ONE political party is talking tough against migrants, accusing its main rival of following an “open borders” policy and sending a senior figure to attend a hard right get-together in Italy.
And another party is demanding the immediate renationalisation of the bankrupt and blundering Thames Water monopoly.
The first party is Labour. And the second is Reform UK. That fact illustrates the volatility of British politics today, where superficial assumptions about party positioning are often turned on their heads.
Keir Starmer is obsessed with winning over Reform voters and keeping hold of those Tories whose support he secured in July. He tiptoes around Nigel Farage like the latter was a precious ornament rather than the demagogic grifter he is.
More substantively, he indulges anti-migrant rhetoric without offering the slightest realistic programme to address the underlying economic and social pressures driving mass migration around the world.
Thus, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper was dispatched to Italy to discuss anti-refugee plans with the hard right government in Rome and also attend a rally organised by the youth section of Premier Giorgia Meloni’s party.
At the same time, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner was ruling out establishing safe, legal pathways for asylum applications, preferring to echo Starmer’s “smash the gangs” bluster.
This is all fuelled by desperation as Reform’s polling continues to surge in traditional Labour-voting areas, including Wales and, for the first time, Scotland.
On the other hand, Farage’s deputy, Richard Tice, has called for taking Thames Water back into public ownership. “It is essentially bust,” he pointed out, “and it should be put out of its misery now,” adding that City financiers were using the present crisis to “rip off consumers even more.”
Most people agree. Yet Labour remains manically committed to a non-existent “private-sector solution” to Thames’ woes.
The Financial Times helpfully explains why. The government “is concerned that, if Thames Water entered the special administration regime, left-wing MPs inside the governing party would call for all water companies to be permanently nationalised.”
Doubtless, they would, with the public cheering them on. It is not only anti-migrant voters that Starmer is afraid of offending, it is also the City of London. Reform, it seems, has no such concerns.
There must, of course, be a reality check. Reform remains a party of oligarchic authoritarianism, seeking, with some success, to build a mass base for a renewed neoliberalism. It is profiting mainly from Labour’s inanity.
Also, we have been here before. When Britain’s putative Fuhrer of the 1930s, Oswald Mosley, first made his break from MacDonald’s Labour, it was to the left, with a programme of state intervention to address mass unemployment in stark contrast to the then-cabinet’s sterile Treasury orthodoxy.
That was only a stepping stone on the way to full-fat fascism in Mosley’s case. The cure offered was ultimately considerably worse than the complaint.
So the left must ceaselessly point out the essence of the Reform programme behind any glitzy promises Farage and Tice may make.
But this will only work if it equally challenges the direction of the Labour government, which, by pandering to Reform’s chauvinism while prioritising financial interests over consumers, is preparing the way for Farageism.
Reform’s guns could be largely spiked by proactively nationalising Thames Water, a move which may be forced on the cabinet in any case, by embarking on a house-building programme not dependent on private developers, by protecting pensioners rather than the wealthy and by tackling poverty in working-class communities.
As it is, Starmer is lamely legitimising Reform’s posturing while offering inadequate solutions. The labour movement must be clear — this is the road to ruin.
