In the English local elections on 1 May, Reform won 41% of all contested council seats, 677 councillors, and majority control of 10 councils in the country, including former mining communities in Lancashire, Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, Kent, Derbyshire, and Durham. Notably, the recent by-election in Clydebank, home of Red Clydeside and the UCS work-in, saw Reform come second, thoroughly debunking the myth that Scotland is a more ‘progressive’ country than England or Wales or that it’s immune to Reform’s repackaged brand of conservative politics. While some workers have undeniably seen Reform as the most effective vehicle to take on the liberal two-party establishment, the decline in turnout compared with previous years shows that the success of Reform has been due mainly to a collapse of the Labour and Conservative parties, with the vast majority of workers still not engaging in electoral politics and waiting to be politicised by other means.
It is undeniable that one of Reform’s most popular policies among its voter base is its proposed crackdown on immigration and the importation of cheap labour from overseas, which has clearly struck a chord with workers who have been deliberately pitted against migrants for an ever-declining number of jobs, wages, and public services. Liberal anti-racists continue to respond with moralising, finger-wagging, and utopian “open borders” rhetoric which utterly fails to resonate with working-class people. Communists must present a materialist and socialist position on immigration rooted in its reactionary role under capitalism and the need for a planned economy including fair labour exchanges, without opportunistically engaging in the scapegoating of migrant workers who often experience significant exploitation themselves.
Despite making no attempt to differ themselves from the Conservative or Labour parties in, for example, their commitments to tax breaks for the rich and the privatisation of the NHS by stealth, Reform have humiliated Labour by outmanoeuvring them to the left on some issues, including calling for an immediate reduction in energy prices, the reindustrialisation of Britain, and the nationalisation of the steel industry. Nigel Farage’s visit to British Steel’s Scunthorpe site where he posed for photographs with Unite and GMB materials while its owners threatened closure shows a conscious effort to pierce the trade union movement, which has met with some success, despite obvious hostility from the Labour-affiliated leadership.
The liberal response to Reform has been unsurprising. On 23 April, Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney of the SNP hosted what he described as an “anti-far right” summit, inviting leaders of all parties represented at Holyrood, as well as Roz Foyer, General Secretary of the STUC. While Foyer made optimistic calls for the liberal politicians of the capitalist parties to act against their class base and instead offer material support to the workers, workers watching from the outside could easily have interpreted this as a trade union movement in bed with the liberal establishment against an up-and-coming ‘anti-establishment’ party, which risks alienating them from the wider workers’ movement, the majority of whom are not in trade union activity.
As communists, we recognise that the rise in support for Reform is a product of austerity, the capitalist parties, and liberalism more generally. Like others among the liberal parties, Labour has nothing new to bring to the table, so has mainly campaigned as a ‘lesser-evil’ alternative. This can only fall on deaf ears under a government that has frozen pensioners, cut benefits to families, backed Israel’s genocide, blocked a negotiated peace between Russia and Ukraine, and escalated the drive towards war all across the world.
There has also been significant pressure from the trade union movement and other leftist groups to present Reform as an escalation towards fascism that must be opposed through liberal anti-racism, and this pressure will likely increase, including calls for alliances with liberal establishment parties and reformists. But liberalism and reformism are not solutions to conservatism, racism, or fascism, they are a cause. In the words of the legendary British-Indian communist Rajani Palme Dutt: “the continued hesitation and retreat of the reformist working-class leadership at each point (policy of the “lesser evil”) encourages the growth of Fascism. On this basis Fascism is able finally to step in and seize the reins, not through its own strength, but through the failure of working-class leadership.”
One of history’s greatest anti-racists, Malcolm X also made a speech about the dangers of liberalism, explaining that “although conservatives aren’t friends of black people, at least they didn’t try to hide it. Like wolves, they show their teeth in a way so we always know where we stand with them. But the liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth but pretend they are smiling. The liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives because they trick you, so that while you run from the growling wolf, you flee into the open jaws of the ‘smiling’ fox.”
Any support for liberalism or the establishment parties, or opposition to Reform in working-class communities without opposing the establishment just as hard or harder, will therefore see the opposite of the intended effect. An ‘anti-establishment’ conservative right can only be defeated by a genuinely anti-establishment communist left and this is a lesson we must take into the movement.
Although in Britain, a fully-developed communist movement is yet to emerge, the international trend is nevertheless hopeful. Despite the European Union banning its member states from attending (ignored by the leaders of Slovakia and Serbia), the Victory Day celebrations in Russia of the defeat of fascism in Europe by the Red Army under Stalin saw leaders of most of progressive humanity unite in Moscow, including Xi Jinping, Lukashenko, Lula, Maduro, Miguel Díaz-Canel, Ibrahim Trahoré, and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in what can only be seen as a sign of greater unity from sovereign-seeking and socialist nations in the Global South against US and Western-led imperialism. This does not mean that the trend towards a multipolar world is not without its difficulties or internal conflicts, as was the case in a serious escalation between India and Pakistan, which included missile and drone strikes between nuclear powers, so we mustn’t be complacent in our calls for unity.
Although multipolarity is not socialism and the threat of new, inter-imperialist rivalries will continue for as long as capitalism remains, a multipolar world nevertheless presents new opportunities to communists globally, as anti-imperialist revolutions have historically led to socialist revolutions if led by the working class. As old relationships are broken and new ones take shape, multipolarity could also lead to much greater economic self-reliance and reindustrialisation projects, something which is desperately needed in Britain and could build the revolutionary class base of communist parties globally on the path to a renewed communist international.
Finally, I’d like to send solidarity to the striking refuse workers here in Birmingham who hold themselves up as exemplaries of our class. Only militancy can secure wins for the workers, and for the past few months, Unite members in Birmingham have been leading the way.
Eben Williams is the YCL’s Education Officer
