Socialist Sonnet No. 240: Punch and Judy Man (2026)

 From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

Punch and Judy Man

 The tide ebbs and flows in Clacton,

Waves advance, pause and then retreat,

Quite unmoved by human conceit

Enjoying the fresh air and fun.

It’s not beyond Westminster’s reach

The squabbling for office and place,

Where everyone’s more than one face.

There’s to be drama on the beach,

A show that’s seemingly funny

And yet is actually grotesque,

The character behind the mask

Only performs for the money.

Once you given all you can spare

You’ll find he is not really there.

D. A.

 

Blogger's Note:

A sonnet prompted by Nigel Farage resigning his parliamentary seat in Clacton, in order that a bye-election is triggered, which he will then fight on a 'Let the people of Clacton decide' platform - I'm paraphrasing, of course. All rather silly.

Cooking the Books: All workers’ parties now? (2026)

The Cooking The Books column from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘We’re now the workers’ party’ proclaimed the headline of an article by Nigel Farage in the Times (10 May) following his party’s gains in the local council elections. A week or so earlier on May Day, Zack Polanski had declared that ‘the Greens are the new workers’ party’.

So, who are ‘the workers’? Capitalist society is divided into two basic classes: a class that owns the resources needed to produce what the members of society need to survive, and a class, without such ownership, whose members are obliged to try to sell their working skills to obtain money to buy what they need to survive. The vast majority of the population are members of this working class, irrespective of what job they do or whether they work in an office or an industrial unit.

Farage wrote about ‘guys wearing orange jackets working for local councils, paid-up trade union members, or the self-employed’, which suggests he is thinking more of manual and industrial workers. That is certainly a common usage of the term ‘working class’, defined by occupation rather than exclusion from ownership of productive resources. There is evidence that many such workers who traditionally supported Labour have switched to Reform.

But if a party is to be judged a workers’ party because of the number of workers who vote for it, any party which has substantial support would be a ‘workers party’ as the vast majority of voters are workers. The Tories, the Liberals and the Scots and Welsh Nats would be workers’ parties too.

Polanski’s claim that the Greens are now the workers’ party is based on promising measures to benefit workers in the workplace. He sounds like a Labour politician of yesteryear:

‘The reforms introduced by Margaret Thatcher nearly half a century ago began the long march downwards in the balance of power and wealth in our country — from those who produce and do the work to those who profit from it …. We will address the massive imbalance in our workplaces and give control back to workers’.

His claim that the Greens are the new workers’ party is in effect a claim that Greens are the new ‘Labour’ party. But why does he think that the Green Party would be any more successful in shifting the balance of power and wealth in favour of those who produce the wealth? Why does he think that the Labour Party failed to do this? And, incidentally, when did workers ever control their places of work?

The Labour Party started off as a trade union pressure group to get legislation passed that would benefit workers. At best it could be seen as a party that aimed to improve the position of workers within capitalism but, although some reforms can do and have done this, capitalism can never be made to run in the interest of the working class, because it is a profit-making system and profits come from the unpaid labour of those ‘who produce and do the work’. It is an anti-worker system and no government can change that.

Farage’s claim that his party is a workers’ party is laughable in view of its openly pro-capitalist policies. Polanski’s claim can be dismissed as vote-catching rhetoric by an opposition party that has no chance of being called to honour its promise — and, if ever it was in that position, it would fail just as the Labour Party has done and for the same reason. Capitalism simply cannot be made to work for the workers.

A real workers’ party is one that advocates political action to bring about the immediate common ownership and democratic control of productive resources.

Farage — opportunist supreme (2025)

From the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘That means less money to cover rent, the weekly shop or a pint down the pub’ (Nigel Farage on the Labour government).

Last month’s Socialist Standard carried an article on May’s local election results which saw Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party win hundreds of seats and perhaps present a serious future threat to the traditional two-party Labour-Tory dominance of UK politics. At the same time the article pointed out that this might just be a flash in the pan, and that come the next parliamentary election Reform’s star may have waned, as has happened in the past with other seeming new pretenders to power.

Nevertheless, it also drew attention to the particularly distasteful nature of Reform’s political agenda, with its open and unashamed promotion of xenophobia, calculated to embolden those with racist outlooks and other particularly obnoxious agendas. And though the Socialist Party is not in the business of focusing its criticism on specific capitalist politicians, preferring to see individuals in that role as instruments of the system they are committed to, it would be at the very least disingenuous of us not to put some focus on the politician who is the embodiment of Reform UK and its policies. We are of course talking about Nigel Farage who is the face, we can say the inventor, of that party, without whom it is hard to imagine it could continue being any kind of force in British politics.

In this perspective it is probably useful to point to some aspects of Farage’s previous political attitudes and activities, which led up to and form at least part of the policies now being embraced by his party. We can find the following:

• In the early 1980s, when a student at Dulwich College, he is on record as voicing admiration for Hitler and was reportedly a vocal supporter of the National Front.
• When this was put to him later by a journalist, he admitted to having said ‘some ridiculous things’, but, when asked if these were racist, replied, ‘it depends how you define it’.
• Standing for UKIP at a 1994 by-election, he sought to enlist the support of the figure he called his political hero, Enoch Powell, who had become infamous for his racist ‘rivers of blood’ speech.
• In the years that followed he was associated with figures from the BNP.
• As leader of UKIP from 2006, he advocated dismantling the NHS, declared opposition to gay marriage and made numerous appearances on the Kremlin-run RT television channel, expressing admiration for Vladimir Putin and his take-over of Crimea in 2014.
• He has consistently voiced support for Donald Trump, referring to him as his ‘pal’, defending his use of misogynistic language (‘grab ‘em by the pussy’) and, in the run-up to the 2020 American elections, making a speech at a rally in Arizona in which he described Trump as ‘the single most resilient and bravest person I have ever met in my life’.
• He presented himself, in a column in The Sun newspaper in April this year, as a modern-day Keir Hardie, stating that ‘when Keir Hardie founded the Labour Party in 1893, he declared it existed to give the working man and woman a voice’, but that now ‘Keir Hardie would be turning in his grave and ‘Labour no longer represents hardworking Brits’.

So now, with characteristic opportunism, Farage, sniffing political power, is seeking to present himself as the leader of a kind of neo-Labour Party who will fix everything Labour has always promised to fix for workers but never has. Statements he has made in the past about privatising the NHS and cutting welfare benefits have ceased, and his focus is on how his party would run things, as he put it in his Sun column, ‘in the interests of the working man and woman’.

In reality, he would be no more able to do this than Labour, which, when in power, has always simply carried out the task of administering capitalism in the interests of those who monopolise society’s wealth – as any government must. So the idea that, if elected, Reform would do anything different is manifest tosh. But tosh that, currently at least, seems to be having significant purchase on workers, judging by that party’s recent local election successes.

And another button that Farage is pressing harder than ever in his courtship of voters is the crude nationalism that, as we have seen, has been present in him since an early stage. In ramping up his longstanding scapegoating of foreigners and minority groups of various kinds, he is blaming them for multiple problems suffered by ‘British’ workers which he says the current government is not taking drastic enough steps to remedy. ‘Labour’s biggest betrayal of the Red Wall is immigration’, is how he expressed this in his column in The Sun.

From what we have seen, the description of Farage as ‘xenophobic and pandering to racism’ and ‘a disingenuous grifter’ contained in a leaked memo from the Coutts’ bank he was recently and publicly in dispute with really does seem to fit the bill. But we know of course that in the end Farage is only an extreme example of the opportunism inherent in all capitalist political leaders as they seek to control a system that breeds economic chaos, poses the constant threat of war and environmental degradation and can only ever offer workers at best a few crumbs from the table of the rich.

