Socialist Sonnet No. 235: Reformation (2026)

 From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

Reformation

Maintaining ‘Socialism’ as watchword

Can seem unlikely, when realpolitik

Is succumbing to the three card trick

Of the slight of hand dealer in absurd

Demagogy, when the popular vote

Is placed on populist blandishments,

Falsified promises; reason relents

Its influence. Without considered thought

Reform, however tempting it appears,

Remains a mistaken gamble to make,

Especially with the future as the stake:

Gamblers regret can last for years and years.

There’s none as asleep as the mistaken,

Being so, so difficult to awaken.

D. A.

Myths of race and nation (2026)

From the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Nationalism teaches you to hate people you never met and to take pride in accomplishments you had no part in.’ So said the American comedian, author and actor, Doug Stanhope. Given that this dictum appears to state something obvious and irrefutable, we might expect it to be widely accepted and so for nationalism to get overwhelmingly rejected by the large-brained creatures that we are. Yet we know that this is not what happens. Almost wherever you look in the world, nationalism is alive and well, and in fact, with the rise of populism, an increasing number of people seem to be openly espousing it together with its brother-in-arms, racism.

Why? The simplest explanation is to be found in the word ‘insecurity’. The system of society that dominates the world – capitalism – by its very nature makes most of those who live under it feel insecure. It forces the overwhelming majority of us to sell our energies to an employer for a wage or salary throughout most of our lives. And we never quite know whether the living provided by that wage or salary will continue, become precarious or be thrown into disarray by the uncontrollable market forces that govern the capitalist system. The instability this generates makes most of us easy prey to the idea, often spread or at least bolstered by governments (or by those waiting in the wings who would like to govern), that people who don’t appear ‘native’ to a particular country are somehow to blame for that insecurity. The idea prevails among many that it is those non-natives that cause it, that make things go wrong by taking ‘our’ jobs, consuming ‘our’ resources, and even committing most acts of criminality.

Of course such a notion is not just recent. It has been present throughout the history of capitalism and indeed, despite its apparent surge via ugly right-wing populism in recent times, it has actually been far worse in past times. In the recent news has been the outcry over the alleged blatant anti-semitism exhibited by Nigel Farage in his youth, and all Jewish people will know that in those years such anti-semitism was widespread and almost ‘normal’. This writer has a clear memory of such incidents in his own school years, for example an occasion when in front of the whole of the class one pupil turned to someone and loudly addressed him as a ‘big fat yid’. No one batted an eyelid then. Now they certainly would. In fact such an incident would be far less likely to happen at all today or, if it did, would cause significant consternation and lead to consequences for the person responsible.

Of course, even worse humiliation and discrimination was suffered by people of colour in those years. Older generations sometimes talk about the open, unabated, taken-for-granted racism they suffered. In a recent BBC Profile programme, for example, about the black screen and stage actor David Harewood, we heard of him being chased through the streets by skinheads and bricks being thrown through the family’s windows. Such open racism is clearly far less virulent today. And even if the clock may seem to be turning backwards in certain ways and in certain countries, the fact is that not long ago the US had a black president, it currently has a Moslem mayor in its major city, and in recent years in the UK too, many major political figures have ethnic minority backgrounds, including the current leader of the Conservative Party. All this would have seemed unimaginable just 40-50 years ago.

Further evidence of this increased acceptance of ‘others’ and diminution of racism is to be found in the UK’s most popular sport, football. People from a great diversity of backgrounds play together on the pitch and are often idolized by supporters, themselves often of diverse origins and skin shades, who mingle together in the stands. Again this is something new compared to previous years when teams had few foreign or black players and football fans from ethnic minorities even avoided going to matches for fear of abuse or attack. One incident among others that this writer remembers from the 1980s (so a relatively short time ago) was being in the crowd at a match between Manchester United and Norwich City and hearing the one black player on the pitch, Ruel Fox, repeatedly having the word ‘coonie’ shouted at him – something that no one seemed to find unusual. One could almost rule out such a scenario today.

Overall, therefore, despite the fact that those with racist notions and tendencies may feel emboldened by phenomena such as the Brexit vote, the rise of Reform UK, the election of Donald Trump, and the emergence in Europe of right-wing populist parties and governments, it remains very much the exception rather than the norm for racism and nationalism to be expressed crudely and publicly. Such expression tends to exist rather in the echo chambers of social media. That is not of course to say that the divide and rule weapons of nationalism and racism are likely to be put aside by those governing – or aiming to govern – a system that is by its very nature riven with insecurity and instability. It serves the purpose of distracting attention from the real reason for that insecurity and instability, which is the division of society into two classes – on the one hand the minority who own most of the wealth (the capitalist class) and on the other the overwhelming majority who own little and can only survive by selling their energies for a wage or salary (the working class). Divide and rule will only be transcended when the members of the majority class decide to act collectively and democratically to win the political power which is needed to shift society from production for the profit of the few to production for the needs of all. Then we will be free of the divisions of ‘race’ and of ‘nation’ that afflict humans across the planet. Then we will be able to focus on what unites rather than divides us.

Howard Moss

Another New Year party (2026)

From the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Following the turn of the year I am pleased to announce the emergence of a new political force, Barnsley Social Action. As I was an enthusiastic biker back in the ‘60s BSA seems appropriate. The focus for this exciting political initiative will be to fight for Barnsley’s independence from the overpowering political behemoth that is Westminster and the regional dominance of Yorkshire. ‘Let the Tykes Take Power!’

I am, of course, appreciative of the Socialist Standard for so willingly providing an initial platform for this, my ambitious project. The first task will be to ensure that no small boats will be redirected from the south coast to sail up the Dearne.

At this point I consider it most important to state without equivocation that all of the above is utter nonsense. Actually such a statement surely can’t have been necessary. Who would set up a political party on such a narrow (minded) basis?

