AS WE enter 2025, the exhaustion of liberal centrism across the West is clearer than ever.

The return of Donald Trump to the White House. The recent collapse of the governments of France and Germany. 

Britain’s own experience — a Labour government resting on fewer votes than it won in opposition, beset by corruption scandals and political pratfalls in its first few months, already trailing the recently wiped out Tories in the polls.

Yeats’s line “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold” seems to summarise today’s politics. His poem The Second Coming disorients us as it is not salvation, but something nightmarish approaching as the world we know crumbles: “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Here too the Irish poet strikes a chord. In Britain and most of the so-called “first world” it is not the left but the radical right that stands poised to take over. 

It isn’t hard to see why the anti-immigrant hatred of Reform UK gets a hearing: the far right’s depiction of the global refugee crisis as a security threat has been taken up by the Establishment parties. 

Keir Starmer boasts of deporting more immigrants than the Tories, just as Rishi Sunak’s “stop the boats” mantra brought the xenophobic hysteria of the fascists into the mainstream. 

And with years of privatisation, funding cuts and property speculation having driven crises across the NHS, municipal services and housing, it is easy to pretend that we are being swamped by unmanageable numbers.

The impetus behind the right can seem illogical. The system breaking down is the Thatcherite consensus established in the 1980s. 

The economy that is failing has had 40 years of neoliberal treatment: tax cuts, deregulation, privatisation. How is a party like Reform UK, advocating more tax cuts and more privatisation, able to sell itself as the solution?

The US billionaire Warren Buffett once observed that “there’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” This remains key to understanding everything happening today: the capitalist class is on the offensive, and it is as determined to exploit today’s crisis of capitalism to its advantage as it was when ripping up the postwar consensus in the 1970s.

In the 1970s, soaring oil prices following the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and competition from newly industrialised countries were among pressures making the broadly social-democratic consensus of the previous 30 years seem unsustainable. 

In Chile, the brutal 1973 coup against Salvador Allende’s government made it a laboratory for neoliberal economics. Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek had been extremists on the fringes of economic thinking before: now they helped shape a rapid-fire project of privatisation and deregulation that raised unemployment and lowered working-class living standards, but successfully reshaped the economy so a greater share was appropriated by the rich. 

The Thatcher government in Britain and Ronald Reagan’s in the United States soon followed suit, turning yesterday’s extremism into today’s common sense. Today, we can see an analogous process beginning with Argentina’s Javier Milei. 

Milei combines libertarian rhetoric denouncing any regulation of corporations, public provision of services and social security with extreme authoritarianism directed towards the working class: he tweets pictures of himself brandishing a baseball bat with the caption “for communists,” while his MPs demand protesters be met with “prison or a bullet.” 

Milei’s economic programme is radical: he has halved the number of ministries (education, housing and transport are among those scrapped), shredded environmental protections, slashed public spending by almost a third in a year, driven down wages and attacked pensions, while bringing in legislation to bill protesters for the cost of policing their demos (something the Tories were mulling last year). 

The aim is unfettered corporate power, capitalism unchecked by democracy. Milei is today an outrider, but we can see a similar programme taking shape in the United States. 

Tech tycoon Elon Musk is lined up to head a Department of Government Efficiency for President Trump alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, who promises “Milei-style cuts on steroids.”

Musk’s political agenda is more sharply defined than Trump’s. The man who tweeted “we will coup whoever we want” after the military overthrow of Bolivian socialist leader Evo Morales in 2019 does not pretend to respect democratic norms. 

Heading a transatlantic corporation, he attacks union rights wherever his companies exist, including in a long drawn-out battle against the IF Metall union in Sweden. In the United States he has taken this war to court, joining Amazon in a lawsuit aimed at ruling the National Labour Relations Board, which regulates employer-union relations, unconstitutional. 

And he sees and styles himself a global player, using his fortune to promote his dystopian vision. This is why he ponders a $100 million donation to Reform UK in Britain, and writes op eds in the German press calling for votes for the far-right Alternative for Germany.

