The legal disqualification of far right leader Marine Le Pen from the 2027 French presidential election looms after a court found her guilty of large scale embezzlement. This could yet be turned to the advantage of her party as her supporters’ protests gather strength.

But France is not the only place where the far right is being handed giant political opportunities on a plate. The calamitous series of austerity measures undertaken by the Starmer – Reeves Labour government seems almost deliberately designed to win maximum unpopularity.

Not content with continuing the two child benefit cap and abolishing winter fuel payments for the elderly, Labour has gone boldly forward with the massive reduction in personal independence payments. In order to justify the move, health secretary Wes Streeting has jumped on the bandwagon of the theory of “over-diagnosis“, which originated in the US, using it to rationalise channelling many of those with severe mental or physical disabilities towards some form of employment. This process is ludicrously called “helping people back into work“ even when many of the claimants are retired or are the parents of sick/disabled children.  

In this context of “over-diagnosis” the books It’s All in Your Head and The Age of Diagnosis by Irish doctor Suzanne O’Sullivan have received wide publicity. She makes the claim that there is no such thing as Long Covid and that many cases of conditions like chronic depression are just aspects of life’s ups and downs.

For a detailed account of the consequences of the attack on welfare rights see the article by ACR’s Dave Kellaway.

Not content with being an austerity government, Starmer Labour is showing itself to be an authoritarian anti-immigrant government, bringing in huge fines and potential imprisonment for employers who give immigrant workers casual, “off the books” employment. Now Keir Starmer is boasting in true Donald Trump style that his government is deporting record numbers of immigrants. Starmer has no problem standing alongside Italian fascist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in this and aping her policies.

Labour’s growing authoritarianism is signalled by the alarming police raid on six young women planning direct action in support of Gaza and by Keir Starmer’s apparent promise to Donald Trump that the UK would get tough with protestors who disrupted Trump’s Scottish golf course to publicise their solidarity with the people of Gaza.

Every statement by Starmer and his team over immigration is an affirmation that Nigel Farage was right on this question all along.

However, because of the austerity measures, Labour is about to suffer a devastating defeat in the upcoming local elections on May 1. (Some councils in the south of England have had their elections paused for a year to implement “English devolution”.) The opinion polls for these local elections are astonishing. The Tories are set to win 26% of the vote (548 seats), Reform 25% (474), Labour 20% (232), the Liberals 16% (270) and the Greens 6% (27). In other words in the first tranche the big winners are projected to be the Conservatives and Reform.

But in the areas with delayed voting which include Sussex, West Sussex, Thurrock, Hampshire and Essex, the Tories are projected to be on 23%, Reform on 25% (233), the Liberals on 20% (251), and the Liberals on 8% (117). It is noticeable that while Reform’s projected vote here is about the same as in 2025, the Greens and Liberals are marginally improved in some of the leafy suburbs. It is also very noticeable that with the first past the post electoral system, parties polling less than 10% or 12% get badly punished in terms of seats per vote.

How did Reform UK break through this barrier? As explained by Hungarian social theorist Karl Polayi (1) and his disciple Robert Kuttner (2) in a time of massive crisis, when the centre and centre-right break down, it is the far right that benefit to begin with, for obvious reasons.

Control of the mass media by right-wing and extreme right wing governments and media corporate giants means the mass media breaks sharply to the right. You only have to know the identity of the most frequent guests ever on Question Time (Nigel Farage) to see the logic of this view. Mass media support is today compounded by social media support, which can be easily fixed in favour of the right, with the use of giant funding from the extreme right millionaires and billionaires.

This is a story going back at least two decades in the United States: Elon Musk is a latecomer to the billionaire superfixers, who really got into their stride with the Tea Party, the precursor of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. The right and the extreme right need to be combated on every front, from social media to elections. In Britain the right wing of the Labour Party MPs, the mass media, the Tories and international backers have done a brilliant job of throwing back the radical left.

The net result is that 200,000 people have left the Labour Party since 2019, overwhelmingly from the left. And apart from a handful of left Labour and independent MPs, this left is mainly without much direction or impact. So thoroughly was the Labour left smashed up that its key leaders seem unable or willing to take steps towards an electoral alternative.

But the success of Reform shows something very important – persistence and continuity, from the UK Independence Party, to the Brexit Party to Reform.

According to Trotsky ‘The situation in every country is a unique crystallisation of the elements of the world process’. And we might add especially in the age of globalisation. We are not at 1933 (when the Nazis took power in Germany) but we are not so far from it. Fighting the fascists is never just a question of street confrontations, marches and pickets. The idea that the fascists can be defeated by being ‘no platformed’, useful as such a tactic might be from time to time. It is above all a question of building a socialist and green political alternative that can have an impact at the level of the masses, including of course elections.

Attempts in Britain to build a united mass left alternative have seen some spectacular failures in the last 25 years (footnote). Which means we have to do it better and not give up. British politics is really is going into a period of transformation. And the Left needs urgently to open a discussion on how to build an alternative left. Without an overarching strategy the thousands, probably tens of thousands of people who have left Labour since the 2024 general election will be betrayed. And there is a continuing danger that protest against austerity will boost Reform and the Tories.

Notes

• The Great Transformation, New York 1924, New edition Penguin 2024
•  Robert Kuttner, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism, WWW Horton, 2018