Original Post >> Marginalia

Sympathy abounds for Reform UK voters. From Keir Starmer trying to win over Reform voters by out-reforming Reform, to Gary Stevenson’s insistence that he is not political and welcomes Reform voters (while consistently espousing socialist positions on wealth redistribution), to people discussing whether it is Labour for being neoliberal or the Greens for splitting the vote who will be responsible if Reform wins the next general election. It seems everyone desperately wants to avoid attributing any form of agency or responsibility to the Reform voters themselves: of course they cannot simply be racists, that is too simplistic a narrative. They must instead be brainwashed by the capitalist class that weaponises them by selling them a narrative that divides us: that immigrants are the problem. They must be desperate for radical alternatives to centrist politicians, but the only option they are given is Reform. Their concerns about immigration are in fact, very real problems of poverty that are misdirected and weaponised against migrants.

These narratives reflect a common problem of systemic power hierarchies in the world. We are constantly conditioned by society to commiserate with the needs and feelings of those with systemic and societal power over those without. The solipsism this begets transcends personal identities. For instance, we are all required to demonstrate our alignment with capitalist power before making any claims against it. This is seen in leftists needing to justify why we seek to redistribute wealth or “punish” the wealthy by “stealing” their hard-earned money. We are accused of being envious of the talent and success of the wealthy.

But this pattern of support for power plays out in other systemic hierarchies as well. Kate Manne has documented what she labels “himpathy”: the tendency of people to pity male perpetrators of sexual violence.¹ We are required to never step out of line by accusing people of sexual assault, or imposing any kind of negative consequences onto men so accused without carefully following due process, feminist critiques of misogyny being baked into due process be damned. This has shown up among leftist organising as well, such as in the treatment of accusations of sexual misconduct by the Socialist Workers Party, or in the recent surfacing of allegations against Cesar Chavez that victims felt pressured to keep silent on for fear of hurting the movement to secure workers’ rights.

Systemic and social sympathy for the more powerful person (particularly in conflicts between oppressed people) exists in other spheres. It is seen in support for anti-trans positions espoused by “gender critical” cis women; here their social positionality as victims of patriarchy (including sexual abuse and misogyny) garners support for their bigotry against trans people, with them often claiming that their positions arise out of concern for their own and others’ safety, hiding both their cisgendered privilege vis-à-vis trans people and the harms that their bigotry causes to trans folk. It is evidenced in the weaponisation of antisemitism against any criticism of Israel’s settler-colonialism and genocide of Palestinians. It allows for the narrative of a specifically gendered “male loneliness epidemic” to take up space in the public consciousness, focusing often on how capitalism has disempowered men, ignoring the fact that loneliness impacts women as much as men.²

In a recent article on Reform UK voters, Sacha Hilhorst paints a sympathetic picture of the demographic. The article accurately describes the problems faced by a large portion of the working class in the UK: falling living standards, poverty, and a general sense of powerlessness against out-of-touch politicians intent on making things worse for the vast majority of people in the country. However, the author does not stop there; the article actively claims that many Reform voters are in fact progressive, and seek radical changes. They are described as seeking price caps on groceries, while otherwise believing in free markets; this is somehow described as coherent critique. The author acknowledges that many Reform voters either do not care enough about politics to change their minds or are otherwise too strongly aligned with right-wing policies, but claims that those who might be open to change could be won over by progressive politics.

What is missed in this analysis is that there already have been progressive alternatives that haven’t been succesful. Labour’s 2019 campaign under Jeremy Corbyn was just that: a solid manifesto intended to address the problems wrought by capitalism directed squarely at the disenchanted working class. It was in that election that the red wall collapsed; with voters moving to support the Tories under Boris Johnson instead. A radical alternative to Reform now exists with the Green Party under Zack Polanski, pushing doggedly against capitalism and climate change; none of this was enough to stem the rising tide of Reform in the elections earlier this month. Sabotage by right-wing media does not mitigate the problem of people who voted against Corbyn being convinced to do so by such media; they likely will continue to be convinced against it every time a more progressive approach is offered.