Ex-Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe, now sitting as an independent, has – at time of writing – launched Great Yarmouth First (GYF) with the stated aim of promoting the specific interests of his constituency. This is surely a basic requirement of any MP, whatever the party affiliation, within the considerable limitations imposed by the requirements of capitalism.

Lowe claims 500 residents have already signed up and he has personally funded the fees for all these new members for a year. Quite how committed this cohort of supporters are may well become apparent in twelve months when renewal time comes around.

The specific political purpose of GYF is according to Lowe, ‘completely focused on doing what is right for Great Yarmouth, not what is right for Norwich or London’. This new party is needed because not only have national governments let people down, ‘the rot extends to local government as well’.

How fortunate for the citizens of Great Yarmouth such an immaculate political messiah was chosen by the electorate at the last election. However, his vision does extend beyond the locally myopic to the rest of the country. Not only does he head GYF, Lowe also leads Restore Britain. The headline aims of this organisation are low taxes, small state, slash immigration, restore Christian principles, fight wokery and so it goes on…and on.

The multi-millionaire Lowe is quoted in the Great Yarmouth Mercury saying ‘We are building a powerful local movement that will fight for local priorities. No petty national politics, just local politics for local people’. This statement seems to stand in contradiction to the obviously national and nationalist Restore Britain. The basic premise of both of Lowe’s groups is to play up, and on, prejudices unfortunately held by too many people looking for simple solutions to their many political, economic and social problems.

While it might seem an organisation such as Great Yarmouth First must be of limited political significance, it does reflect an underlying feature of more widespread popular discourse. A competitor for Barnsley Social Action would be The Yorkshire Party. The website of the would-be governors of Britain’s largest county refers to things socialists recognise, such as: ‘This isn’t about left or right’, ‘Our rivers shouldn’t be profit streams for offshore companies’, ‘Subsidiarity – decisions made as close to the people as possible’, ‘Dignity – respect for every person and community’, ‘Community – working together’, ‘Cooperation – shared goals…’

There is also mention of values such as fairer, stronger and more democratic, though specifically in Yorkshire. Most of what is offered is fairly standard social democratic fare that Labour, Liberal Democrat and even reasonable Conservative (if that’s not too much of an oxymoron) supporters could subscribe to.

It certainly doesn’t read as being rabidly explicitly nationalistic, except, of course, its focus is narrowly on Yorkshire. As often with local political groupings The Yorkshire Party seems fuelled by resentment of a perceived national, for which read Westminster, bias against the county, especially in economic terms.

There is certainly good reason for people to feel economically aggrieved, to rail against the failings of the NHS, to be very much aware of the democratic deficit whereby voting, locally and nationally, changes very little for the better. However justified these feelings, however worthy the aspirations, none of this applies specifically to Yorkshire alone. The social democratic style solutions, along with a Yorkshire parliament to enact them, are aspirations that can never be realised even if the entire White Rose vote went to this party.

The fundamental problem that every party, local, regional or national, cannot overcome is capitalism. No matter how sincere or well intentioned, the scope for positive political action is severely curtailed by market economics, the undeniable drive to realise profits. Even such an explicit adherent to capitalism as former Prime Minister Liz Truss could be evicted from Number 10 Downing Street within about a month and a half of taking up residence. She wasn’t even proposing some wildly radical social reforms. Just showing her Conservative intentions as ill thought-out and economically inimical to market interests was enough.

A perfect example of the democratic deficit in that Truss was toppled from power not by the ballot box, but, in effect, the workings of the market. She wasn’t even in power long enough for a conspiracy to be formulated against her. Capitalism doesn’t really need conspiracies or coups d’état. If bond prices fall or share prices tumble so do the politicians or policies that are perceived as being the cause. Certainly no requirement for an election.

So for Great Yarmouth First, The Yorkshire Party – you can also read the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru or similar, Reform UK, the seemingly shambolic Your Party, The Green Party or the three main Westminster parties. Because whatever their political differences they are all the same in one essential feature. They can only act as far as capitalism and its imperatives allow.

The achievement of real change would mean an economic arrangement in which the means of production are held in common so ensure people’s needs are met uninhibited by the profit motive, in a truly democratic society in which people freely contribute without any requirement for money. In a word, socialism. Such is only achievable on a worldwide basis. Of course, people will always relate to their localities, but they have no need of being located within national boundaries. A time when communities were fairly static are long passed.

There is a deal of archaeological evidence showing that even in prehistory Neolithic trading links between widely separated communities existed, when the concept of national boundaries didn’t exist and wouldn’t for thousands of years. Indeed, from the earliest days of the emergence of humankind migration has been a feature. The idea of being defined by location in nation states is but a brief moment in our collective history. So the prospect of a worldwide cooperative community cannot be dismissed as fanciful or a contradiction of human nature.

But people have to want this, have to be actively involved in working through the details, accepting there can be no leader or party that can do it for them.

Until then there is always Barnsley Social Action – no one from Doncaster need apply.

Dave Alton

Popularity (2025)

From the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just how popular is populism? Taking the media, social and broadcast, at face value it appears to be the surging political trend nationally and internationally. In Britain, Reform UK are feted as the almost certain next government in waiting. Every small rubber dinghy that braves the Channel crossing to disgorge its cargo of migrants on the Anglo-Saxon shore counts as a clutch of increased votes for the party. Their accommodation frequently features, on the evening news, as the epicentre of patriotic outrage.

For a while that stalwart British icon, the Turkish Saint George, had his banner raised to flutter from many a lamppost. Or it was draped around the shoulders of angry demonstrators traipsing through the streets of the capital to gather and be harangued by demagogues. Certainly those marchers, like most people, have a great deal to be angry about. Lives blighted by inadequate incomes, rising prices, serious failings in health and social services and a growing housing crisis.