If workers continue to follow the likes of Farage (or any other leader), it will be a long wait before we get the new system we need where the sole motive of production will be to meet the reasonable needs of all in a world society without borders or states or classes. And, of course, before that can happen, workers will also need to throw off their own sense of powerlessness and the illusion that change can only be brought about by certain exceptional individuals.

Howard Moss

Reform – Breaking the mould or flash in the pan? (2025)

From the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month’s local election results sparked a barrage of headlines forecasting a seismic change in the British electoral landscape. The tabloids in particular went full throttle with titles like ‘The Reform Revolution’, ‘Reform Shockwave’, and ‘Farage Eyes No 10’. The change being foreseen was the end of two-party politics now that a third party with significant public support was on the scene. And after over a century of political yo-yo between Tory and Labour, there does seem to be another credible contender in the waiting room.

More than a protest vote?

After all similar things have happened in other European countries with similar electoral systems to the UK. In 1990s Italy, for example, the existing post-war parties were wiped from the map to be replaced by others, some of which then didn’t survive and were supplanted by other new ones, one of which one is currently the ruling party. In France too changes in the electoral scene mean that the country currently has a president leading a party that was formed less than 10 years ago. Could similar things happen here, now that Nigel Farage’s Reform party seems to have made significant inroads into sections of the electorate that have traditionally supported one or the other of the two longstanding parties?

Many commentators seem to think so, especially as Farage seems to be ferociously tapping into issues aimed at getting the electorate – or certain sections of it anyway – worked up about the other parties’ policies. These include what he presents as over-emphasis on climate change measures, over-sympathetic treatment of asylum seekers, and insufficient focus on ‘national sovereignty’. Even electoral analyst Professor John Curtice, well-known for his even-handedness, has talked about ‘an electorate that still has little faith in the Conservatives and which is now disappointed by Labour’s performance in office’ and expressed the view that ‘Reform’s triumph was much more than a protest vote’.

Elected or dismissed?

The other thing that many who see Reform as here to stay point to is that the right-wing ‘populist’ view of the world they represent reflects a movement taking place more widely in other places with a democratic electoral system. There are examples to be found in Italy’s current Brothers of Italy party government, in Javier Milei’s presidency in Argentina, in Viktor Orban’s leadership in Hungary and, of course, the United States under Donald Trump. Parties of a similar ilk have also garnered substantial support in France and Germany. So is the UK likely to go the same way once the next general election takes place? Will Britain be ruled by Reform with Nigel Farage the country’s next prime minister?

Certainly, many things are possible in capitalist politics. That’s because, as the Socialist Party has never tired of pointing out, capitalism is a system that, unpredictable as it is in the details of its future direction, easily disorients and confuses the parties that try to run it. By its nature it can only have as its overall goal the securing of profit for those who monopolise the wealth of society. But we also know that, because of the anarchic nature of the ‘market forces’ under which it operates, no one and no government can foresee the twists and turns that it will take even in the short term and that may make the particular political team trying to administer it popular or unpopular with the electorate. Any party in power is always condemned to taking on the task of controlling the uncontrollable. Will it manage to keep control at least enough to gain voters’ favour at the next election? They do not know and neither does anyone else. As one sage commentator has, therefore, said and we have seen over and over again: ‘Governments are not elected, they are dismissed’.

So, in Britain currently, much depends on the extent to which the Labour government can win back some of the support it seems to have lost since last year’s election. Will a sufficient number of voters feel less afflicted than they do at present by the problems, mainly economic (eg, cost of living, inflation, insecure employment), that the market-controlled buying and selling system inflicts upon them? If so, the Reform vote (31 percent in last month’s elections) may subside, or at least take more voters away from the Tories than from Labour.

Will history count?

The other factor to take into account is that, while some of the countries mentioned earlier have seen the rise and fall of political parties as well as new parties and groupings coming to power, in terms of parties and governments Britain has tended to be more stable than most. Since Labour took over from the Liberals as the main party of opposition to the Tories in the early twentieth century, the two have alternated in government ever since. And this has happened despite the apparent threat from other parties and movements that have sometimes surged onto the scene but then sunk. Examples are Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement in the 1930s, the Social Democratic Party led by the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ which broke away from Labour in the early 1980s and at one point was polling one third of the electorate, and the significant breakthrough which seemed to be promised for the LibDems by the period of ‘Cleggmania’ prior to the 2010 general election.

Things may turn out differently this time of course. And if Reform’s recent election successes turn out to be more than a flash in the pan, socialists will find especially distasteful any spread of its open promotion of xenophobia and its so-called ‘anti-woke’ agenda, both likely to embolden racists and those with other retrograde outlooks. But whether Reform manages to last any longer as a serious political force than its previous incarnations (UKIP, Brexit Party) or not, what is certain is that, even in government, it would be no more capable of running smoothly and in the interests of those who have elected it a system which is by its very nature unstable, uncontrollable and has as its inalienable purpose the realisation of profit for the minority who monopolise the wealth produced by the majority.

Howard Moss

Cooking the Books: A fool’s errand (2025)

The Cooking The Books column from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Farage woos red wall with vow to reindustrialise UK’, read a headline in the Times (16 April). According to the journalist:

‘At a working men’s club in Newton Aycliffe, Co Durham, the Reform leader made his most audacious attempt yet to outflank Labour to its left on the economy, praising trade unions and calling for the return of nationalised heavy industry, coal mining and oil and gas extraction.’

This could be read as saying that Farage called for the return of nationalised coal and oil and gas. Actually, he has only called for the nationalisation of one steelworks called ‘British Steel’ and not even for the nationalisation of all steelworks in Britain. It is true, though, that he has called for more manufacturing and heavy industry in Britain and for allowing privately-owned coal mining and more drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea.

It is a long time since the Labour Party has committed itself to trying to revive heavy industry in Britain. They have accepted the evolution of British capitalism towards capturing a share of world surplus value through financial services. Only its rather reduced left wing still dream of this. Here is Eddie Dempsey, Mick Lynch’s successor as General Secretary of the RMT union, writing in the Morning Star (3/4 May):

‘Thatcherism ripped up the industrial foundations of this country… We were left with a service and big-finance-dominated economy with communities stripped of stable work, identity and any real power to determine the course of their lives… The antidote is an organised economy and a wider society with a strategic role for the state driving investment with credible industrial planning to bring back high-quality jobs and good housing’.

It can be seriously doubted that Farage wants to see such a state-capitalist system introduced. If he did, he would indeed ‘outflank the Labour Party to its left’. His is just populist demagoguery. What he is plainly trying to do is to exploit for vote-catching purposes the loss of ‘stable work, identity and real power to determine the course of their lives’ felt by people living in areas formerly dominated by heavy manual work.

Farage has given no details of how he would bring about a reindustrialisation of Britain. Understandably, since private enterprise, which he favours, will only invest if there is a prospect of making a profit that is more than minimal. The domination of heavy industry in parts of Britain ended precisely because the industries concerned (coal mining, steel making, shipbuilding) were no longer profitable in the face of competition from cheaper producers in other parts of the world.

He could say he would follow Trump and seek to make heavy industry profitable by erecting a tariff wall around it but dares not because this would make no sense in a country so heavily dependent on international trade as Britain. Besides, it is not what those who fund Reform UK want. They are financiers whose priority is to be able to carry on their financial wheelings and dealings, internationally as much as nationally, without state regulation.

Dempsey will be sincere. But if tariffs are ruled out (to which he might not be opposed), then the only other way to try to make heavy industry, whether nationalised or private, profitable again would be through government subsidies but this would be at the expense of other sectors of the economy.

The economic law of capitalism of ‘no profit, no production’ cannot be bucked. The government could try to go against it by protective tariffs or large subsidies but the result would be to undermine the competitiveness of British industry generally, leading to loss of jobs elsewhere in the economy. Anybody seeking to reindustrialise Britain is on a fool’s errand.