There is a much simpler explanation that people simply do not want to acknowledge: that many, if not most Reform voters support the party because they endorse the anti-immigration views espoused by its leaders. They are not looking at the United States’ rising cost of living under Trump and faltering about the far right, they are looking at the violence being done to immigrants by the regime and desperately wanting it replicated here. Trump’s approval among Republicans in the US on the issue of his handling of the cost of living has plummeted. While this has dented their overall support of him, it should come as no surprise that their approval of Trump remains high: he is delivering on the main thing—harming racialised minorities—that they actually care about.

Farage has not proposed any radical economic policies to garner support – he has doubled down on the capitalist agenda of the previous governments, promising tax and welfare cuts. The first four policies listed on the Reform UK website are about immigration, not the economy. This is because Reform recognises what the left does not: that the best explanation for why voters support Reform is that they are racist.

One-third of leave voters, the demographic that most predicts support for Reform, openly describe themselves as racist. Those that don’t will often claim not to be racist (“I’m not racist, but…”) while simultaneously endorsing racist anti-immigrant beliefs – anti-immigration beliefs are inherently racist. Reform voters are often oppressed, poor, struggling to make ends meet, and targetted by constant propaganda. They are also racist. These are not incompatible positions. What we must recognise is that the former does not excuse the latter. The left needs to understand that in refusing to acknowledge and address this problem directly, the racism is allowed to exist unchallenged.

This is not new; David R Roediger describes the same problem seen in leftist commentary on the election of a white supremacist in 1989:

“Viewers were thus treated to the exotic notion that, when white workers react to unemployment by electing a prominent white supremacist who promises to gut welfare programs, they are acting on class terms, rather than as working class racists”³

It is time we stopped placating racist sentiments by excusing them as being less important to those espousing them than economic concerns. This is simply not true. Reform voters have demonstrably and consistently voted for policies and parties that manifest their sentiments against immigrants. Whether it was in voting Brexit, voting for the party that promised to get it done, and now supporting the party that has promised to deport migrants, nothing in the economic policies of these parties indicates other concerns being as relevant to their decision. They have consistently voted for parties that have maintained austerity and slashed public funding, refusing to accept that these might contribute to if not be responsible for the cost of living crisis, so long as the removal of migrants is prioritised. The bias in media propaganda against socialist alternatives may exist, but confirmation bias ensures that this succeeds in galvanising racist sentiments against immigration. Reform voters are not so much using immigrants as a scapegoat for their economic problems as using their economic problems as an excuse to justify their racism.

Instead of twisting ourselves into knots to avoid calling out the racism of white people and desperately trying to rationalise why everyone except Reform voters should be blamed for the rise of the far right in the UK, we need to address the underlying problem. Racism is a problem among Britons, and Reform voters both implicitly and explicitly support racism and racist policies. The rise of the far right is an economic problem, but we cannot ignore the race problem that directly fuels it. Trying to educate a racist that the real source of the problems they deal with are capitalism, austerity and wealth inequality is futile without addressing their racism first; to someone who believes that they are ‘naturally’ superior to another ethnic group, the narrative that the ‘inferior’ group is to blame for their problems will always be more enticing than any economic theory. This is especially true if such an economic theory attacks the (rich white) people they view as their own. Appeasing this by failing to call it what it is only fuels the problem by refusing to hold people to account for bigotry, allowing it to grow into full-fledged fascism.

1. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press, 2017), 196–205 ↩︎
2. Marlies Maes, Pamela Qualter, Janne Vanhalst, Wim Van Den Noortgate, and Luc Goossens, ‘Gender Differences in Loneliness across the Lifespan: A Meta–Analysis’, European Journal of Personality 33, no. 6 (2019): 642–54, https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2220. ↩︎
3. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, Revised ed, The Haymarket Series (Verso books, 2007), 8. ↩︎

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