Governments come and go, and nothing substantially alters, except often for the worse. Even a desperate grab for a major change, with its promise of significant transformation such as Brexit, quickly proves an illusion, its glister merely fool’s gold.

Despite being leading purveyors of this political vacuity in its previous incarnation as UKIP, Reform UK is presently gaining popularity as the prospective saviour of the nation. They have, of course, the advantage of novelty, not yet marked by failure of governance. Reform UK’s impressive showing in May’s council elections has been tarnished somewhat through a number of resignations by, expulsions and suspensions of, some of their new councillors. There is evidence from a previous seeming breakthrough in local government of similar serious failings.

The British National Party in 2003 made what appeared to be a breakthrough in council elections. This was seen at the time as a harbinger of further success come elections for metropolitan districts, the European parliament and the mayor of London. This expectation was largely frustrated in 2004. Although the BNP did gain 3 council seats in Epping Forest, scene of recent unpleasantness at the Bell Hotel, it lost 7 of its 8 seats in Burnley, but gained one in Bradford. This proved the peak of its success.

Reform UK have certainly exceeded this precedent and might represent the triumph of populism come the next general election. This then invites the question of how popular populism has to be to succeed.

In the 2024 general election Labour took 33.7 percent of the UK vote (34.6 per cent in GB) to acquire an overall majority of 172. In other words the democratic process as it now is elected a government with a large majority even though around 66 percent of those who actually voted didn’t vote for it.

The last electoral showing by a party boasting a popular surge was in 2019. The Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn had witnessed a large influx of new members to become by far the largest party, at a time when party memberships were declining and had been for a number of years. Despite this Labour accrued just 32.2 percent of the UK vote, noticeably down from Corbyn’s previous effort in 2017. Labour was popular enough to attract those new members, but not to become elected, falling 11 percent short of the Conservative vote on 43.6 percent.

Becoming a government does not require a party to be popular enough to win an outright majority of the vote. Indeed, in the multi-party system we now seem to have, somewhere around a third of votes might actually be enough as Labour showed last time. This then is presumably Reform UK’s target. Should it achieve that target it is a moot point as to how long that populism lasts when it is confronted with administering all the problems and contradictions capitalism continually generates. No party to date deliberately sets out to generally make people’s lives worse. Yet they inevitably are forced into enacting policies that are detrimental to workers when the economic imperatives of capitalism demand it. As Britain’s shortest serving Prime Minister, Liz Truss, quickly found out, economic mismanagement does not even require democratic process to be removed from office.

Populism is commonly associated with right-wing politicians and parties, but the left also make attempts at popular appeal. Following on from boosting Labour Party membership, Jeremy Corbyn has become the focus around which Your Party is being promoted. A loose conglomeration of disaffected Labourites and left-wing reformists, Your Party intends to become to the Labour Party what Reform UK is to the Tories. However, there are signs it is already failing before it has had the chance to present itself to the electorate.

Adnan Hussain, MP for Blackburn, has parted company with Your Party citing a toxic culture of infighting, jostling for position and factional competition. Also, there have been questions raised concerning access to, and deployment of, £800,000 raised in donations. Those who have had any experience of left-wing politics will recognise these as common features figuring in previous incarnations of popular front alliances of left Labour and Trotskyist ‘Socialist’ groups. Even if, however unlikely it presently seems, Your Party was to succeed in replacing Labour as the left alternative elected to govern the country, it would still face the fundamental constraints capitalism imposes on administrations.

A simple example: the Brexit referendum had two possible results, but only one outcome. A vote to stay in the EU meant capitalism, while a vote to leave meant capitalism. So it is with parliamentary elections; whichever party is popularly voted for – left, right or centre – capitalism remains the determining feature of society.

In a sense, all contending political parties are populist. They vie with each other for the popular vote, that 35 to 40 percent that unlocks the door to 10 Downing Street. All parties that is, bar one, the Socialist Party of Great Britain. There is no aspiration, not even a far-fetched one, to be invited by the monarch to form a government. This is not lack of ambition. Indeed the Socialist Party’s ambition goes way beyond the severely circumscribed aspirations of all the others.

Only the working people of the world acting in concert to abolish capitalism and replace it with socialism can see the realisation of the aims of the Socialist Party. The common democratic ownership of the means of wealth creation to establish a moneyless society dedicated to meeting everyone’s needs without the imperative to make profits. The election of a popular parliament dedicated to serving the emergence of such a society would be an important element in that process. But it wouldn’t be the Socialist Party sitting on the front benches as there would be no front benches.

The socialist cause certainly needs much, much greater popularity than it presently has. That may involve socialist candidates standing in elections, with a view to raising awareness, provoking voters to think beyond the present political offerings.

Socialists do court popularity, yet not for themselves or even their party, but for socialism itself. No matter how unpopular that idea presently is it still remains, and will remain, the only alternative for people who want to take control and refashion society to meet their needs.

D. A.

Rights – a movable feast (2025)

From the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, recently announced that her Party will take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights if they win the next election. A big ‘if’ obviously, but, in stating at the same time that such a move was ‘necessary to protect our borders, our veterans, and our citizens’, it’s clear that what she was trying to do was to steal the clothes of her dangerous competitor on the right wing of British capitalist politics, Reform UK. She was giving a nod towards the extreme nationalism that currently seems rampant and gets expressed most virulently in the call to ‘stop the boats’.

Whether any such move would actually curb immigration is of course open to question, but, if what would seem to be the most overarching of rights – human rights – can be removed at a stroke by a government with a parliamentary majority, is there anything permanent or consistent in the notion of rights at all?

How many rights?