Reforming UK politics? (2025)

From the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party has consistently questioned the efficacy of reform. Capitalise the word and it takes on a specific significance. Reform UK emerged as a political force of note by securing five parliamentary seats at the last general election.

The Green Party increased its representation in Parliament to four, which was impressive considering the difficulties posed by the first-past-the-post-system. Even more remarkable, though, was Reform’s performance. Considered along with its former incarnation as the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), its electoral progress is of interest. In the 2015 general election, one seat was won with an overall UK vote share of 12.6 percent. By the 2019 election, standing as the Brexit Party, its vote share had declined to around 2 percent, with no seats gained. This was the time of Boris Johnson’s Tory Party undertaking to ‘get Brexit done!’ The moment and purpose for UKIP/Brexit Party appeared to have passed.

Five years later though, emerging as Reform UK with a political platform expanded beyond just Brexit, came an apparent breakthrough. However, at 14.3 percent of the vote, the improvement on the 2015 performance was less than spectacular. The major factor was not so much the increased Reform vote, but the near collapse of Conservative Party support. In 2015 they took 36.8 percent of the vote, which increased to 43.6 percent in 2019. Five years on they were down to 23.7 percent. This seems to indicate many Conservative voters relocating with Reform, enabling the taking of seats previously denied them. The Tory right split and its largely extra-parliamentary pressure group was able to become in-house (of Commons).

A determining factor in Reform’s rise must be its leader, Nigel Farage. He had founded Reform UK, originally the Brexit Party, two years after he left UKIP following the Brexit referendum. He then effectively left Reform UK and concentrated his political activities around the Trump camp in America. Up to just a few weeks prior to the 2024 general election Reform UK was being led by Richard Tice. Initially Farage declined to advance himself as a candidate, undertaking to proselytise for the Tice campaign around the country.

Who owns Reform UK?

A sudden volte-face occurred when Farage claimed he had a sense of guilt about not stepping forwards and letting his supporters down. In short order, Tice was replaced as Reform UK leader by the apparently selfless Farage. Previously, Tice had been a member, and co-founder with Arron Banks, of the Brexit campaigning group Leave EU. This organisation distinguished itself in 2018 by being fined £70,000 for breaching electoral law during the referendum campaign.

Tice’s tenure as leader of Reform had been marred by fractious personal relations in the party. He had secured, in March 2024, the defection of a former Conservative Party deputy chair and MP for Ashfield, Lee Anderson. This was achieved despite Anderson, just a few months earlier, having referred to Tice as a ‘pound shop Nigel Farage’ who should ‘pipe down a little bit’ so as not to exacerbate tensions between Tories and Reform to the benefit of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.

Tice’s response was to tell Sky News, ‘…we’re going to replace the Tories as the main alternative to Labour in those red wall seats.’ As the election turned out, the red wall seats the Johnson Tories took in 2019 largely returned to Labour. It was the Conservative Party that suffered loss of support in 2024.

The relative success of Reform under the renewed Farage leadership has also led to a reorganisation of the Party. Unusually, Reform UK was founded and owned by its leader, Farage, who initially established it as a private limited company in which he was the majority shareholder. Rarely, if ever, has a political party so blatantly reflected the capitalist system it is dedicated to serving. It was this that enabled Farage to simply take over the leadership again. As owner he didn’t require the democratic inconvenience of being voted into position by the membership.

Two months after the 2024 general election, at its Birmingham conference, Reform was informed by its leader that he intended giving up his shares, and thereby his personal ownership. For the first time since its inception, members would be able to vote on party matters. The party leader was, in future, to be elected and could subsequently be removed by a vote of no confidence. However, such a vote would only happen if 50 percent of the membership wrote to the chairman requesting one.

Alternatively, Reform MPs can trigger such a vote if 50 of them, or 50 percent, demand one. This only applies when there is a minimum of 100 MPs. The purpose behind this change is to attract a larger membership, although it does leave the leader in a strong, dominant position.

Companies House records show that Reform 2025 is now the shareholder, and that neither Farage nor Tice continue to hold shares. Reform UK has become a non-profit organisation limited by guarantee. Again, a reflection of capitalist structure is maintained.

Demagogic populism

Unsurprisingly, the policies of Reform, styled as a ‘contract with the people’ are, in many ways, largely indistinguishable from those of the other parliamentary parties, excepting differences of emphasis and nuance.

Policies include immigration and its control, increasing police numbers with more ‘bobbies on the beat’, cutting NHS waiting lists, reducing the tax burden and tweaking various taxes, freeing businesses from red tape, fast tracking brownfield development sites for housing, speeding up development of nuclear energy, increasing defence spending etc.

Education policies do give an insight into the political shading of Reform. They propose to scrap student loan interest (going for the youth vote?), ban teaching critical race theory and gender ideology, fine universities guilty of political bias or cancel culture, offer private school tax relief, re-introduce home economics, double pupil referral units, and make the school curriculum more ‘patriotic’.

There is a pervasive demagogic populism running through Reform UK. This is personified in Nigel Farage who does not typically appear as a fanatical ranter. Rather, his style is that of the plain speaker of common sense, appealing to the interests of various groups of voters.

There are business tax cuts for one section of the Tory-minded, VAT adjustments to deal with the cost of living, anti-woke messaging for the ‘you can’t say anything these days’ brigade and, of course immigration control. It’s pick-and-mix politics, a selection of flavours so nearly everyone’s taste is accommodated.

Underlying it all, as with the other parliamentary parties, is the broad if unacknowledged agreement not to challenge capitalism at all. That leaves the cause of the various concerns afflicting people free to operate as it does, as it must, driven by the absolute unquenchable thirst for profit. Production for profit and not for need would continue unhindered under a Reform administration.

The myriad problems people face in the UK, as around the world, cannot be solved by Reform or any other party committed to capitalism, the very system that is the source of the problems. Voting is important, but voting for another status-quo party, no matter how populist, will solve nothing.

Because the vote is valuable don’t give it away to a party making promises it can’t keep. Like any scam call ask the question, am I going to take what is offered on trust? Or should I take a considered, conscious decision to act in concert with others like me to achieve what will benefit us all?

Regressive mouthpiece

Reform UK has recently begun to show itself, for all its democratic claims, as a party where personal ambition and in-fighting are the order of the day. Rupert Lowe, just 8 months on from the general election, has had the Reform whip withdrawn. Also, the party has referred their MP to the police for threatening Zia Yusuf, the chair. There is also an internal investigation into possible staff bullying. Lowe has responded by appointing his own legal team. Perhaps of greater concern for Reform is that Lowe dominates Reform’s digital-first community with more than 300,000 followers on X. It may well be that Reform UK has had its moment in the political sun.

It is not possible to predict the future for Reform UK. It seems unlikely to garner enough support to amass a parliamentary majority. It may well have significant influence as the repository and mouthpiece of regressive, even xenophobic sectors of the electorate. Unfortunately, those sectors may, at present, constitute a rather greater number of voters than was once the case.

This indicates the importance of socialists continuing to challenge capitalism directly, and not to get drawn into specific concerns about Reform UK or any similar political group that might emerge in the future. Only when the majority of people come to embrace socialism and actively seek to abolish capitalism, will all the present parties, including Reform UK, become wholly irrelevant and disappear from the political sphere. This would be truly ‘reforming’ UK politics.

D. A.

Editorial: What to do about Reform UK? (2025)

Editorial from the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reform UK is a reincarnation of the Brexit Party and given the recent furore over Rupert Lowe MP, seems to be beset by the same type of periodic infighting among its representatives. In fact, it is effectively the same party with a change of name and led and financed by the same people — typically dissident members of the capitalist class who want less regulation of their financial activities. They realise that they can’t get this unless they control political power — the power to make laws and regulations — and that the route to such control lies through the ballot box. They are hoping to repeat their success in the Brexit referendum, by again appealing to anti-foreigner prejudice and distrust of a ‘liberal elite’ that they say is running the country. But they are no friends of the workers whose votes they need.

