The last The World Transformed festival opened on 7 October 2023, a day that moved history. While Labour Party Conference delegates watched Israeli flags projected onto screens and Party leaders voiced solidarity with 75 years of colonial occupation, across Liverpool TWT beamed the Palestinian flag onto its host venue, the historic Black-E, and spoke to the spirit of Palestinian steadfastness and resistance.

The energies released by Palestinian resistance and the solidarity movements that emerged in streets, campuses and workplaces across the world, sharpened our analysis and rewired our orientation. The status quo could no longer be tolerated. In 2024, we ended our informal link to the Labour Party, and announced that the festival would no longer run as a conference fringe event, as it had since 2016. 

Since then, TWT has evolved more fully into a movement. We have connected with groups across Britain – from the National Education Union and Black Lives Matter UK to the Greater Manchester Tenants Union and the Palestinian Youth Movement – to help craft a festival for the masses, from the masses. The response has strengthened our collective resolve, conviction, and coordination as we forge a new path of struggle. Our new vision launches in Hulme, Manchester on 9 October 2025.

Transformational forums

The central kernel of TWT25 is built from collaborative effort. Programme themes across three days of debate, strategy and activity are borne out of in-depth discussion with our partner organisations. They reflect the key lessons and the experiences our movement has accumulated over the last year, with an emphasis on anti-imperialism, internationalism and the need to build working class organisation and associational life.

At the very least attendees will leave with a better sense of what their comrades think about the moment of history we together find ourselves in

Engagement across a wide spectrum of movement partners has moreover reshaped the form of the festival. This year, at the heart of each day’s programme, are Assemblies where delegates and attendees will shape a collective analysis of the conjunctural moment we find ourselves in – and the strategies and coalitions we must build to move out of it. 

Assemblies are designed to foster deep levels of unity and strengthen coordination efforts across movements. At the very least – and this will be no small feat – we hope attendees will leave them with a better sense of what their comrades think about the moment of history we together find ourselves in.

Right time

Our convening takes place at a critical moment. While the prospect of a new left party ignited sections of the socialist left across the summer, recent weeks have shown the project remains saddled with enormous challenges. 

A new wind may yet blow through the political landscape, but this moment is fraught with fragilities – and dangers. TWT provides an opportunity to face this moment together, head on. To analyse it, critically and soberly, and find the collective will to enter its currents and make them our own.

We will do this in Manchester, a city with a history that traces our movements’ own. It is  marked with traditions of dissent, layered by rich seams of Chartism, industrial syndicalism, socialism, republicanism, communism, suffragism, Black radicalism and anti-imperialism. 

Right place

Festival venues straddle Hulme and Moss Side, totemic neighbourhoods famed for radical movements, artistic innovation, musical experimentation and social struggle. Communities built on waves of migration – from Ireland, the Caribbean, Africa – and places that have cradled tenant and worker militancy, antiracist action, community solidarity and internationalism. These living traditions are manifest in the specific histories of the buildings hosting festival events.

The 1945 Fifth Pan-African Congress (PAC) is just one special local event that we commemorate this year. The Congress, eighty years ago, saw delegates including Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, Amy Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta and W.E.B. de Bois address African and Caribbean decolonisation from Western imperial powers. 

It marked, in du Bois’ estimation, ‘a decisive year in determining the freedom of Africa’, and remains a landmark event in Black radical history. We celebrate PAC not with nostalgia, but with the determination and ambition of our forebearers.

Double threats

For the British left today, two dominant forces shape our current conjuncture. One is a right-wing Labour government, swept to office on a loveless landslide, determined to act as the ‘responsible’ arm of the British state. War remains at the heart of the agenda. Genocide in Gaza is backed by British military assets while the Treasury cuts welfare for the most vulnerable at home. Climate and housing crises persist unaddressed. They make migrants into scapegoats and quell dissent with draconian application of anti-terror legislation.

The other force is an incipient British fascism. In 2024, racist riots swept the country, driven by Islamophobia and anti-migrant sentiment. Now fascist marches, ‘asylum hotel’ rallies and flag-laden lampposts appear almost part of the furniture. Nigel Farage and Reform UK, riding high in the polls, have set the terms of the national conversation through weekly press conferences and coordinated street action.

Rising to the challenge

The British left has failed to intervene decisively in this course of events. Fragmentation, decomposition and descent into recrimination followed the twin punches of the 2019 general election and the Covid pandemic, kneecapping us as we entered a new decade. 

We cannot keep clinging to a political moment that began a decade ago

Initiatives like Don’t Pay and Enough is Enough burnt out within a year. The 2022 strike wave failed in the main to break out of the public sector, despite rallying public opinion and sparking an uptick in industrial activity with notable wins. Throughout, the effervescence of the Corbyn years hung over us, wrapping us in a comforting blanket of nostalgia. 

We cannot keep clinging to a political moment that began a decade ago. The political ground it was built on has ebbed away, leaving initiatives that launched in its wake gradually deflating. Instead of orienting towards the future, we have for too long raked over the past. The left in Britain, disorientated and weak, has been on the back foot for too long. 

We are now deep into the century. That new decade has already reached its mid-way point. We cannot shrink from the challenges ahead, but rise to meet them, together. To confront them, it is clear, we must get organised. We hope you’ll join us in Manchester, or elsewhere in the future, as we continue to forge The World Transformed.