We certainly hear much noise about rights, both from those who want to do away with or weaken them and from others who oppose their removal or weakening. What kind of rights are we talking about? Well, to give a few examples, there are workers’ rights, pension rights, women’s rights, property rights, gay rights, the right to free speech, the right to family life, the right to privacy, the right to strike, the right to peaceful protest, the right to education, the right to a fair trial, and so on. A short time ago I found myself attending a lecture given by the Older Persons’ Commissioner for Wales on the subject of ‘How we move from principles to practice to make rights real for older people’. There are also some ‘rights’ which, while often talked about in the past, little is heard of these days – for instance, ‘the right to work’ or ‘ the right to rest and holiday’. There are also some bizarre ‘twists’ on the rights agenda, such as ‘the right to bear arms’ (usually with reference to the US), and ‘the rights of the unborn child’ (insisted on by opponents of abortion).

Looking at the broad historical context, rights are a feature of the fact that the system we live under has found ways of becoming more benign and less repressive. The overriding reason for this has been the perception by governments and wealth owners that those in society who have to work for a wage or salary to survive are more likely to do that readily and acceptingly and at the same time be more productive and efficient in their work if their lives are made not altogether uncomfortable. And indeed one of the effects of having the various ‘rights’ conferred has been to make us feel more comfortable in our position as wage slaves. But it took a long time. Most of today’s ‘rights’ would have been considered unthinkable not just in pre-modern times, where the ‘divine right of kings’ prevailed, but even in the early years of industrialisation and capitalist development. In the nineteenth century, for example, talk of, say, ‘women’s rights’ or the ‘right to education’ or ‘pension rights’ would have been unlikely to say the least. And, until well into the 20th century, even the notion of ‘workers’ rights’ was much contested, and only in recent times has ‘gay rights’ become part of the vocabulary of English. This kind of thing is of course still very much the case in many ‘less developed’ parts of the world where dictatorial or repressive regimes hold sway. Examples such as North Korea, Myanmar, China, Belarus and some countries in Africa and the Middle East come to mind.

Different ‘rights’ in different places

But, despite the existence of many kinds of ‘rights’ in most of Europe and North America, it would be mistaken to regard these as necessarily permanent or consistent features. They can easily be watered down or removed by the governments that oversee the system of production for profit and buying and selling that we live in (ie, capitalism), if it seems to them to be in the interest of the continued smooth running of that system to do that. A British government deciding to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, as the Tory leader has promised to do if her Party comes to power, would be an example of that. A recent example of this actually happening has been the watering down of the right to peaceful protest by the ban on demonstrations by supporters of the Palestine Action group. As for ‘the right to strike’, it still exists of course, but it has been chipped away at by various different governments, with the overall effect of making striking today markedly more difficult for workers than at times in the past. I have testified to another instance of the watering down of ‘rights’ in my own place of work, where the contracts signed by employees have moved from specifying a ‘maximum’ of 35 hours as the standard working week in recognition of ‘The European Working Time Directive’, to now specifying a working week of ‘at least’ 35 hours.

And there can also be striking differences between the most economically advanced countries in the rights they accord. The most ‘generous’ in this domain tend to be the Scandinavian countries, while in the United States, despite its being the hub of world capitalism, ‘workers’ rights’, for instance, are all but non-existent. To give an example, in Sweden parents are eligible for up to 480 days of paid parental leave from their employment, a policy driven by the idea that children well looked after by their parents are likely to be more productive and better socially integrated later in life when they enter ‘the world of work’. In the US, where a different ethic (more of a dog-eat-dog one) prevails, there is no statutory ‘right’ to paid leave, such being entirely at the employer’s discretion. This can create situations, as one commentator has put it, where ‘American parents scramble back to work days after giving birth’. To add to this, employment practice in the US regards work as a voluntary contract which can be dissolved at any time by either party without the mandatory right to redundancy pay for the employee.

A slippery concept

The reality is that ‘rights’ (like reforms) are very much a movable feast easily or not so easily granted but then rowed back on as convenient and also sometimes differing drastically even from one economically advanced country to another. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserted everyone’s right to an adequate standard of living, including the right to food, public services and social security. But everyone knows that, in a world where people may be poorly paid, unemployed or homeless, this is no more than an unattainable wish list. What price such people’s right to an ‘adequate standard of living’ or their ‘property rights’? Again, while very few would disagree that people should have the right to free speech and the right to be free from arbitrary arrest or imprisonment, how does that square with the reality of a system where the accumulation of wealth for the already wealthy few dominates and allows authoritarian regimes (Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, etc) to fly in the face of that?

In the kind of world socialists campaign to see established – marketless, moneyless, wageless, leaderless, and based on voluntary work, democratic organisation and free access to all goods and services – the slippery concept that is ‘rights’ will not enter into the equation. Instead, in a classless society of human freedom, needs, both practical and social, will be satisfied as a matter of course. Above all, the productive machinery of society and the goods and services it produces will belong not to one class, but to everyone as an automatic and inalienable ‘right’.

Howard Moss

Festival of thieves (1982)

From the October 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Approaching from a distance it seemed as if it could have been a meeting of the Youth section of the Bulgarian Communist Party: flags attached to poles were held high by blank-faced patriots who clapped occasionally with all the passion of a fly drowning in a glass of water; on the makeshift platform stood grey-suited, makeshift leaders whose faces seemed to blend in to the empty slogans which were written on the solitary blue banner; the hum of conformity was in the air and, approaching, it became clear that the three hundred or so people assembled in Hyde Park stood beneath a banner which announced that this was a “RALLY FOR FREEDOM”.

Freedom, eh? Certainly not the Bulgarian CP, then. On closer inspection they might have been a regiment of newly-recruited Boy Scouts — or perhaps a crowd of extras waiting around for a re-make of Mary Poppins. But then came that all too familiar clapping sound — that sound which tells you that “Britain" or "Our Boys” or “Long Live Maggie" have been mentioned — the sound of non-verbal consent and complacency which is Nature’s little way of telling us that Conservatives are around. There is no mistaking the Tory clap; your reporter had stumbled upon a Young Conservatives’ rally — a rally for freedom, no less — freedom under capitalism. The Houdinis of British politics were about to perform live — well, almost.