Reform may have been in the process of trying to develop detailed policies and promises like the other parties, but this is not the basis of its appeal nor why people vote for it. It’s the discontent felt by many about the economic problems they face and the failure of the Labour and Conservative parties to deliver on their promises to mitigate these.

Reform’s position can be described as ‘nativist’ in the sense of supporting a policy of prioritising the interests of native-born inhabitants against those of immigrants. In Britain this would include not just ‘white’ people but native-born and established ‘non-whites’. As Reform members and candidates fall into the latter group, to campaign against the party for being racist won’t wash as it can be seen not to be the case.

Even so, the way Reform expresses its nativism is crude, nasty and divisive. Obviously, socialists counter those spreading hatred against our fellow workers who are refugees or undocumented immigrants. That’s part of our general position that the workers of the world should unite to replace capitalism with socialism.

The pressure group ‘Stand Up To Racism’ proposes to ‘go door to door where Reform candidates are standing to mobilise the vote against them’. But voting for the other parties won’t stem the growth of Reform as the basis for its growth has been precisely the failure of these parties to deliver on their promises.

Reform feeds off the widespread view that the MPs and councillors of the other parties are out for themselves. But that’s not the reason these parties don’t deliver. It’s because they support and operate within capitalism. They fail because under capitalism, a system driven by profit-making, profits have to come before meeting people’s needs; a priority which those making political decisions have to apply. The established parties fail because it is impossible for them to succeed. They would fail even if all their MPs and councillors were saints.

Capitalism simply cannot be made to work for the benefit of the majority class of wage and salary workers and their dependants. Reform will fail too if ever it gets into positions where it is in charge of implementing policies. They too will have to run the system according to its priorities and economic laws.

The way to react to the growth of Reform is not to support the other parties against it. It is to campaign against capitalism and all the parties that support that system and for a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources so that they can be used to directly meet people’s needs.

Letter: The polarisation of politics (2025)

Letter to the Editors from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The polarisation of politics

The dialectic taking place among political opponents at the present time is that there is a polarisation and a narrowing of political thought taking place in the UK. Put simply, we are seeing a decrease in compromise and increased partisanship. Will this lead to a more tribalised political system as some political commentators have suggested?

In the UK since Brexit there has no doubt taken place a fragmentation of politics and right wing populist views taking charge of the narrative.

Mr Farage has been the main proponent of a populist free market economy encouraging the idea that we should engage in a society of competitive individuals vying for a higher proportion of the goods available in the land. Some kind of anarchic free for all society that ignores the welfare of the people and encourages fierce competition with no moral arbiters.

With the rise of marginal parties that, in my view only offer a very short lifespan, it is a grim foreboding for the future. Socialism seems to have taken a back seat at the present time. With the arrival of revisionist Keir Starmer, the Labour party lacks the bravery to attack free enterprise head on. Public ownership is still very fragmented and piecemeal.

Farage and his cohorts continue to feed the electorate with misinformation, racial prejudice and bigotry. They continue to foster the political agenda with an attack on the use of rules in a free market economy as it, in their opinion limits among other things the freedom of speech. Ignoring the facts that rules act as a protective cocoon for the collective and limit greedy individuals from appropriating all that is available.

There is also a view from liberal commentators that there is an oligarchy taking shape. And this oligarchy with all its wealth, power and influence will eventually threaten democracy.

Is this however just another example of pop up populist fear mongering? I think so. In the UK Nigel Farage, the so called ‘Man of the People,’ the messiah in waiting is without doubt a dangerous opponent of socialism. Although a racist and fear monger, he is no political slouch. An educated raconteur with plenty of political muscle. He is very persuasive in that ‘boyish’ tone of innocence he portrays to the gallery.

But his reform party in my view is an enigma. It will not last the distance. It has no real substance. It can be viewed as some kind of short fix that will only satisfy the electorate for a short while.

The impulse will stutter and die out. It just does not have the bedrock of support to be a lasting political party. It is no tour de force.

But having said that, they are perversely a real and present danger. The narrative in the political cauldron at the moment is change and not for the better. The right wing is attempting to batter doors

down.

The rich and powerful would have us believe that ruthless competition is the way forward. Jim Ratcliffe, a part shareholder in Manchester United in is search for that ultra-competitive spirit is tearing the club apart by ignoring the needs of the workforce. Socialism needs to be more aggressive in its defence of equality and fairness.

I would take Thomas Moore’s pragmatic view of socialism which would be based on the practical considerations of socialism and as Marx stated, with the rise of technological development’s the modes of production change over time creating new and revolutionary structures.

In the UK we have a truly diverse culture and I would hope that this will produce a profound cultural shift and a more progressive society which will see the disappearance of class divisions. As a last thought could AI have a dramatic effect on the conditions of our social relations.

Barry Watts, 

Dover

Reply:

You make a lot of separate points so we can’t really address all of them. It’s undoubtedly true that in the US and Europe the political pendulum has swung towards the right in recent years, as rocketing prices and unaffordable housing have put a squeeze on workers, which together with wars and climate change don’t offer young people much hope for the future.

In such dire times, it’s common to think less about progressive ideas and more about loss aversion, and never mind other problems. Ably assisted by social media, the right has amplified the general unease into a clickbait hysteria of xenophobia, anti-wokism and conspiracy yarns which drowns out adult debate and promotes gleeful mediocrities like Farage who know how to exploit it. They don’t need arguments as long as they get attention. And having no coherent political or ideological theory is not a weakness but an advantage for such ‘pop-up populists’, because it means they can rebrand any time they like.

The left is in a state of despair and disrepair. Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn were unable to turn back the capitalist clock with their supposedly radical state-ownership programmes. Anti or post-capitalists, overlooked since Occupy, fail to be heard above the noise.

But the right is also fragmented and confused. Some hanker for a ruthless, stateless Adam Smith parody that never could feasibly exist. Many want a return to 19th century protectionism. Trump meanwhile is going in contradictory directions with new isolationist tariffs combined with expansionist rhetoric, prompting dark forebodings of a future global war.

Is the new oligarchy threatening democracy, you ask, as if ‘democracy’ is what we’ve got? The rich do seem to be enjoying a new Gilded Age, but just look how they bend the knee to Trump, to Putin, to Xi. That’s not the act of invincible plutocrats. They fear the state’s power to break them if it chooses. And they need the state’s power to maintain order, without which they can’t continue to profit.

Is all this bad for socialism’s prospects? The barrage of soundbite and counter-soundbite is certainly a source of general confusion, but workers’ collective interest remains crystal clear for anyone to see. You hint that future technology might create new structures through which to challenge the system. Possibly so, but it doesn’t take technology to make a revolution. Only we workers can do that. – Editors.

Where Farage won (2024)

From the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

A leprous body rots not from the head but from the extremities: this applies also to our diseased body politic. Starved of the lifeblood of economic activity, England’s forgotten peripheral towns have become necrotic tissue, an economically irrelevant expulsion of the disabled, the unemployed, the retired, along with a sufficient garrison of minimum-wage staff to run the tills and dole counters and care homes: the underpaid and the undermourned.

Welcome to Clacton

A decision was made, long ago, to arrange matters in this way, first under Thatcher and then under New Labour and subsequent governments. The focus would be the City, and such industries that were most profitable to export such as the arms trade, and the rest of the nation’s economy that was ill-served by this focus would be maintained by subsidy and the dole, paid with largesse from profits. Then once this policy was in place the other shoe dropped and the subsidy was withdrawn. A wildly unequal society emerged where a regional working class possessing only the ability to labour found no one who would buy, and no one who would make up the difference. There is a profitable economic axis from London to Liverpool with industry either side of the line: agricultural labour in the shires; but at the periphery there is despair brought and compounded by the arrival of uneconomic migrants who can no longer afford to live alongside those who still have wages.