Musk has shacked up with Trump, though tensions in the Trump camp are already evident, especially over immigration. 

The vision is not so much “America First” as “Big Business First:” the online row between Musk and Trump supporters of the last week has seen the Tesla chief insult US workers as lazy and badly educated, as he defends the corporate right to replace them with foreign talent. 

But the same has always been true of the supposedly patriotic British right. British workers are “among the worst idlers in the world,” the Tory MPs who authored neoliberal manifesto Britannia Unchained (who included Liz Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng, Dominic Raab and Priti Patel) maintained. 

The narrative exposes the class war lurking under the nationalist frontage, and is supposed to justify attacks on social security and public services to lick the working-class into shape through the discipline of poverty. 

All these people see the Thatcherite counterrevolution of the 1980s as unfinished business: the next step is to dismantle everything won by labour movements from the 19th century on. 

The economic imperative comes from Western capitalism’s increasing inability to compete on innovation with China, meaning profit must be sought through greater exploitation of the workforce and through the carve-up of public services. The story is that once the constraints of workers’ rights and social or environmental obligations are removed, capitalism will work its magic and generate wealth.

We know from the experience of the last 40 years that it will generate wealth only for the few. Besides, with the last 10 years the 10 hottest on record and ever more severe climate disruption, it is no exaggeration to say the world cannot afford victory for the Mileis, Musks and Farages.

Yet that is our trajectory. Labour, too wedded to the status quo even to respond to the public outcry over the ecological devastation inflicted on our waterways by privatisation, putting the boot into pensioners and children in poverty alike, has no answers at all to the far right, at least under its current leader.

The status quo will break. But it doesn’t have to break to the right. Less than a decade ago it was the left that had the momentum, not just in Britain with Jeremy Corbyn, but with left movements on the rise in Greece, Spain and even the United States.

The more intelligent conservatives recognise that the radical left still has potential. One Conservative ex-spad, a veteran of two Downing Street operations, told me last month there were only three politicians in Britain who can fill a hall when they speak: Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Jeremy Corbyn. 

The continued Establishment hatred of Corbyn is well founded: he retains a profile and a popularity it has not suppressed, while the vision of redistribution, public ownership and peace that motivated hundreds of thousands of Labour activists from 2015-20 can still move millions.

It will be an uphill struggle, though. In the 1970s it often seemed as likely the postwar consensus would break to the left as to the right: the communist-led shop stewards’ movement led a huge and militant trade union movement from the shop floor, breaking Labour’s wages policy; Tony Benn envisaged a new era of industrial democracy and workers’ power.

We did not prevail then. Now, the trade union movement is half the size, class consciousness less developed across the working class. The left has been routed in the party of organised labour. It can mobilise huge numbers for urgent causes: ceasefire in Palestine, stopping far-right riots; but it has no common strategy or programme.

An Argentinian trade unionist told last month’s TUC anti-racism conference that Milei’s success rested on convincing the unorganised majority of workers that the minority represented by trade unions were a privileged strata with separate interests. In Britain, where nearly 80 per cent of workers are not unionised, the same could happen.

We can only hope to counter the right if we look outwards. 

Unions must build workplace power and the anti-racist fight must be fought in the workplace. But the majority of workers will be left out of these struggles unless they can be transformed into battles for collective bargaining across whole sectors, that secure better terms and conditions across the board, so unions are seen to deliver for the whole working class.

The community activism and street protests cannot fade away because Labour is in power. 

Organised labour has to have an alternative to the status quo that can be pitched against that offered by Farage. It needs to be popularised through anti-cuts campaigns and mobilisations against the most hated government policies (as Unite already mobilises protests against the winter fuel cuts). We need to be at the forefront of the fight to save council services and win proper funding for schools and hospitals, and we need to be seen.

The stakes are high. If Labour falls to the right, as social democratic parties across Europe are falling, we face the brave new world of Milei and Musk: one where our rights both as workers and as citizens are trampled in the rapacious corporate drive to squeeze maximum profit from a dying planet.