NIGEL FARAGE’S Reform party — actually a limited company — poses a threat to British democracy and we on the left must organise to provide voters with a real alternative to the Labour-Tory consensus.

Reform is on a roll, and it is kicking off the new year with its East Midlands conference on January 3 2025 in my home city of Leicester. A city where Britain’s minority population makes up the majority.

Just a week before July’s general election, a Channel 4 undercover investigation exposed a canvasser for the Reform party using racist language about political opponents and saying Britain should “just shoot” asylum-seekers trying to cross the Channel.

This incident did not occur in isolation: Farage’s “breaking point” anti-immigrant ad caused outrage in 2016 and Reform includes among its MPs former Tory Lee Anderson who, when deputy chair of the Conservative Party, refused to apologise for saying that asylum-seekers should just “f*** off back to France” if they didn’t want to live on what amounted to detention barges.

The Reform candidate for Bexhill and Battle was reported as saying that “Britain would be in a far better state today had we taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality.”

Despite, or because of, such racism, Reform managed to win five seats in the general election, a number well short of the 13 that exit polls initially predicted.

But the party came second in 98 parliamentary seats, ironically to the benefit of Labour, which picked up 89 of them — a result that had looked far-fetched only two months earlier, when Reform performed far worse than expected in May’s local elections, picking up just two councillors.

But while Labour’s polling has plummeted since it entered government, thanks to a string of announcements of cuts, rises in energy prices, and its support for the genocide in Gaza and for further privatisation in the NHS, Reform’s has risen, and many analysts are now openly asking the question, not just whether Reform could replace the Tories as the official opposition in 2029, but whether it might actually win, particularly if Trump-supporting billionaire Elon Musk follows through on a reported promise to fund it.

The idea that Farage and co represent popular or working-class interests is at odds with their background. Of the five MPs elected under a Reform banner in July, three come from expensive private education: Farage from Dulwich College, Richard Tice from exclusive Uppingham, and multimillionaire Rupert Lowe from Radley. Of the remaining two, James McMurdock was a career banker.

But nature abhors a vacuum. The Conservatives are the natural party of elite interests, but Labour under Keir Starmer is doing its best to supplant them, imposing cuts on pensioners and public services while boasting of getting into bed with massive private investment firm BlackRock and of extending private involvement in healthcare, as well as making a show of praise for the monarchy and enabling water and energy firms to make huge price hikes after years of voracious profit-taking.

Starmer’s decision to follow and even go beyond Tory policies has created a political landscape in which the old phrase regarding politicians that “they’re all the same” has become — an ideal situation for right-wing demagogues  — a dangerous vacuum in which Reform can pose as anti-Establishment insurgents despite the Establishment backgrounds of its leading figures, a posture that can appeal to those who don’t know the detail and hear only rhetoric that scratches the itch of their dissatisfaction with the status quo and their suspicion of the foreign.

Labour’s contribution to such dangers is not new, of course. Since Tony Blair in the ’90s, Britain has suffered decades of discourse designed to push the “Overton window” of acceptable political debate to the right; so far to the right that many argue the so-called “centrists” of today sit well to the right of many Conservatives of the past.

Blair’s excuse for this, at least as framed by his right-hand man Peter Mandelson, was that the working class had nowhere else to go. But with parts of the working class looking for scapegoats for the deprivation and disrespect heaped on them by the political classes since Thatcher, Reform’s unashamed immigrant-bashing has enough appeal to be dangerous.

We have seen the severity of those dangers manifested in the far-right racist riots earlier this year and in the racist murder of five people this week at refugee centres in northern France.

This danger is compounded by Britain’s “winner-takes-all” parliamentary voting system. Labour achieved a huge landslide under this system, but at a record low vote, and its poll ratings are already plummeting.

Reform says its membership has reached 105,000, compared to a claimed figure of 132,000 for the Tories and a claimed 370,000, though perhaps much lower, for Labour.

While Farage’s personal ratings with the general public are not high — his net approval rating is -20 according to recent polls by Ipsos and YouGov — they are far above those of the Labour, Tory and Lib Dem leaders. Labour could not even solve the problem by removing Starmer since likely leadership candidates such as Rachel Reeves appear, according to the polls, to fare even worse.

The rise of Reform has been enabled by a climate of prejudice, anger and fear that has been whipped up for years by British politicians and the mainstream media. The moral panic over the “invasion” by refugees in boats, forced by an absence of safe and legal asylum routes and the demonisation of Muslims and benefit claimants have been used for years as go-to tactics to justify spending cuts and the erosion of our freedoms.

Labour has been anything but blameless in this regard, from the anti-immigration mugs and promises to be “tougher than the Tories on benefit claimants’ under Ed Miliband to Starmer’s smearing of the poor and disabled as a “blight” and his courting of the far-right in Europe against refugees from Syria. All of these have both fed the Farage-Reform narrative and created anger and disillusionment among voters for the far right to exploit.

A troubling aspect of Reform’s results in the general election of 2024 is that they were achieved with very little party infrastructure. Reform is not even technically a political party but rather a limited company, with Farage as director and main shareholder; it had no significant activist base and or branch structure to mount a “ground game” yet was still able to take a 14 per cent share of those who bothered to vote. This again suggests the danger posed by the sameness of Labour and the Tories, which saw a turnout of only 52 per cent  — a record low since universal suffrage began.

Those hungry for radical change are arguably more likely to vote — but only if they have an alternative that they want to vote for. Reform offered that for the right, but Labour refused to offer it for the left — a stark contrast with the huge turnout for Jeremy Corbyn’s “For the Many” platform in 2017 and even with the millions who voted for him again in 2019.

The hunger for change among voters and Farage’s willingness to appeal to the worst instincts of the right make the refusal of Starmer’s Labour to offer any change to the left an existential danger to British democracy and our social fabric.

Given this refusal and the right’s rush to exploit it, the necessity for the left to organise and fill that vacuum is urgent and inescapable. Capitalism cannot deliver on the crisis of housing, health, education, equality, the environment and never-ending wars.

We need a principled opposition to racism and fascism. We need a left that will organise and champion policies that benefit working-class people while rejecting racism and the scapegoating that comes from the right. We need a new left electoral party that is capable of strengthening working-class organisations, communities and trade unions. One that provides a serious challenge to capital.

The French parliamentary election results showed what can be done, even at short notice, when the left unites to combat the imminent threat from the far right. Britain’s left must learn from that and act — and arguably, it must do so quickly.

Claudia Webbe was the member of Parliament for Leicester East (2019-24). You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and twitter.com/ClaudiaWebbe.