New left party needed to halt Reform’s march to power
It is now more than a year since Rishi Sunak stood rain-soaked outside 10 Downing Street to announce a general election. In the time that has passed since, the political landscape of Britain has been transformed almost beyond recognition. The final nails in the coffin of the two-party system are being loudly hammered in. On 1 May 2025, voters in local elections delivered a damning verdict on Starmer’s government while simultaneously wiping out the Tories across many of their traditional heartlands.
Now the biggest question facing the workers’ movement in Britain is how to halt and reverse the rise of British Trumpism in the form of Reform UK, whose growth in support was the elections’ main, but not only, takeaway. Thes elections have lent great urgency to the call — which Socialist Alternative has been making for some time — for the launch of a new left party, rooted in working-class struggle. The most politically conscious groups of workers and young people understand this instinctively.
Reform on the rise
Nigel Farage has won big and he wants more. Reform took 677 of 1600 contested council seats and gained control of eight local authorities. The party won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election in Labour’s 49th safest parliamentary seat. It also won three mayoral contests. What’s more, it now leads in the polls nationally by a substantial amount. Some projections suggest that, were a general election to be held tomorrow, Reform would win by a landslide.
This represents an extremely dangerous situation for working-class and oppressed people in Britain. In line with decaying capitalism’s turn towards reactionary politics in this period, there is a hardening of support for racist, anti-trans, and anti-migrant ideas, which is being reflected in Reform’s growing support. There has also been a growth of more outright fascistic forces, though these remain marginal and largely disorganised. They were nonetheless evident in the outbreak of violence and thuggery which took place in August last year, targeting refugees and Black and Asian communities.
Workers’ movement
But this is far from the full picture. The working class in Britain is a powerful force which has been in the process of reasserting itself — both politically and through the trade union movement over the last period. Contrary to what you might assume based on Reform’s success, during the last decade, there was also a dramatic shift in public attitudes towards immigration in a progressive direction.
There has been a small reversal of this trend in the last year or so, but the working class, on the whole, remains significantly more welcoming of migrants today than they were a just over decade ago. In 2013, only 20% of those Surveyed thought immigration had a positive economic impact. By 2022, one poll put this figure as high as 59%. The more recent surveys have put it averaging at around 40% — still double what it was in 2013.
Meanwhile, the strike wave that took place during the last year of the Tory government has put the workers’ movement in a strengthened position. The idea of collective workers’ action as a tool to fight back has been revived in the minds of millions of workers. Now, a new round of action is potentially in the offing over public sector pay and Starmer’s government is scrambling to avoid it.
Attitudes on questions like welfare benefits have also moved towards the left. Disgustingly, the Labour Party is seeking to revive offensive tropes about sick and disabled people being ‘scroungers’ which had become much less widely supported. But the attacks the government has made on benefits — especially the removal of the Winter Fuel Allowance from millions of elderly people and cuts to disability benefits — have still been extremely unpopular. In fact, the cut to the fuel allowance was the number one reason people cited for defecting from Labour at the local elections.
There is a mismatch between the seemingly unchallenged rise of Reform, with the Tories and Labour trailing behind them politically, and the consciousness of the majority of working-class people in Britain. What has really taken place — as we have seen elsewhere in the world — is a process of political polarisation.
But the right has a political organisation around which they are building, which gives them the scope to continue to widen their base. In this sense, the right has had a ‘head start’, with all the political momentum currently swinging behind Reform.
End of two-party system?
Despite only having five seats in parliament, Reform is now the unofficial opposition. Rishi Sunak’s election announcement on the Downing Street’s steps may yet be remembered as the last speech ever to be given by a Tory prime minister. To make such an assertion, even in the immediate aftermath of their 2024 general election trouncing, might have seemed fantastical. But while there can still be scope for the original, ever-adaptable party of capitalism to reinvent itself, the Tories’ decline looks increasingly terminal.
Farage has little incentive to offer such a deeply unpopular party an alliance. Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, is increasingly viewed as irrelevant. Her leadership rivals brief against her with talk of a deal with Reform. But the more immediate danger she faces is a slow trickle of defections, with MPs looking to save their own seats by joining up with Farage and co.
Meanwhile, despite being in power, the crisis facing Labour is also looking increasingly existential. Starmer assumed office with a huge majority in Parliament only to be denied even the briefest of honeymoons. His apparently comfortable victory owed more to the collapse of the Tories and the quirks of the British electoral system than it did the enthusiastic support of voters. Yet it still led many capitalist commentators to conclude that a tumultuous and chaotic chapter in British politics had come to an end. They were mistaken.