These inward migrants of course blame immigrants of a darker hue for their troubles. A classic case of a post-hoc argument, whereby cheap labour arriving in the economic centres coinciding with the displacement of English workers is treated as a cause. And there is a certain reason: arriving workers are simply better skilled and less organised, commanding lower wages and conditions for a given productivity. Instead of insisting on integrating new arrivals, as workers in the core are wont to do, they blame them for their troubles. Which is why they can be found abusing lifeboat crews and hapless seaborne migrants, resisting the immigrant wave across the South Coast like so many latter-day Cnuts.

This is the classic view, but there are significant mitigations. For example, during the Corbyn years the Clacton Labour branch as least trebled in size, hardly a sign of universal right-wing opinion. In local politics, Clacton has one Labour ward, largely of local people who work in the town. Jaywick, which one would think the most viscerally aggrieved, returned two independents, at least one of which is of a left-Labour bent and a former Labour councillor. The trend for much of the town, however, is for Conservative councillors in the business town wards but pro-Brexit independents dominating most of the just-scraping-by residential areas of the town, who are by and large expelled Conservatives. Further out, like some political chromatography experiment, the countryside is Tory, the villages are LibDem, and neighbouring Harwich and Dovercourt, being a working town, is pretty solidly Labour. So there’s nothing in the sea air that necessarily drives the Reform/UKIP vote. Inland, political views normalise. And where there is local economic activity, politics arguably fall almost as Left as one can expect south of the Wash. Brexit and anti-immigrant politics express themselves partially across the dispossessed, but mainly the displaced from London, and mainly east London, who are arguably the plague carriers, self-employed traders such as plumbers but also East End retirees migrating down the A12 corridor, bringing the knuckle-dragging Alf Garnett politics of the I’m-all-right-Jack boomer generation. Meanwhile the spouses of such workers are under pressure to, well, espouse their spouses’ views for the sake of a quiet life.

Electoral evidence

This picture tends to be supported by the electoral evidence. It is hard to recall, fifteen years on, how significant the BNP was in the 2010 general election: the year the Clacton constituency was formed, now separated from the more industrial (and Labour) Harwich. They received 4.6 percent in Clacton, but in the East End of London Nick Griffin achieved a record 14.6 percent of the Barking vote. Dagenham and Rainham was their second most successful at 11.2 percent; Thurrock at 7.9 percent, Upminster at 6.4 percent, Basildon 5.6 percent, Romford at 5.2 percent, all kept their deposits. The BNP imploded after 2010, but the hate they had inhabited and encouraged lingered, and as the years passed this rough beast shuffled along the road towards Clacton, waiting to be reborn.

If we look at the Clacton general election results we find the following. In 2010 the Tories won 53 percent, Labour 25 percent, LibDem 12.9 percent, BNP 4.6 percent, and ‘Tendring First’ (a grouping expelled from the Conservatives) 2.5 percent. In 2014 the Conservative MP, Douglas Carswell, switched to UKIP and forced a by-election which he won with 59.7 percent, with Conservative Giles Watling on 24.6, and Labour with 11.2 percent. The LibDems had collapsed to 1.3 percent. In 2015 Carswell kept the seat for UKIP with 44.4 percent as opposed to 36.7 percent for the Conservative candidate. In 2017 Carswell didn’t stand, Watling secured 61.2 percent for the Conservatives, but Labour got 25.2 percent with a local (now Green) Left candidate, and UKIP trailed at 7.6 percent with a new candidate. In 2019 Watling gained 72.3 percent of the vote, Labour 15.5 percent under a centre-right unknown (the initial Left candidate was smeared as an antisemite and replaced by head office), the LibDems won 5.8 percent, the Greens creeping up on 2.8 percent. Which brings us to the current 2024 result with Farage on 46.2 percent for Reform, Watling for the Conservatives on 27.9 percent, a foisted (but later withdrawn for apparently being too charismatic!) Labour candidate on 16.2 percent, and the LibDems on 4.4 percent and Greens on 4.2 percent. There was an additional 1 percent for two disgruntled UKIPpers standing as independents: one had been the Reform candidate before Farage thrust him aside.

So, wading through the data, the right-wing vote in Clacton (Con, UKIP, Reform, BNP, Independent) was 61 percent in 2010 but has been steady at about 75 percent since. There was a pulse of personal and UKIP support in 2014 and 2015 for Carswell’s candidacy which may have helped drive further into the rump vote for a few extra percent. 2017 was left-Labour’s year under Corbyn, gaining fully 10 percent from the Conservative vote, but sinking back later to an average 15 percent. And in 2024 the right-wing vote was arguably ‘average’ for the seat. Farage didn’t take votes off Labour, LibDem or Green (who increased their vote by 50 percent with left-Labour votes), he simply split the Conservative vote, doing much worse than Carswell did for UKIP a decade ago. Both right and left have radicalised, the right to Reform and the left to the Greens, while a 10 percent vote, rootless since the LibDem’s self-immolation, has swung to Carswell, to Corbyn, and now straddles LibDem and Green.

How did he do it?

As a Clacton resident, I can speak to how the trick was done. Money. They rented prime town space for a campaign office, just round the corner from the Wetherspoons pub. There were the Reform leaflets. Then there were several ‘personal communications’ from supposed private citizens, like a doctor begging us to vote Reform to save the NHS. As well as enormous and copious signage, there were A-frame flatbed lorries with mobile signs, at least one with a massive TV display, and also parked on prominent bridges, across not just the constituency but the surrounding council area. And of course the celebrity factor of Farage’s name. And, as Channel 4 discovered, racists from London come down to spread their filth door to door.

In conclusion, there hasn’t been a shift to the right. There has been a shift rightwards within the right (and, within the left, leftwards), while 10 percent of voters will vote for anything that looks fresh. While Thatcher defeated the National Front by stealing their policies, so the far right has metastasised within the Conservatives and Farage is holding what now amounts to an internal debate. But whereas many Northern towns can see the same right-wing voters emerge in the same place decades later, London has flung its white, politically dispossessed to the coastal periphery. In the end, Clacton’s political change may depend on probate as a resentful post-war generation, that watched the Empire fall and colonials progress to equals, and then shuffled to the coast to retire, shuffles a little further off.

Clactonian

Cooking the Books: Digital pound, what’s that? (2023)

The Cooking the Books column from the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘New deputy governor will oversee project to mint digital pound’, was how the Times (2 August) reported the appointment of Sarah Breeden as a deputy governor of the Bank of England. Here’s the Bank’s description of what is envisaged:

‘The digital pound would be a new type of money issued by the Bank of England for everyone to use for day-to-day spending. You would be able to use it in-store or online to make payments. This type of money is known as a central bank digital currency (CBDC). […] The digital pound would be denominated in sterling and its value would be stable, just like banknotes. £10 in digital pounds would always have the same value as a £10 banknote. […] The digital pound would be like an electronic version of the banknotes issued by the Bank of England. […] The way that you would access digital pounds would be through a digital wallet that would be provided by a private company’ (Digital Pound ).

The press statement issued by the Treasury and the Bank in February announcing a consultation on the subject explained that the Bank would provide the infrastructure in the form of a ‘core ledger’; the private companies would offer people digital wallets through smartphones or smart cards (tinyurl.com/4nkjxvpt).

Money, as Marx pointed out in section 4 of chapter 1 of Capital on ‘The Fetishism of Commodities’, is not a physical thing but the expression of a social relation. He wrote of ‘a definite social relation between men that assumes… the fantastic form of a relation between things’. The relation between people he had in mind was between producers of different articles for sale who could only be brought into relation with each other via the market, which required a means of exchange. Today this includes the relation between buyers and sellers of labour power.