The flags were upside-down Union Jacks and their holders were young Tories who had come to cheer their leaders who had come to tell them that there could be no sweeter freedom than that which capitalism offers. An exiled Hungarian general was brought on to frighten the crowd with horror stories about “Hungarian Communism”. “We must keep the flame of democracy burning” he said (by which he did not mean that we should burn down the House of Lords) and “the Communists must be opposed with all our might". The crowd applauded heartily, not realising that by “Communism” the general meant a society based on authoritarian government, impotent trade unions, intense militarism and national chauvinism (all of which are features of state capitalist Russia and all of which also happen to be Tory objectives) and that by “freedom” he meant the right of the rich and powerful 10 per cent to exploit the propertyless 90 per cent. The deception of rhetoric is well disguised by a long, hard Tory clap.

Next comedian to mount the podium was Rhodes Boyson, government minister for indoctrinating the wage slaves. Ex-headmaster Boyson spoke with all the arrogance of a village idiot who has become drunk on a pint of shandy, thus acquiring the confidence to open his mouth as if he knew what he was talking about. He referred to the Berlin Wall and the need for respect and said that meetings like this could certainly not take place in Red Square. He was right about the last point — in Moscow they are able to assemble even more deluded patriots in their cynical attempts to manipulate wage slaves in the name of “freedom". The crowd clapped Rhodes Boyson until they were exhausted (for some of them this was the most energy they’d expended in months) and fifteen seconds after his speech ended the next contestant to be Tory Twit of the Year ascended the platform.

The third man was concerned about “defence”, by which he meant attack, and felt that fifth columnists were at work in our schools, by which he meant that it was terrible that not all teachers are in favour of telling children that when they grow up they must go out and kill people. He said that “we need to get back to teaching the basic values of civilisation; we need to explain . . .” “Yes, the basic values of sending workers to kill each other in your commercial wars" interjected a bearded heckler in the front row. He was soon surrounded by three or four Tory stewards w ho wore Union Jack shirts and looked as if they had failed the intelligence test allowing them to join the National Front. No questions allowed at Young Conservatives meetings: so that’s what they mean by “freedom”..

The star speaker was John Biggs-Davison who announced that the theme of the rally could be summed up in one word which was . . . um . . . er (reaching for his prompt cards) “Ah yes, self-determination — that's what we stand for. The right of people to live as they choose to live." He failed to mention that this “right" would be denied to the vast majority of the population who produce the wealth of society. Capitalism offers workers no more than the right to live as we can afford lo live. The freedom to be impoverished — to be alienated from ownership and control over the world we live in — is no freedom at all.

In the subway leading to Hyde Park there used to be a couple of old con-men who obtained fivers from gullible Americans by performing the three-card trick. One day they were arrested and now they are conning tourists in a different area of London. But what of the Tory con-men for whom freedom means exploitation, liberty means inequality and peace means oppression? Trading on the political ignorance of the exploited class, these people have police protection while they perform the political three-card trick. But nothing will defend the advocates of capitalism against the genuine case for social freedom. Be they Tory. SDP or Labour, the misleaders of the working class will not succeed forever.

Steve Coleman

An Alternative Reich? (2025)

Book Review from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Alt Reich. By Nafeez Ahmed. Byline Books 2024. £12.99

This is a book about the challenge to conventional liberal bourgeois democracy posed by a network of far-right populists, ‘nativists’ and neo-nazis that appear to be in the ascendancy in many parts of the world, including the United States. They locate society’s problems not in the inability of the market economy to provide for people’s physical and psychological needs, but in the inability of the established systems of political democracy to deliver ’change’ to those who appear disgruntled with it.

Ahmed is a good researcher and he traces the way in which a relatively small number of multi-billionaires have set up or founded think tanks and pressure groups that have spread these far-right viewpoints over decades: most notably organisations like the Henry Jackson Society and the Heritage Foundation. Their reach has been deep and profound – into the heart of the media, and politically into the Trump administration, the Boris Johnson and Truss governments, and others in Western Europe and beyond.

The phenomenon is undoubtedly real and it is chronicled in detail here, but like others out to make a distinctive point, he can sometimes overstate his case. In the Conclusion, he seems to recognise this himself, saying:

‘The fascism of the Alt Reich is … a contradictory amalgamation of shifting white supremacism, extreme nativism and anti-globalist nationalist corporatism, which inherently pines for deregulated private capital to be backed by an authoritarian state reliant on unitary military power merged with techno-corporate autocracy. This is hardly a coherent worldview; rather it is an evolving mishmash of contradictory and competing worldviews’ (p.379).

Indeed, and this can be seen by the way in which some of its major players (like Trump and Musk) can fall out so easily, or why Reform UK has become a by-word for political resignation in more ways than one.

That the market fails to deliver on people’s expectations of it (and seems to have been doing so increasingly over the last 20 or so years) is at the root of why this rather incoherent set of viewpoints has gained such traction . . . the popular narrative is that all governments fail to deliver and they’re fundamentally all the same. As Mark Twain said, history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes and so it’s almost a minor variation of the old anarchist slogan about the futility of elections, in that whoever you vote for the government always gets back in.

And allied to all this there are worrying undercurrents – the blaming of immigrants as a source of society’s problems in a way not seen since the 1970s, an unshakeable belief in capitalism as a system but not its obvious and inevitable consequences, and a leader-loving authoritarianism that underpins a not-so-sneaking admiration for dictatorial abominations like Putin, Orban and Modi.

