to pick his worst, it’d be the disastrous welfare reform bill of the summer. Starmer’s bill would have tightened the criteria for claiming personal independence payment (PIP), a disability benefit that supports working-age adults with living costs. The changes would have led to between 800,000 and 1.2 million people losing their benefits.

Moderate Meg Hillier launched a rebellion of over 100 MPs, who called it a “catastrophe” and demanded amendments until the eleventh hour. After heated and extended negotiations with senior rebels, work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall agreed to apply eligibility changes to new PIP applicants only, to increase funding for back-to-work schemes, and to commission a review of PIP before any more cuts. The amended bill passed, but 49 Labour MPs still voted against it.

Starmer insisted this wasn’t a “U-turn”. So let’s call it a climbdown. This metaphor feels more apt anyway, since there’s a particularly undignified element of the whole affair for the prime minister. Many rebels and critics of the bill were moderate MPs. The public disagreed with it. And the fallout was relentlessly covered in the mainstream press – a rarity for stories about disability.

Such widespread disapproval reflected a Labour party that had not just lost touch with its dwindling leftwing, but alienated what should have been its natural centrist cheerleaders. Starmer was made to look not only heartless, but also weak. This doesn’t bode well for the prime minister’s plans to table more disability cuts next year.

Kieran Andrieu, British-Palestinian political economist and Novara Media contributor.

Palestinians could remember 2025 in several ways. The deadliest year to be Palestinian on record. The year when apocalypse became normal. The year when hope vanished. Or the year of fake ceasefires, where everyone important seemed to agree no Palestinians were dying even when so many did – so long as their deaths fell under the auspices of Donald Trump’s carve-up.

To quote the statistics at this juncture feels almost gratuitous, but there are more than 20,000 children who once lived and dreamed in Gaza’s streets who live and dream no more. And for many of those left behind, the year ends in tents, flooded up to the knee in unsanitary water. To view Gaza from the sky today is to view a lunar landscape – the saddest sight on earth, rendered with British and American weapons.

I wish I had cheerier news from 2025. And I wish I had cheerier predictions for 2026, but ‘Greater Israel’ remains the project, and a real estate mogul remains in residence at the White House. The truth is, we have nothing to fall back on but our solidarity and resistance. And that’s not nothing.

Harriet Williamson, Novara Media reporter and editor.

I’ll remember 2025 as the year Keir Starmer’s government had its mask-off moment. Although the plan to proscribe Palestine Action was first seeded under the Tories, Labour took the plunge and lumped a group sabotaging factories making the weapons used to maim and kill children in Gaza in with the likes of Al-Qaida and Isis.

Since proscription came into force on 5 July, more than 2,300 people have been arrested under section 13 of the Terrorism Act for holding signs reading “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”.

I’ve interviewed priests, grandparents, disabled retirees and NHS staff – all willing to be arrested to highlight what they feel is a ridiculous and draconian application of terror law, and the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. I’ve covered the unprecedented judicial review of Palestine Action’s proscription – and the last minute judge swap that campaign groups called a transparency-free backroom “stitch-up”.

Call me naive, but I never thought I’d be reporting on nannas in their eighties being dragged away by groups of cops for sitting in silence with cardboard signs. Or speaking to Met police officers who feel “ashamed and sick” for enforcing the law.

‘Dystopian’ is an irritatingly overused word, but in this context, it feels like a fit.

Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil.

Unquestionably, the biggest news story of 2025 was 800,000 people registering interest in Your Party – the new leftwing political party founded by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana – when it launched in the summer. I was about to get out of prison at the time and, in a slightly mad rush, wrote a short book called Your Party: Grasping the Enormity of the Moment during my last ten days inside.

The day after I got out, I gave a presentation to Sultana and her team on how they could get 1.5 million people plus to sign up to the party, using Zoom calls and a national door-knocking campaign. Everyone was going, “Wow, yes, let’s do it.”

Alas, it was not to be. But that is not the story here.

The story is that there is massive social repression in this end-times historical moment, and as soon as people see an escape route from our descent into a hell of rupture, collapse, and fascism, millions of people are going to rush towards it.

The huge show of interest in a new leftwing political formation is just one indicator of our collective desperation and desire. The question, of course, is who is going to provide that pathway, and whether they will provide it in time. And if and when it happens, it will be the biggest news story of all time.

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