The physical thing in which this social relation is expressed can, and has, varied. In pre-capitalist times it had been, among other things, cows and cowrie shells but historically the most important form that money has taken has been the precious metals gold and silver. However, even these haven’t expressed money for many years now, having been replaced by intrinsically valueless paper notes and cheap metal coins issued by the state. We are currently in a period where these are being increasingly replaced by a computer code. The coming of central bank digital money would complete this change in the form (though not the substance) of money.

You can see the logic, from a capitalist point of view, of doing something like this. Payments these days are increasingly made electronically anyway, by transfers to and between banks. However, the ‘libertarian’ right are up in arms about it. Soon after the government’s announcement Nigel Farage tweeted on 7 February: ‘Central Bank Digital Currencies will give the state total control over our lives. This must be resisted’. In the recent by-elections, the Reform Party, the successor to the Brexit Party, promised to ‘oppose a cashless society and central bank digital currency’ while Piers Corbyn shouted ‘KEEP CASH!’ Yet another conspiracy theory.

The government is saying that the new form of money would not replace cash but that notes and coins would continue to be issued. What it would replace is bank transfers. Which would make it even clearer that banks only circulate money. They don’t create it. Only a central bank like the Bank of England can do that.

The socialist retort to Piers Corbyn might be ‘Smash Cash’, or, rather, change the social relation of which money is an expression by making productive resources commonly owned and democratically controlled. Money would then vanish into thin air.

Making fans for Nigel? (2022)

Book Review from the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

One Party After Another. By Michael Crick. Simon & Schuster. 2022. £25

Ex-Newsnight journalist Michael Crick has something of a reputation as a hatchet-job specialist, though this book is more well-rounded than expected. It is helped by the fact that Crick is a good writer and so the book is an entertaining read, well-researched and salacious perhaps in equal measure. He portrays Nigel Farage as ‘the great disrupter’ and as the arch-UK populist of his time, and there can be little doubt about that aspect of Farage’s life.

Crick argues that Farage was like this from the outset, from his apparent teenage dalliance while at Dulwich College with the National Front, straight to his high-octane career as a City metals commodity trader (bypassing university, which never interested him). It was the decision in 1990 by the then Conservative government to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) that impelled Farage to take politics seriously – he had previously been a sometime member of the Tory Party but had also on one occasion voted Green.

Joining the Anti-Federalist League set up by Dr Alan Sked, he was eventually to take it over – pretty ruthlessly according to Crick – and turn it into what became UKIP. Crick does a good job of chronicling the turbulence at the centre of Farage’s life since (the multiple affairs, the serious drinking culture, the near-death experiences including the plane crash on election day in 2010) which has mirrored in some ways the turbulence of his political career. Hence the title One Party After Another – Farage has been UKIP leader and then resigned only to return so many times it is genuinely difficult to keep count, and of course then went on to form the Brexit Party and latterly Reform UK. He is portrayed as a veritable ‘force of nature’ who bizarrely couples a genuine talent for communication with a profound difficulty in working with other people.

His ultimate legacy is Brexit of course, though while Crick doesn’t underplay the role of Johnson, Gove, Cummings and their ilk in this, he does rather underplay the role of the tabloid press, who arguably enjoyed their last hurrah in promoting the greatest irrelevance ever purveyed to the British working class. And all with the help of arriviste businessmen and hedge fund managers who bankrolled the operation both before and after the 2016 referendum. Crick outlines how this campaign then paved the way for the 2019 General Election, the collapse of Labour’s ‘Red Wall’ and the eventual UK withdrawal from the EU. Crick says:

‘For a hundred years the Labour Party had depended on class loyalty. People voted Labour because they’d always voted Labour, and their families and friends all voted Labour too… In the 2016 referendum, Labour officially urged people to vote Remain, yet in hundreds of traditional working-class Labour seats, especially in the Midlands and the North, Labour supporters and trade unionists voted emphatically to leave the EU. The 2016 referendum burst the rising dam of resentment in such places that Labour no longer delivered for poor people like them with insecure, lowly paid jobs, and that under Blair, Miliband and Corbyn, Labour had become just another London party for wealthy middle-class types who’d gone to university’ (p.547).

In some ways, it’s difficult to disagree and Farage’s Brexit Party rubbed salt in this wound. But for what? Crick argues that part of Farage’s legacy is that it may be difficult for the Labour Party to ever form a government on its own again. But as people are now discovering with a likely pending recession (according to the Bank of England) and because Brexit has helped propel price rises to their greatest rate in decades, Brexit was just another illusion as a supposed solution to people’s problems. In fact, not only wasn’t it the answer, it wasn’t even asking the right question.

Farage was a key player in creating one of the biggest political apparitions of the last century and as time passes this is likely to become clearer. As a result, what seems like a career that had a massive impact now (Crick rates him as one of the five most significant political leaders of the last 50 years) might look rather differently when those voters in the Red Wall seats notice their lives haven’t actually changed for the better after all. Meanwhile, both UKIP and Reform UK have struggled to find a new purpose and given the political trajectories of both Northern Ireland and Scotland currently, it might not be too long before one of the greatest political ironies of all time emerges when UKIP has to rename itself ‘EWIP’.

Farage is currently marooned at GB News, which ever more seems to exist as being purely and simply his very own ‘news’ channel. Here he continues his rather repulsive dalliance with fellow egomaniac Donald Trump together with his campaign against men in little boats crossing the channel at great peril, effectively an unwanted latter-day Dunkirk without white faces. A man of the people until the end, clearly.

DAP

Proper Gander: Making A Drama Out Of A Crisis (2019)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

The great big mess Parliament’s made of leaving the EU wasn’t what the ‘Vote Leave’ campaign told us it would be like. If you believed the slogan on the side of that bus, it would be as simple as transferring the £350 million apparently sent to the EU each week into the NHS’s needy coffers. That particular stunt was one among many examples of how the campaign strategists tried to shape opinion in the run-up to June 2016’s referendum. The manoeuvrings of the Vote Leave campaign team were recently dramatised in Channel 4’s revealing one-off Brexit: The Uncivil War.

Vote Leave’s chief strategist, and the drama’s central character, is Dominic Cummings. His CV includes running projects to stop Britain adopting the Euro and ratifying the EU’s constitution, and being Michael Gove’s main adviser during his unpopular stint as Tory Secretary of State for Education. Despite having a key role in shaping the Leave campaign, Cummings hasn’t been widely heard of, or attracted the attention of many journalists or commentators until now. Instead, the faces of the Leave campaign have been those of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, who are hardly glowing examples of humanity. In the drama, Cummings is portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays him as the usual Cumberbatch brooding maverick-type with an annoying amount of self confidence. He stands on tables, he cycles on the pavement, and he talks in blunt, opinionated aphorisms.

His manner makes him disliked among the ranks of white-haired, old-fashioned Leave-supporting MPs, not least for his boasts about wanting the campaign to look like ‘an insurgence against the establishment’. They needn’t worry about him doing anything to really challenge the status quo, but they should have realised he’s much savvier than them about how political campaigns are run in the 21st century. So, his approach utilises the latest social media tools, with its messages carefully honed from research and data.

Cummings wants his campaign to focus on ‘cost and control’. He’s reluctant to bring immigration too much into the pitch, saying there’s no need to target people who are against immigration as they’re already likely to back leaving the EU. He also thinks that Farage’s influence will lose them support, but sidekick Matthew Elliott suggests that Farage and his ilk can do the ‘heavy lifting’ on bringing xenophobia into the debate so ‘Vote Leave’ can keep their hands clean on the issue. The drama makes much of the lightbulb moment when Cummings thinks up the slogan ‘Take Back Control’, saying it appeals to the desire to regain what’s supposedly been lost. He wants leaving the EU to be a seen as proudly returning to the correct order, rather than bumbling into the unknown, as it’s turned out to be.