So Ahmed’s book is worth reading for these reasons alone. It’s just worth bearing in mind that the fascism of which he writes is not really the fascism of the 1920s and 30s, and while the ‘Alt Reich’ book title is a clever one it is, in this respect, not entirely accurate. Another caveat is that it seems odd that a book of this nature (around 400 pages) does not have an index. Perhaps it’s just the sort of left-field, unconventional, liberal approach the alt-reich themselves would decry. But without having an obsession with tradition and procedure, it might just, actually, have been rather useful . . .

DAP

Away with all national flags! (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bertrand Russell once said ‘Patriots always talk of dying for their country but never of killing for their country’. What, then, should we make of a recent poll carried out by the Daily Express (30 August) that found ‘Nearly three-quarters of Brits unwilling to fight for UK in the event of war’?

If the Express is to be believed, a majority sensibly enough have lost their appetite to fight for ‘their’ country in a war. One should be wary of jumping to hasty conclusions, however. Sadly, unwillingness to ‘fight for the UK’ does not necessarily translate into a decline of patriotism. It doesn’t seem to have dampened nationalist fervour.

In August 2025, a high-profile and, seemingly, widely supported grassroots campaign was launched, dubbed ‘Operation Raise the Colours’, ostensibly to ‘promote patriotism’ by flying flags from lamp-posts or painting the Saint George Cross onto mini-roundabouts.

However, one would have to be politically naïve not to see that the ulterior purpose behind all the flag-waving protests accompanying this bizarre fad has been to promote a far-right agenda. The frankly racist targeting of asylum seekers holed up in migrant centres exemplifies this.

This development is notable for the sheer amount of misinformation it has generated – whether we are talking about the costs of the asylum system, the lavish lifestyle asylum seekers are alleged to enjoy (they get a measly £7 a day), or the actual numbers involved (the UK has below the European Union average for asylum applications).

According to the ‘Hope not Hate’ group, the campaign´s organiser is Andrew Currien (AKA Andy Saxon), an ally of the far-right activist, Tommy Robinson. He was formerly in the English Defence League and now runs security for the far-right party, Britain First.

One theory that has been doing the rounds is that the ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ campaign is a reaction to the widespread display of Palestinian flags at protests against what is happening in Gaza. Whatever the case, as far as socialists are concerned, we would far prefer to see no national flags displayed anywhere. In the words of the novelist, Arundhati Roy: ‘Flags are bits of coloured cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.’

Shrink-wrapping people´s minds means, among other things, instilling in them the absurd notion that they possess something called a ’country’ in the first instance. It is not just the usual suspects that are actively engaged in this indoctrination process – the state, the church, the media and so on. In its own way too, the Left, when it talks of ‘nationalising the commanding heights of industry’ or glorifies ‘national liberation struggles’ against ‘imperialism’, reinforces a nationalist mindset and by extension, capitalism. To refer to the Communist Manifesto: ‘The workingmen have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got’.

To those who imagine that ‘Britain’ is ‘their’ country, one might well ask – in what meaningful sense is this true? According to one source, ‘just 0.3% of the population – 160,000 families – own two-thirds of the country, and less than 1% of the population owns 70% of the land’.

Also in Britain, according to a report from the Office for National Statistics (2018), foreign-owned businesses accounted for 13.4 percent of total UK company assets, while foreign buyers account for over 40 percent of London’s prime property market. Most ‘British’ workers don’t even own their own homes, let alone this abstraction called ‘Britain’. A Google Earth photo reveals no borders whatsoever that might delineate those particular spatial units we choose to call ‘countries’. All we see are mountains, forests, farmland, urban settlements, rolling on as far as the eye can see and in every conceivable direction.

Borders only exist in our minds – in our imagination. They are nothing more than social conventions. There is nothing ‘natural’ about them whatsoever, any more than the nation-states they spatially delineate. Our capacity to imagine is part of what makes us human beings. As John Lennon´s song famously put it, ‘Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do.’

Today, the great majority of us are little more than prisoners with shopping rights in this open prison that is called capitalism. In this society, the industrial and natural resources of our planet are monopolised by a super-rich, tiny parasite class. It is in their economic interests –not ours – that wars are fought.

At present, there are literally dozens of armed conflicts going on in the world – from localised insurgencies to full-scale wars. To what end? Where is the sense in workers killing other workers just like them – complete strangers with whom they have absolutely no reason to quarrel – just to ensure one piece of tatty cloth, as opposed to another, gets to be raised on the town hall´s flagpole?

Whatever tatty cloth is raised is not going to affect the basic situation of working class people. The same goes in wars. For example, whether in Ukraine it’s a Ukrainian or, alternatively, a Russian rag on the end of a pole. There are no winners in a war (apart from maybe the undertakers and the weapons manufacturers). Workers on both sides will have lost, having succumbed to the death cult of nationalism, their battered bodies draped in the symbol of what is so detestable about the society they currently live in.

Robin Cox

Flagging politics (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘We just kind of thought, why don’t we just go put up some flags down one road, just because we think it’d look nice, and we just made the area look better.’ The words of Joseph Moulton, interviewed by YorkMix Radio. Moulton is credited by YorkMix as the instigator of the widespread appearance of Union and St. George flags along the highways and byways of that city. He conceded that the action was rather more than merely cosmetic.

His political rationale stems from a family background in the mining industry of South Yorkshire, communities, ‘…targeted and destroyed by the government through the closing of communal spaces, high tax on pubs and meeting places, stuff like that’. Self-employed, running websites and online businesses, having been mentored by an unnamed someone in the defence and private security business, Moulton has worked as an independent contractor in that sector. This appears to indicate a vague political awareness of social and economic problems, endemic in capitalist society, filtered through a sector directly involved in profiting from the widespread instability of volatile international politics.

