We need to confront them. And when we do so, we will see they are vulnerable.
Jon Trickett is Labour MP for Hemsworth
It’s time we got serious about far-right parties. It simply won’t do to mimic their policies in the hope of creaming off their supporters. We need to confront them. And when we do so, we will see they are vulnerable.
Look to other liberal democracies across the world, and what do you see? More often than not you see a surge in support for extreme right parties following weak social democratic governments. Look even closer, and you might fear that you see our country’s future too.
Look at Germany after the elections for example. The East-West divide in votes looks reminiscent of the country before the fall of the Berlin wall. To the East a sea of AfD blue. The far right party won 34% of the vote in Eastern Germany, consisting of five states and the eastern half of Berlin. The West is CDU/CSU grey.
The AfD picked up 720k votes from the SPD, 1 million from the CDU/CSU, 890k from the FDU and nearly 2 million former non-voters. On a turnout of 83% (up from 76.6% in 2021) it is clear the far right struck a chord with many turned off by politics.
Although shocking, it should not be surprising that the far right have done so well in areas like East Germany whose communities have been “left behind” for many years. Much like the rust belt in America, the former mining areas in Northern France and the so-called “red wall” in Britain, the right are growing in those communities let down by social democracy and held back by a neo-liberal economic system.
I represent a constituency in the “Red Wall,” similar to the Rust Belt in America or post-industrial areas in East Germany. Our areas voted Labour for a century. But many started voting Conservative in recent times. Many more stopped voting altogether. And more recently, some are turning to the right-wing Reform UK party.
This is a familiar pattern in many liberal democracies. It’s true that voting patterns have changed; workers have moved away from center-left parties elsewhere as they have from the Labour Party in the UK. It’s said that this has happened because workers’ cultural attitudes have shifted to the right and away from the social democrats. But the truth is that the decoupling of social class and left-wing voting has been the consequence of decisions made by successive centre-left political leaders who have failed to deliver for working-class communities.
The dealignment between working-class voters and the centre-left parties has led to a whole industry of establishment figures, political analysts, think tankers, and others in search for answers. They have begun to carry out attitudinal surveys in a fumbling attempt to realign their parties with the lost millions of voters. Party leaders moved to the right on cultural identity issues thinking this was the way to retain working-class loyalty. But then, in a self-defeating spiral, this provoked a further migration away by progressive sections of working people who in the past would have voted for centre-left parties of government.
This has produced governments which pander to the right in the name of “pragmatism” rather than ideology. However, their continued pursuit of a neoliberal agenda shows otherwise. The truth is the political establishment knows that their programme will not deliver materially for working people. Without a consensus for the status quo, governments have pushed through increasingly authoritarian measures against dissent.
The political class are worried. But instead of fighting on right wing turf, the centre left should instead focus on improving the material conditions of working people. They have been treated shamefully by the economic, cultural, and political establishment in the last few decades.
In Britain, the number of people living in poverty is estimated to be about 14.5 million around the end of the current Parliament. The number of families in poverty where all adults were working or at least one was working full time has doubled. Over the last four decades, British workers produced more wealth, but their incomes no longer kept up with their output. So productivity increased by 87 percent, but median wages increased by only 61 percent. This wealth hasn’t gone nowhere; it has gone to the wealthiest.
The country’s billionaires have never had it so good. The combined wealth of the 165 billionaires in the UK in 2024 is £965 billion. Corporate Britain isn’t doing so badly either. The UK financial sector held around £27 trillion in 2022. This is compared to the country’s gross domestic product of around £3.1 trillion in 2022.
This deepening inequality is at the core of the malaise felt in working class communities all across Europe and the USA. Instead of continuing to uphold an economic system which only delivers growth for the very few, we must ensure a radical break with the neoliberal orthodoxy so embedded in the political establishment.
So what do we do here in Britain? We began this article saying we should confront Reform. They are certainly beatable.
On a whole series of issues they are at odds with the values of working class people.
They are wrong on: wanting to introduce an American-style insurance system for the NHS; voting against workers’ rights; resisting public ownership of key public services; failing to tackle the obscene levels of inequality and the tax system which rewards wealth more than work. They are represented mainly in the House of Commons by millionaires. And this probably explains why they cannot see anything wrong with the fact that their leader is filling his boots from the nine paid jobs alongside his role as an MP.
It’s time to confront Reform. Are you up to take a stand?
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