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The capitalists’ preferred party of rule is the Tory party, which has been in office three years out of every four for the last century. Whenever the Tories became too unpopular and levels of social unrest started to rise, the Labour party second eleven was fielded to preserve the status quo and keep the workers in line. Yet now we are witnessing the dramatic transformation of Reform into a possible party of government. Why?
Reform: the third eleven?
The old system is crumbling. Both parties have been so exposed that workers are increasingly turning away from electoral politics altogether. Many who have clung to the idea of the ‘lesser of two evils’ are losing faith in British parliamentarism and realising the truth of the old joke: If voting changed anything, they’d abolish it.
Within a year of taking office, Labour’s prospects of winning another election look negligible. Keir Starmer’s cabinet has carried on ‘business as usual’ by overseeing imperialist war, brutal austerity and vicious repression of all dissent. And after 17 years of severe cutbacks (to pay off debt taken on to bail out banks in 2008 and corporations in 2020), this is not going down well.
The desire to save money by hitting the poor and vulnerable (instead of abolishing offshore havens and other mechanisms whereby billionaire elites hide wealth and avoid tax) is even more unpopular in light of the government’s bottomless purse for waging aggressive and genocidal wars. Labour is determined to spend billions more to “keep Ukraine in the fight”, adding more bodies to the 1.7 million who have already died in a war that was entirely planned and provoked by the west, and from which British financiers hope to benefit. The continued participation of British forces in the Gaza genocide – and harsh repression of those who speak out against that criminality – have been the last straw for many.
With Labour and Tory both drained of credibility, the ruling class has been training up a new reserve team, which is now ready to be brought into play. Reform’s role is to promote the well-worn narrative that all the ills presently plaguing our lives have been caused by “uncontrolled migration”. In promoting this fairy tale, Farage has the unstinting cooperation of the corporate media, which give huge coverage to him, his party and his divisive rhetoric.
Workers v workers
Contrary to the ‘small boats’ hysteria, most migrants come to Britain legally, filling skilled roles for which employers prefer not to pay proper rates. The real crime against the working class is not that there are immigrant workers, but that our trade union leaders have allowed a two-tier system of employment to grow and to flourish.
Those workers who come as ‘illegals’ offer even more benefits to the exploiters. They are often kept in slave conditions, with passports confiscated and wages set at pennies per hour, unable to speak out for fear of state retribution. Not only are they ignored by the trade unions, the state doesn’t even have to pay any medical or other social costs for them.
The real demand we should be making is not for deportation but that our trade unions start doing their job: no acceptance of two-tier labour forces – not within an individual company and not within the country! The unions should be in the forefront of busting the sites where ‘illegal’ migrants are sweated and of demanding decent pay, conditions and representation for every single worker in Britain.
The scapegoating of refugees and asylum seekers takes hypocrisy and cynicism to new levels. Forced to flee conditions of military and economic devastation unleashed on their homelands by imperialist predation, they arrive to find themselves stuck in what are effectively open prisons. Their asylum claims are not processed, they are barred from working, and they are kept on a starvation ‘allowance’ while the corporate landlords who house them in slum conditions rake in enormous profits. The sole blame for the rising cost of their ‘housing’ lies with the profiteers who have set up this treasury-fleecing scam.
As deindustrialisation, austerity, privatisation and inflation accelerate, conditions of daily life are getting worse for most workers. In an effort to redirect their anger, the ruling class, via its politicians, its media, and paid provocateurs like Tommy Robinson, is pointing the finger straight at immigrants. Workers are asked to believe that other, even poorer people, not the rising profits of the super-rich and the workings of capitalist economics, are the cause of their troubles.
Controlled opposition
The ruling elites have no other way to restabilise their system of global looting than by turning the screws on workers at home and driving aggressively into war abroad. They know that this will cause even more pain for the workers in Britain, which is why Reform is being so relentlessly promoted. They also know that if they want workers to keep voting and keep believing in their immigration mythology, they need us to believe that Farage is not the establishment’s man – although the truth is that no real outsider would ever get even one-thousandth of the airtime that is devoted to Reform!
Like Jeremy Corbyn before him, now that Farage is auditioning in earnest for the ‘top job’, he is reversing previously expressed ‘disruptive’ (ie, popular with most workers) views against the Ukraine war and Nato. He understands that those who make it into high office have to pass stringent suitability tests, and that support for Nato’s wars (and for zionist Israel) is non-negotiable.
The capitalist economy is locked in a deep and unsolvable crisis. Britain’s financier elites have no way of addressing the contradictions of the system over which they preside; no way to improve the lot of British workers. They want us to believe that Nigel Farage and Reform can fix our problems by rounding up and expelling migrants, but no ejection of workers can bring back the jobs that British monopoly capitalism has been exporting abroad (in order to maximise profits) for more than a century. Only the revolutionary replacement of the entire economic system can reverse this trend.
Farage is simply one more player in a game that the British ruling class has been directing for 200 years. He is using racism to divide the working class and set us against each other – and at the same time to justify the criminal wars being waged against other nations in an orgy of plunder and robbery.
The only thing that can stop him and sweep away the system that he works for is an organised and unified working class fighting for a planned socialist economy, where the working people take control of what is produced and how it is distributed, and where their needs (not the profits of a handful of parasites) decide everything.
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