Rather than second-guessing his own politics by attributing far-right motivation to his actions, his flagging campaign rather reflects a confused and superficial political viewpoint: identifying widespread problems without any serious understanding of the root cause. Raising the flag up the local lampposts became the summer trend nationally for a while. This was a popular movement, perhaps inspired by Reform UK, or by even more sinister right-wing groups, a widespread outbreak of xenophobia maybe, people outraged by boatloads of migrants tipping up on the south coast, with governments of either major party unable to repel them. Certainly, along with lamppost-hoisted flags were those carried into battle with the state outside asylum-seeker hotels.

Tripadvisor describes The Bell Hotel, Epping: ‘Plenty of parking and good location… Sadly a lot of the hotel is run down and in need of an urgent refurbishment.’ All the more so, most likely, having been laid siege to by the aggressively discontented. At first the local state authority, via a court ruling, declared the hotel must be closed, without any apparent consideration of what would then happen to those housed in its less than salubrious facilities. Then a legal volte-face resulting in more outraged British (or were they English?) patriots turning up at the hotel, along with counter-demonstrators.

August is often referred to by the news media as the ‘silly season’ with parliament on leave and frequently no British news worth reporting. Not in 2025 though as the battle of Epping featured night after night on broadcasts. The focus was a single asylum seeker arrested and charged with several offences including the sexual assault of a 14 year old girl. He was subsequently convicted. Other asylum seekers housed at The Bell made clear not only their abhorrence of his actions, but their overall dislike of the man for his general behaviour, which they had had to put up with prior to his arrest.

There were obviously political actors at work quite prepared to further exploit the 14 year old victim for their own ends, as was the case with the tragic victims in Southport the previous year. The disaffected meanwhile allowed themselves to become an unreasonable, unreasoning mob, most of whom are usually rational, sociable people in their everyday circumstances, however trying those might be.

As Joseph Moulton identified in South Yorkshire, people nationally and internationally are having to deal with social and economic stresses which politicians will not, or more likely, cannot deal with. Pre-election promises all too readily made are rapidly reneged on.

When people lose faith in politics it doesn’t mean they have no beliefs at all; rather, they can come to believe in almost any ill-founded solutions whose appeal is immediate, without consideration of consequences, and without any analysis of why circumstances are as they are. They identify only symptoms, with no attempt to find causes. It is analgesic politics. It is all too easy to deride those protesting outside asylum hotels. Undoubtedly there will be quite a mix of motives amongst them. Some may well have far-right tendencies, while others genuinely feel threatened and insecure. Many seem to be of the ‘precariat’ strata of the wider working class, those whose immediate economic circumstances make their lives an almost constant struggle. Feelings of vulnerability heighten perceptions of threat and a sense of unfairness. ‘My son can’t get a house, but they get them given!’ is one comment by a protester to a TV news interviewer.

An effect of economic and social pressures is to narrow people’s focus. They don’t look for reasons why refugees risk the treacherous Channel crossing in what are little more than dinghies. The ultimate cause of their own and refugees’ ills lies outside their awareness. The wider world with all manner of disorders caused by capitalism merely enforces a sense of lack of control, a feeling of near powerlessness. So, rather than aspiring to abolish borders the reaction is to make them more clearly defined and secure.

When those who are occupying the moral high ground stage their counter-protests they unintentionally heighten the sense amongst the demonstrators that their concerns are simply being dismissed as those of racist bigots. So when the flag is run up the flagpole (lamppost) people start to salute it and it becomes a trend. When interviewed, some of the more active flag raisers insist their motives are positive, to do with pride and community.

Understandable to a point amidst all the national and international uncertainties. It just makes the task of socialists all the more difficult. As with reformism, it diverts thinking away from what really needs to be done. The media has given the impression that virtually the whole country has been decked out with flags. Online reports carry photographs of lamppost after lamppost sporting the colours. However, the accompanying article reveals that it’s only the same couple of streets being shown. The rest of the town/city being undraped, just as Joseph Moulton indicated in his interview with YorkMix Radio. A few flags, however ill or well-intentioned, will, like closing borders and asylum hotels, change nothing. Within a few weeks, as autumn weather takes hold, those flags will become rain sodden, tattered and faded, hanging limply. An appropriate symbol of capitalist Britain.

D.A.

Editorial: The fruits of reformism’s failures (2025)

Editorial from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Saturday 13 September an estimated 110-150,000 people demonstrated on the streets of central London waving Union and St. George flags to ‘Unite the Kingdom’. This followed a campaign of painting the cross of St. George on roundabouts and bridges and attaching the flag to lampposts which no car driver or bus traveller could have failed to notice. Meanwhile the Reform UK party tops polls of voting intentions and is winning local council by-elections up and down the country.

Some, like the organisers of the much smaller — only some 5,000 — counter-demonstration ‘against fascist Tommy Robinson and his Far Right supporters’, see it as the beginning of the rise of a fascist movement that needs to ‘smashed’. Certainly, the organisers were demagogic rabble-rousers peddling prejudice and hate, starting with Robinson himself. Some are indeed fascists. Others seem to have been Christian Nationalists as evidenced by some demonstrators waving crosses. But that’s the organisers.

Most of those taking part in the demonstration can’t reliably be called fascists, but are people who had been misled into believing that immigrants and asylum-seekers are somehow being given priority over people born here. They aren’t, but the rabble-rousers encourage the mistaken belief that they are. The socialist response is not to smash such demonstrations but to argue all the more forcefully why all workers, native or immigrant, should unite to end the capitalist system that treats them both as second class.

What we are witnessing is not fascism, which arguably belongs to a different era and different political conditions, but what political philosophers have called ‘nativism’ — the view that the established population of a state should be given priority over incomers. ‘Nativism’ is one end of the spectrum of nationalism, distinguished by insisting that measures should be taken against immigrants, from making it difficult for them to become citizens to stopping more coming to deporting those who have come.