Since Starmer took power, we have witnessed some of the most rapid and dramatic changes in Britain’s political history. Against the backdrop of the worldwide capitalist crisis, the rise of Trump 2.0, and the long-term decline and stagnation of the British economy, Starmer’s government has been rapidly plunged into a state of permacrisis.
Labour in crisis
Anyone who had looked at the 2024 General Election result with any real curiosity could see that the writing was already on the wall for the two-party system in Britain. The Tories haemorrhaged votes — but not primarily to Labour. Instead, Reform ate into their support and made a significant breakthrough. Meanwhile, despite Labour gaining seats, the party lost votes. On its left, anti-war independents came seemingly out of nowhere to win safe Labour seats in four constituencies. Corbyn also won back his seat as an independent having been ejected from Labour by Starmer. The Greens significantly increased their vote share and won three more MPs.
Nonetheless, dramatic as those results were, few could have predicted how rapidly and drastically this trend towards the end of Tory-Labour ‘duopoly’ would be accelerated with Labour in office. Unforgivably, Starmer in power has continued to aid and abet the Israeli regime in its murderous rampage across the Middle East, including the genocidal onslaught in Gaza. His more recent ‘tough talk’ on Netanyahu, which is not matched by tough action, will make little impact when it comes to winning back the many thousands of Muslim voters who feel unable to ever vote Labour again.
Meanwhile, unable to reverse the long-term decline and stagnation of the British economy, and unwilling to take any steps to substantially redistribute wealth, the Labour government moved to make fresh attacks on the working class within weeks of taking office. Stamer’s personal popularity declined more quickly than that of any modern Prime Minister bar Liz Truss.
Trump whirlwind
But it was the election of Trump and the whirlwind of earth-shaking events that have followed it which have most dramatically intensified this crisis. Trump’s Oval Office bombshell meeting with Zelensky was directly connected to Starmer’s government making a wholesale turn towards austerity to fund militarism earlier this year. The US president’s so-called ‘liberation day’ tariff announcements led to further downgrades in British long-term growth forecasts. This, along with the overall economic uncertainty, has significantly reduced the ‘headroom’ that exists for the chancellor to work within her own self-imposed fiscal rules. Meanwhile, Trump and his cronies have continued to put weight behind far-right and right-populist forces internationally — Reform included.
The local elections have clearly led to a certain re-calibration in the strategy of Starmer’s top team. Until very recently, the Labour right saw the increase in support for Reform as broadly beneficial to them. From their perspective, Reform had split the Tory vote in 2024 and helped hand them victory. Belatedly, they have woken up to the threat Farage and his cronies pose to them electorally.
Their response to this is to up the ante on anti-trans and anti-migrant scapegoating. The White Paper Labour recently announced will impose repressive new restrictions on those coming to live and work in Britain. The speech Starmer gave announcing it used such poisonous rhetoric as to be readily compared with Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 “rivers of blood” speech. This approach, by echoing and legitimising the politics of Farage, is a gift to the right. In the days that followed the announcement, polls showed Reform’s lead increasing.
New party needed urgently
It’s now clear as day that the only force capable of halting the rise of Reform is the workers’ movement. To do so effectively, one crucial missing weapon is the existence of a political party which can bring together the different struggles being waged by working-class and oppressed people and offer a coherent political challenge to Reform’s lies.
The Conference of Resistance which launched the People’s Alliance for Change and Equality in Huddersfield on 9 May and has received significant media attention since showed, on a small scale, a model for how such a new party could be built. It brought together trade unionists, campaigners defending local NHS services, people fighting to save dementia homes, groups organising in solidarity with Palestine, young people building radical LGBTQ+ pride events and many more, to discuss how to fight back most effectively. This included discussions about preparing a slate of candidates to stand in the 2026 local elections.
We need a new party now, which can unite and help organise workers in struggle around socialist demands. Corbyn, speaking in Huddersfield, confirmed that there would be “something in place” before the 2026 elections. This is a very welcome statement.
In the view of Socialist Alternative, there should be no further delay in launching a new party. We believe such a party should be open to individuals, campaign groups, socialist organisations and trade unions to join up and get involved. It should be organised democratically — a space to discuss and debate the ideas needed to take our struggles forward.
Socialist Alternative will campaign for any new party to adopt a socialist program. Capitalism is a system in crisis and decay. We need socialist change — based on solidarity, workers’ democracy, public ownership of the banks and big monopolies, and democratic economic planning in the interests of people and the planet.
