08.05.2025

Breaking the mould?

Last week saw major gains for Reform UK - but is Nigel Farage’s outfit about to replace the Tories? They have, after all, been in perpetual chaos for years. Paul Demarty is sceptical

It would not be quite true to say that Reform UK was the only winner on May 1. The Liberal Democrats will be cheered by a strong outing that saw a net gain of 146 councillors, taking overall control in three counties; and the Greens more than doubled their strength in council seats under contestation.

That said, Nigel Farage and his merry men and women were rampant. They took one more seat in parliament, beating out Labour in Runcorn by six votes - a by-election held after previous MP Mike Amesbury was caught on video beating the hell out of a local man, which I suppose is a neat illustration of the mutual comity between major-party MPs and their constituents at the present time. Reform further took the new mayoralties of Hull and East Yorkshire and Greater Lincolnshire. They picked up a staggering 648 councillors, taking control of 10 councils.

The councils in play were largely rural, and so it is no surprise to see that the victims of the Reform wave were principally Conservatives. The Tories lost control of every council they held - eight straight to Reform, and the other seven to no overall control, all thanks to Reform. That said, Reform did take one council, Doncaster, from Labour (where it narrowly lost the mayoral race).

This is a serious problem for the Tory leadership, to put it mildly. The Conservatives are, after all, His Majesty’s extremely loyal opposition; with the government in a state of perpetual chaos and demoralisation, they should really have their tails up. Not last week. I think back, rather sadly, to an article I wrote after Kemi Badenoch’s victory in the leadership race, cautioning people against writing her off too early.¹ That one, as they say, really aged like milk. Her job is surely under threat; the in-tray of Bob Blackman, chair of the 1922 Committee, will surely groan under the weight of letters demanding a confidence vote.

Wipeout

In fairness to the woman, she has been dealt a poor hand. Last year’s general election saw a Tory wipeout, with her party assailed on the right by very substantial Reform votes, and on the left by strong showings from the Lib Dems in the ‘blue wall’ seats of the south-east, whose voters are more plugged into the London economy and therefore wary of hard-Brexit policies that tend to degrade the City. If she survives, she will have to find some way to deal with these twin threats; if she fails, her successor will be in the same pickle.

As often on days like May 1, there is much chatter about the possible death of the Conservative Party. Such a thing is hardly impossible, but we should be cautious. Ours remains a cruel electoral system for third parties; and, more importantly, the Tory Party is a truly historic organisation - the oldest political party in the world, and for centuries a load-bearing institution in the British constitutional order. It is a true class party, which represents the interests of the bourgeoisie by creating a constituency in the petty bourgeoisie and backward elements of the working class.

Such parties can die, but they are not vanquished all at once by a poor day at the office in an off-year election. The question is rather whether we have seen, over the recent period, a sufficiently severe fundamental decay in its ability to keep this alliance together and turn it out at the polling booth. If that is the case, it is not clear yet: nothing we have seen is incompatible with the interpretation that the Tories are still punch-drunk from their drubbing last year, not to say the five years of disaster that preceded it, and will recover in time.

If they are to recover, they have two obvious approaches - wait out the Reform threat and recapture the votes they have lost well enough to reduce their deficit in 2029; or work out some kind of arrangement with Reform that will, ultimately, lead to reunification (which is what, really, it would be - very many of Reform’s councillors are previously Tory activists, and even Nigel Farage was a member until 1992).

Which of these is the result depends very much on Reform’s progress in the coming years. Can it build on its successes in the last 12 months? There are, again, reasons for scepticism here. Previous Farage outfits have had successes in local elections that have later collapsed. The UK Independence Party took over Thanet council in 2015; but a vicious row over plans to reopen a local airport eventually resulted in the implosion of its council group and a reversion to Tory rule. Farage himself has a history of vicious feuds with subordinates.

Puzzle

The Reform operation looks a little more professional at face value. Yet, if anything, it has a more difficult political puzzle to solve. Ukip - at least in its Farage iteration - sold voters a pretty orthodox version of Thatcherism. It had the same economic policy of deregulation, privatisation and the like; its hatred of Europe was strongly associated with Margaret Thatcher’s later years, when she relentlessly campaigned on the back benches and in the Lords for the basic Brexiteer demands. The core Ukip vote was basically a Tory vote, and their strongholds were (former) Tory strongholds.

Reform has, in fact, succeeded in doing what overexcited commentators always supposed Ukip to be on the verge of - taking votes from the Tories and Labour on an essentially populist platform of opposition to an unaccountable and ill-defined elite. So far as the ‘elite’ can be stereotyped as a bunch of politically-correct, censorious liberals who wish to flood the country with immigrants, this works just fine. As soon as one gains control of, say, 10 municipal councils, however, the reality principle looms larger - of a society already stripped to the bone and barely able to keep up with the basics of local governance (picking up refuse, social care and so on).