Part of the socialist case against trying to reform capitalism to make it work for all is that the rise of reactionary parties — including in its day fascism — is a result of the inevitable failure of reformist politics and parties to do this. Those excluded from the ownership and control of society feel (correctly) that their problems are not being solved and (mistakenly) expect politicians to solve them. Traditionally either the Conservative Party or the Labour Party have been elected to do this. At the moment, the Tories are still discredited by the failure and antics of the previous government while the Labour Party, given a chance after last year’s election, has very quickly — more quickly than would normally be expected —become discredited too. This has left an opening for a different set of politicians to bid to have a go.

Reform UK, too, will fail as the problems are not caused by what governments do or don’t do but by the workings of the capitalist economic system, which both causes the problems and prevents their solution. The excluded majority are treated as second class because under capitalism making profits for those who own the resources on which society depends comes first. As long as capitalism persists, and as long as people put up with it, the needs of the excluded majority will come second — and some of that majority will be duped by far-right demagogues.

Socialist Sonnet No. 203: Uniting the Kingdom, by George (2025)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog 

 

                                      Uniting the Kingdom, by George

 Fearful laidly wyrm, gruesome millipede

Of grotesque proportions. Its poisonous

Venom paralyses reason in case

Some humane diversion just might succeed

In making it pause for thought and realise

Its determined course, the slippery slope

It’s slithering down, is one without hope,

A pathway of misdirection and lies.

Leaders look down from swish crystal towers,

Concealing their contempt for this creature,

Certain tomorrow’s headlines will feature

Their agendas, strengthening their powers.

Meanwhile the rough beast, having been reborn,

Slouches towards Paris, Berlin and London.

 D. A.

Major Douglas in Alberta (1935)

From the August 1935 issue of the Socialist Standard

An interesting situation has arisen in Alberta with the acceptance by Major Douglas of post as adviser to the Government. The Government in the province is in the hands of the Party known as the United Farmers of Alberta, whose hold on the electorate has been seriously undermined by the rapid growth of a local Social Credit League run by a Mr. Aberhart. Fearful of being defeated at the next elections the Government, in the words of the Canadian correspondent of the Economist, “hit upon the idea of importing Major Douglas himself, the parent of Social Credit, to confound Mr. Aberhart” (Economist, June 29th).

Major Douglas and Mr. Aberhart have said some harsh things about each other, and each claims that his particular scheme is the genuine article, so that it seems highly probable that the move of the Alberta Government will succeed in splitting the Social Credit vote. Major Douglas is not giving his aid for nothing. He is to have a “generous fee.” According to the Vanguard (Toronto, June 1st, 1935) he gets a retaining fee of 5,000 dollars and a further payment of 2,000 dollars for every visit to Alberta.

He has recommended the formation of a coalition Government which shall seek a mandate for the following four “fundamental objectives” (Economist, June 29th).

A drastic reduction of taxation, particularly upon property.

A maintenance dividend as of right, probably small at first, and graded so as to be at the maximum after middle age.

Measures designed to produce a low price level within the Province with adequate remuneration to the producer and trader.

Development of internal resources based upon “physical capacity rather than upon financial considerations.”

It will be noticed that these objectives might be accepted easily by any Liberal-Labour Party anywhere. Where they are definite they are in line with capitalism. Where they are vague they are good vote-catching devices.

What is important about the Alberta episode is that it exposes the real nature of the Douglasite gospel. Major Douglas and his followers are most emphatic that their scheme is not inflation of the currency, but that, in fact, is precisely what it is. The whole Douglas theory is based on an ancient myth about a supposed deficiency of purchasing power. There is no such deficiency, and consequently the issue of Social Credit in the form of the payment of an allowance to all citizens, since it is not to be provided by increased taxation, could only be done by inflating the currency and thus causing the price level to rise. Major Douglas is most anxious to deny this because experiences of inflation in France, Germany and elsewhere have shown how useless that is except for the problems of certain sections of the capitalist class. Now we find him acting as adviser to the United Farmers of Alberta, one of the planks of whose programme, adopted at a conference two or three years ago (see Canadian Annual Review, 1933), is inflation of the currency to bring the dollar down to the level of the wheat-producing foreign competitors of the Alberta farmers! Like certain English economists who have been prepared to give conditional support to the Douglas scheme, the Alberta farmers will be willing to do so simply because it involves currency inflation which they believe will help to reduce the burden of their indebtedness to the Canadian banks, mortgage companies and insurance companies.

Douglas – Defender of Capitalism

Before leaving Major Douglas it may be worthwhile to remind those misguided workers who support him how essentially capitalistic is his movement. He is himself an unrepentant anti-Socialist. In his Monopoly of Credit (Chapman & Hall, 1931) he describes the relationship between capitalism and workers as “a perfectly equitable arrangement” (p. 34) and in his Draft Social Credit Scheme for Scotland he emphasised that there was to be no ” interference with existing ownerships, so called,” and there would continue to be profits, wages and capitalist ownership (see appendix to Social Credit, revised edition, 1933, Eyre & Spottiswoode). He constantly puts forward the absurd theory – but a very useful one to the industrial and commercial capitalists in hoodwinking the workers – that capitalists and workers are both exploited and impoverished by their common enemy, the banker. One of the journals which espouses his cause, the New English Weekly, tells us (May 26th, 1932) that Douglasism could be introduced only under two forms of government

“A dictatorship … or a Patriotic largely and predominantly composed ‘Tory aristocrats’…”

On January 26th, 1933, the same paper had the following frank admission about the aims of the Douglas movement:

“… if by capitalism is understood the system of competitive production for profit, it can be said that the required change would not involve its destruction but only its regulation.”

Edgar Hardcastle

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.