Also featured in the drama is Craig Oliver (David Cameron’s Communications Director), the Remain campaign’s main strategist. He’s depicted in a more reasonable, positive way than Cummings, albeit exasperated by his own campaign’s uphill struggle. Chatting with Cummings down the pub, Oliver says his campaign has had to counter a ‘slow drip drip drip of fear and hate’ he attributes to immigration. He tells Cummings that the Leave campaign ‘feeds a toxic culture’ of mistrust, while Cummings tells Oliver that his type has dominated politics for decades, and ‘change is exciting’. In an earlier scene, Cummings had recognised that (capitalist) referenda reduce complicated issues to crude binaries and sharp divisions in opinions. He doesn’t seem to realise, though, that his approach to the campaign exacerbated this.

Both sides of the campaign are shown to have a patronising, estranged attitude towards the general public. To them, each person is just a potential vote, there to be moulded into believing enough to cast it. The campaign teams ‘segment and target’ groups of people, such as ‘Ardent Internationalists’: degree-educated, gay marriage-supporting Remainers, and ‘EU Hostiles’ who are 98 percent white and retired, each comprising 11 percent of voters. Dividing up people into groups goes much deeper and more detailed than this, though. Our online activities leave behind a wealth of information about us, and algorithms are the mysterious driving force behind how this data gets processed, correlating who we are with what we prefer. Specialist software gathers information on websites visited, or tweets retweeted, or Facebook groups joined, cross-references it with each other and builds up a vast database of who is interested in what. Millions of Facebook users had their data surreptitiously mined by the disgraced consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, and sold on to Vote Leave. This information was then used by the campaign to target particular adverts to particular groups of people. So, anyone who clicked on a specially-designed Facebook post about Turkey, for example, would be sent the version of a Vote Leave advert which they will be most receptive to. The idea is that you’ll convince someone of something easier if you exploit its connections with something they already agree with. Barack Obama’s presidential election campaign led the way with this strategy, apparently.

Reducing people’s preferences to data is a simplistic way of relating to others, and when used to shape opinion, is manipulative and demeaning. The campaign teams are more comfortable treating the electorate as statistics than dealing with them as real people. As Brexit: The Uncivil War shows, modern political campaigning is about using the latest technology in an insidious, cynical way and glossing over complex issues. Why risk trying to change opinion through balanced, reasoned debate when you have tools like targeted adverts and a big red bus plastered with an extravagant claim?

Mike Foster

Brexit, the Nation-state and the Workers (2016)

From the October 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Over two months has now passed since the British people cast their vote on the UK’s  membership of the European Union. While the mass-participatory process of the referendum and aspects of the arguments used by either side were of some interest to socialists (rising above the norm of what now passes for politics), in the main the whole affair and its outcome were disappointing for us.

A question that was framed as having supreme importance (‘a once in a generation chance to set the future course of the country’) was yet again a debate about which particular version or configuration of capitalism should be selected. In this case, the specific question of whether a trans-national system of capitalism or a more traditional national organisation of capitalism, should be chosen.

Given that the vast majority of the electorate are members of the working class, that the turnout was relatively high and the vote was close to 50/50, it broadly means just under half the workers of Britain wanted to retain the current system while the other part wanted to return to the society that they either remembered or imagined existed before 1973. Socialists have no fundamental interest on adjudicating on this question. Nonetheless, Brexit will undoubtedly remain the dominant issue of British politics for years to come and it does shed some light on the current nature of the interaction between the state, the workers and the capitalists.

Split in the capitalist class

Although the referendum itself and the debate in the run-up to it were undoubtedly exercises in popular democracy, it wasn’t the authentic democracy that we espouse. The real struggle and motivation for the referendum was a conflict between two sections of the British capitalist class. It is true that many people attended public meetings, participated in radio phone-ins, went along to TV debates and engaged in on-line discussion forums. Most people genuinely believed in the views they shared with friends or colleagues.

However these ideas and arguments that they deployed were reflective of a wider climate that had been developing over the previous few decades. An underlying controversy has been growing in British capitalism at least since the late 1980s about the merits of Britain’s membership of the EU. Initially the manifestation of this was limited to the formation of small pressure groups associated with the Conservative Party and the occasional critical column in the right-wing press but Euro-scepticism soon spread into wider society. The very large capitalist companies have always supported the concept of the European Union. These multinationals can invest tens of billions of euros and accept regulations in return for a secure investment climate. They are not really concerned whether right-of-centre or left-of-centre governments are in power in any individual country across the many nations of Europe; all that counts is that there is a broadly similar, pro-business climate in these countries. The EU as the organisational framework in which this macro-policy is implemented is attractive to them.

However, some capitalists in Britain do not subscribe to this arrangement. These include small businesses mainly producing goods or supplying services for the local home market. They are concerned with day-to-day struggles to make and keep profits and for whom the regulations from Brussels are burdensome. Also there are large capitalist enterprises whose dominant trade in goods or services are to destinations outside the EU. It’s worth noting that the significant financial supporters of the Leave side came from these sectors of the economy (finance, retail, catering, publishing) where any benefits of EU membership are marginal.

Mendacity and exaggeration

Such a split in the capitalist class complicates the task of government. In most cases there is a consensual view amongst the capitalist class about the major economic questions of the day and the government (whatever its nominal persuasion) implements policies in line with this view with the justification to the public that it is necessary to promote and ensure prosperity. When a section of the capitalist class comes to a view that is divergent from more mainstream elements of the class (such as in this case the need to leave the EU) an alternative approach to directly liaising with government must be employed. Then enough voters (the vast majority being workers) must be encouraged to believe that the proposed policy needs to be implemented and they must be used to place pressure  on the government. In that sense the power that the universal franchise gives to workers is exploited. Given that the Leave side of capitalism were victorious, this leads to an analysis of the arguments that they deployed in the debate and why they ultimately proved successful.

First of all it has to be said that the Leave campaign told some whopping lies to get their vote out. The Remain side weren’t far behind in their overblown doom-laden predictions of economic catastrophe that would befall Britain after exit. Of course mendacity and exaggeration are part and parcel of political campaigns under capitalism and in fact one of the means by which workers are continually inveigled into supporting the continuation of the capitalist system election after election. The two main planks of the Leave campaign were the loss of democracy in being part of the EU and the inability to control levels of immigration from European countries into the UK (although the large EU membership fee was also a complaint). These two issues were summed up by their effective slogan of urging people to ‘take back control’.

The Leave side were appealing to two disparate target audiences with this message – firstly, patriotic and traditionalist people (more likely Tory voters) who never accepted the (slight) diminution of national sovereignty that was a requirement of EU membership. As socialists we say the argument about a lack of democracy is fallacious. Even in the context of political structures within capitalist states, the UK is one of the few democracies with both an unelected head of state and unelected second chamber. It has a vote counting system (first past the post) that typically creates huge discrepancies between votes received by any particular party and the number of MPs elected. In any case, real power within capitalism does not entirely lie with elected MPs. And of course the bureaucrats in Brussels, administering Euro-wide capitalism have no more or less a mandate than the bureaucrats in Whitehall handling exclusively British capitalism.

The second audience could be described as being more Labour-oriented in inclination. For example, the media reported disquiet in this constituency (‘working class communities’ as they were referred to) arising from globalisation and a feeling of being ‘left behind’. Capitalism has internationalised itself, which was always inevitable, but many workers are used to capitalism organised around the nation-state. Up to 2016, Britain may well have had the fastest growing economy in Europe, creating more jobs than the rest of EU but many of these came with low pay and zero hour contracts. One salient feature of this ‘new economy’ is that many workers (and not just those at the bottom of the income scale) have no prospect of being able to buy such a basic item of human need as a house. The Leave side cannily exploited this dissatisfaction by giving the impression that in the UK there were only a certain number of houses that could be built, a certain number of school places available, a certain number of appointments at GP surgeries and that every extra foreigner reduced the availability of these to the home citizen. The Leave campaign unscrupulously played on this sense of insecurity and anger to appeal to national instincts among workers. In that sense, many workers voted on national rather than class lines (as indeed they unfortunately do in most elections in most countries).