What, in that case, is the political platform of Reform? Ukip-style turbo-Thatcherism, or the sort of far-right nativist social democracy that so many have sought to project onto Donald Trump in the US? The top-line pledges in the party’s manifesto (its “contract” with the British people) attempt to square the circle. Raise the income of the poorest … by raising the threshold for income tax to £20,000. Reduce NHS waiting times … through tax breaks for doctors and nurses and cutting back-office costs.² Those are, of course, national policies, even if they were more than wishful thinking, and, when the cold winds of local government as it actually exists start blowing in, more sanguine centrists are probably right to expect a degree of (perhaps localised) disillusionment, and perhaps Ukip-in-Thanet-style implosions.

All that said, people are voting for them. The idea is abroad that, above all, immigration is to blame for all the various social dysfunctions. As the Reform “contract” promises, “all non-essential immigration [will be] frozen to boost wages, protect public services, end the housing crisis and cut crime”. It is hardly surprising that the idea is abroad; both the Conservatives and Labour have frothed about immigration as a diversionary tactic and promised to do something about it - and broken those promises in spectacularly obvious ways.

For those of us who persist in the idea that immigrants are to be treateddecently and not made the scapegoats for a combination of large-scale economic injustice and small-scale political incompetence, it is the worst of all possible worlds - state capacity continues, in stages, to degrade; at every stage, blame is placed on incomers; but, since the incomers are quite genuinely necessary to keep both basic functions of society and more rarefied institutions like universities and financial firms afloat, they keep coming, ensuring new cycles of scapegoating.

Atrophied

That such idiocy should spread among the reactionary petty bourgeoisie is, alas, to be expected. More might be expected of the working class; but the workers’ movement’s formerly formidable sinews of war have atrophied, and so we must face the reality that in this country and many others, chauvinism with respect to migrants has spread widely in a working class atomised by the decline of its mass organisations and thus pushed towards the political psychology of the petty bourgeoisie.

This is not a mere ideological fancy. We can illustrate this through a standard left-right argument about immigration. A rightwinger will argue that, if there is mass immigration, companies will employ lower-cost migrant workers and displace native labour; therefore, it is necessary to restrict immigration to keep wages up. A leftist might argue that illegalising migrant labour merely makes it more precarious, and therefore employers will exploit that fact to drive wages down.

The reality is that both of these arguments are correct. Employers will exploit any and all prevailing conditions to drive wages down - heads they win, tails we lose. The only way out is working class organisation to curtail the employers’ power to do so. However, this really does pan out decisively for the left side of the argument, because in both cases you only have a chance of fighting back by organising both native and migrant labour; but doing so is far easier when the migrant part of the coalition is not in constant, immediate danger of deportation.

QED: except, as mentioned, the formations that could make such common organisation a reality are reeling after decades of defeat. That is why working class hostility to migration makes sense: in the absence of militant trade unions and workers’ political parties, one must merely pick one’s poison, and it is perfectly rational, though hopeless, to pick the poison that you are not currently being fed. Anti-migrant chauvinism tends to feed on itself - and, since it can never really be consummated, the answer is always more of the same. It is like the Turkish delight in The lion, the witch and the wardrobe: “Anyone who had once tasted it would want more and more of it, and would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves.” And so, if Reform should fail, another gang of reactionaries is sure to pick up the torch.

Senseless

It is this rather treacherous situation that makes the approach of the Socialist Workers Party to Reform so hopeless. Alex Callinicos, writing in the latest Socialist Worker, does at least conclude that “it’s urgent that the radical left gets its electoral act together to pose an alternative.” (How well the SWP’s electoral-alternative-mongering is going is another matter.)³ Its concrete activity in this electoral cycle, however, has consisted more or less entirely of purely negative anti-Reform campaigning under its Stand Up to Racism banner. As I write, here are the headlines of the first five posts on SUtR’s website: ”Reform win Runcorn: time to get organised”; “After the May elections, stop Reform UK”; “Stop Reform UK, Scotland Summit”; “Fund the campaign to stop Reform UK”; “Joint statement: stop Reform UK”. My point, I take it, is well made.

This is consistent with SWP practice within SUtR and its predecessors, Unite Against Fascism and the Anti-Nazi League: since all of these fronts depend for their perceived legitimacy on their political breadth, they definitionally cannot endorse any positive alternative. To say “vote Green” would alienate Labour people, and vice versa; to say “vote Tory” would alienate themselves, naturally. Yet going around various rural county councils saying merely don’t vote Reform is exactly the same as saying “vote Tory”. Who the hell else is there?

A positive alternative is, as I have argued, a tricky thing to offer. There is not some magic combination of slogans that will reverse the steady course of reactionary ‘progress’. It depends on us really rebuilding the fighting capacity of the class, which means giving up on cheap talk and short cuts. As always, the time to start this very long job is now - yesterday, indeed. Making ourselves outriders of a declining political establishment is suicidal.

1. ‘A modern chameleon’ Weekly Worker November 7 2024: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1514/a-modern-chameleon.↩︎

2. assets.nationbuilder.com/reformuk/pages/253/attachments/original/1718625371/Reform_UK_Our_Contract_with_You.pdf.↩︎

3. See Carla Roberts, ‘What’s the point?’ Weekly Worker April 24: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1535/whats-the-point.↩︎