Right-wing populism

While many of the small left-wing groups encouraged a Leave vote (whereas socialists want an end to all versions of capitalism whether nationally based or globally organised), the main thrust of the Leave side had all the time-honoured hallmarks of right wing populism. This was most clearly manifested by the political party UKIP being the main grass-roots organisation of the Brexiteers, led by Nigel Farage. Farage is a former Tory and in his espousal of anti-immigrant solutions to the problems of modern society, especially during insecure times, has had many predecessors in European history. Currently Donald Trump is ploughing a similar furrow in the United States trying to exploit the disenchantment of a subset of American workers (white, blue collar) with the failures of capitalism to provide them with a decent life. In normal conditions, the Labour Party might have successfully countered the atavistic appeal of UKIP but one important side-effect of the campaign (that has become a front page story in its aftermath) concerns the travails of the Labour Party.

For a hundred years it has declared itself the voice of unionised workers and their families, initially seeking to transform the capitalist system, then settling for attempting to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism before finally under the Blair/Brown leadership being a straightforward manager of the system virtually indistinguishable from the rival Tory party. This complete capitulation to capitalism and abandonment of even the rhetoric of change has produced a wide swathe of disillusioned former Labour voters, many of whom were enticed into switching to UKIP. It is true that Jeremy Corbyn, as the current leader, has injected some excitement into progressive politics. However his election last year in some ways only emphasises the erratic and rudderless state of the Labour Party; going from Blair, arguably its most right-wing leader in history now to its most left-wing leader, and within a relatively short time frame.

Ultimately the outcome of the vote was surprising and generally unwanted by the leaders of global capitalism. Since the end of the Second World War, the trend has been towards a globalised organisation of capitalism driven by the major international companies (the top tier of capitalism). Of course as with all socio-economic patterns, this trend does not proceed smoothly but occurs in fits and starts though the underlying pattern is clearly evident.

Will Brexit be looked back on as a one-off oddity peculiar to Britain or as a harbinger of things to come, marking a departure from this particular trend of globalisation? In any case over the years, capitalism has proved itself an adaptable system and ultimately will have no serious problem accommodating Britain outside the EU.

It can be difficult to extract good news for socialists when commenting on the current affairs of capitalism. From a socialist perspective, we deplore the fact that the Leave campaign deliberately tapped into chauvinistic feelings in workers to obtain their desired outcome. Conversely what was encouraging was that many workers ignored the dire warnings of the usual paid lobbyists of capitalism (the Bank of England, the OECD, the CBI, etc.) in arriving at their decision. It shows that workers are not always the political sheep that some political strategists assume. Finally, though, it’s only when workers across the world discard all notions that countries and national identities are a central part of the political landscape that real changes can be made to all our lives.

Kevin Cronin

Greasy Pole: Cameron’s Selections (2017)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Driven out by Brexit from 10 Downing Street and then from the Tory benches in Parliament David Cameron will be written into history through his talent for composing a welter of vacuous, discreditable phrases which did nothing to avert his decline. An early example of this was his assurance that with him in charge there would be ‘no more Punch and Judy politics’. No more performances in the House of Commons when his reluctance to deal appropriately with some genuine problems of the people – the workers, the children, the voters – outside served only to provoke the Tory hooligan benches into a storm of bellows and false laughter designed to blank out all discussion. In 2010 there was his trumpeted conviction that ‘. . . if you trust people and give them more power and control over their lives, they become stronger, and society becomes stronger too, and I believe profoundly that we are all in this together’. Those final six words were to be repeatedly quoted as evidence of his enduring duplicity.  There was not even a hint that he feared his government would be bitterly remembered for repressive, impoverishing measures such as the Bedroom Tax as the cause of so many desperately homeless people. Or the maliciously sprouting figures of those who need their local Food Bank to sustain them. And the degradation of JAM –  the masses who, conforming to all the demands of the  politicians, are compelled to exist on the basis of Just About Managing – in other words through the charity of  Next To Nothing.

A List

The Conservatives won the 2015 election, in the process wiping out the Coalition Lib Dems, through gaining a majority of seats which encouraged Cameron, as only the second Prime Minister to have increased their majority while in power (triumphantly, the first example was of course Thatcher) to proclaim that they were ‘…on the brink of something special’ – which in reality was a government of false claims and pledges. And among the forecasts of a frighteningly successful future for them was the strategy of building a refashioned party more in tune with this vision. This was the origin of the so-called A List, an idea which had been in discussion since Cameron became leader in 2005. A few months later a party committee set out to reduce the 500 hopeful candidates to between 100 and 150 on the assumption that this was the way to ensure a party which would be free of the prejudices which had hampered its prospects in the past.

Portillo

The response among party members was varied. There was approval from Michael Portillo, on the grounds that at the time the Tories did not have a lot to lose as ‘. . . much of the Parliamentary Party is reactionary and unattractive to voters’. But Portillo was once the ‘darling of the Right’, in the days when he was MP at first for Enfield Southgate and then Kensington and Chelsea and a well-fancied candidate for the Party leadership. After a series of frustrated ambitions he resigned from Parliament in 2005 and turned to an alternative type of entertainment by dressing in flashy trousers and presenting TV programmes mournfully quoting from Bradshaw’s Handbook of railway history. The other side of the debate was scathingly represented by Ann Widdecombe, another ex-MP (and in fact no less than a Minister of Prisons) who condemned the List as ‘an insult to women’ which was ‘storing up huge problems for the future’. But Widdecombe’s TV experience was rather different to Portillo’s because there was no chance of her influencing opinion by her few but wretchedly clumsy appearances as a contestant in Strictly Come Dancing.

Broxtowe

But there were enough hopefuls in the List to persuade Cameron that it had introduced some hope and fertility into the Party. Andrea Leadsom, Priti Patel and Amber Rudd are among those who wriggled their way onto the Front Bench although not all of them have been impressive enough to avoid the conclusion that their selection was more a matter of appeasing Cameron than impressing the voters. One of them has been Anna Soubry, who sits for Broxtowe in Nottinghamshire. This is a marginal seat, re-created in 1983 and held by the Tories until it swung to Labour in the Blair landslide of 1997. Soubry won it in 2010 by a majority of 389, which she increased in 2015 to 4287. She went through the process familiar to precariously elected A Listers in that she held a series of minor governmental posts until she chose to return to the Back Benches in July 2016, by which time she had done enough to justify the opinion of Sam Carr in the Independent that she had‘ . . . a record of unusually free speech’, among a few other embarrassments. During her original attempt at election, for Gedling in Nottingham in 2005, she declared herself to be ‘ashamed’ at living in that city because of what she perceived as its serious reputation for crime. During her early time as an MP she was embarrassed to be informed that she had employed a party member who campaigned for the return of slavery.

Farage

In the EU Referendum she came out as a firm supporter of the Remain side, which may have persuaded her to deal with Nigel Farage as an opponent who ‘ . . . looked like somebody has put their finger up his bottom and he really rather likes it’ – an assessment she later excused as a ‘light hearted comment’. Which could not have applied to her rather less colourful opinion of Alex Salmond whose participation in government was a prospect which provoked ‘absolute horror’ in her. (Salmond rated her as ‘demented’ and advised her to ‘behave yourself woman'). So there can be no surprise at the record of Soubry’s favourite causes. She supports the Trident submarine renewal; developing private treatment rather than the NHS; university tuition fees; the deployment of British Armed forces abroad in theatres of war such as Iraq and Afghanistan . . .  No doubt David Cameron was proud of originating the idea of the A List as evidence of his place in history as an enterprising and dynamic leader. But we have had enough of such conceits. It would be better if in such matters we began to work our way through the alphabet.

Ivan