Working-class voters are turning to Reform due to Labour austerity, more than racism, so an independent left is the answer, not the centre, argues Chris Bambery 

On Thursday, Reform UK stormed to victory in Llanelli’s Lliedi ward, taking 568 votes, while Labour came second with 312 votes. The winner, Michelle Beer, said of her victory: ‘All I kept hearing was that people felt they weren’t being listened to, and not enough was being done. They felt they had seen a deterioration. We formed our messages from there.’ She added that this feeling of not being listened to was directed at national and local politicians. Llanelli is a former steel town. 
  
In Scotland, the contest in Thursday’s Scottish parliamentary by-election in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse is shaping into a contest between the Scottish National Party and Reform UK, with Labour looking to be pushed into third place. This is in an area of former coal mines and steel works in South Lanarkshire. Just under 13,000 children in South Lanarkshire (23.1%) live in relative poverty. 
 
The by-election turned nasty with a  Reform UK advert incorrectly claiming Scottish Labour leader, Anis  Sarwar, has promised to prioritise the Pakistani community. The Facebook advert, on which Reform UK has spent up to £14,999, showed a clip of Sarwar speaking at an event celebrating the 75^th anniversary of Pakistan’s independence in 2022, when he said: ‘Pakistanis need [to be] represented in every mainstream political party in Scotland and across the UK.’ 
  
It appears alongside text reading: ‘Anas Sarwar has said he will prioritise the Pakistani community.’ The Pakistani community is not the cause of child poverty in South Lanarkshire. 
  
Farage has released a second attack video this week, captioned: ‘Anas Sarwar is the one obsessed about race.’ It contrasts a speech Sarwar delivered at the Scottish parliament, pointing out the lack of black and ethnic-minority leaders across the public sector, with footage of Farage speaking at a Reform rally, where he says: ‘We don’t care about skin colour … we don’t care who you are … we care whether you share the values of this country.’ 
 
Racist dog whistles are key to Reform UK’s politics, but it’s not why they win votes in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse or in Llanelli. Councillor Beer is right, the main reason people vote Reform UK – as poll after poll demonstrates – is not primarily to ‘stop the boats’ but because they see it as giving them a voice when the established parties don’t listen. 

What Reform voters want 

It is clear that Nigel Farage, Reform UK’s leader, has been studying data on who is voting Reform UK, because he senses his party has a big future in Labour areas such as these. Labour List prints details of a poll tracking voters in ‘Red Wall’ parliamentary constituencies – in northern England and the Midlands, once safe Labour seats, which went to Reform UK in the 2024 general election showing Nigel Farage had a net approval rating of 14%, compared to 5% for Andy Burnham, the most popular Labour figure, -19% for Angela Rayner and -22% for Rachel Reeves. 
  
A YouGov poll earlier this week put Reform well ahead in people’s voting attentions come a general election, on 29%, ahead of Labour on 22% and the Tories on 16%. That explains Farage’s commitment to restore winter fuel payments to all pensioners and to scrap the two-child benefit cap. Farage stated: ‘The prime minister is out of touch with working people, he doesn’t understand what they want and how they feel about the big issues facing Britain. It’s going to be these very same working people that will vote Reform at the next election and kick Labour out of government.’ 
  
A Reform source told the Guardian that the party was ‘already outflanking Labour.’ The response of Sir Keir Starmer was to attack Farage as ‘untrustworthy’, a case of the pot calling the kettle black, and to compare him to Liz Truss. The latter accusation was not made to paint Farage as a right-wing Tory but because his benefit promises break the neoliberal fiscal rules: how awful! 
 
Faced with the choice between fiscal ‘responsibility’ and your granny keeping warm this winter, it’s not difficult to see which option most people would choose. Farage knows his supporters want a better-funded NHS and deplore the state of our roads and railways, towns and cities. 
 
Guardian columnist, Gaby Hinsliff, made an interesting aside this week: ‘Might it ultimately take a dash of leftwing populism to beat the rightwing kind? (Apparently, in focus groups, the one left politician who seemingly excites Reform voters is Bernie Sanders, raging against an economy he considers rigged against the working classes.)’ 
 
So how can we stop Reform UK? The first thing is that while the party cadre are motivated by ‘stop the boats’ that’s not why most people voted Reform UK in the 1 May local elections. Simply dubbing them racist is not going to allow a conversation to develop. 
 
Neither, for the same reason, is trying to mobilise outside their rallies and events. In the local elections earlier this year, the main drive of anti-racist campaign groups was to get the vote out to stop Reform. The problem with simply trying to get voters to the polls to stop Farage is twofold. First, in an overwhelming number of seats where Reform UK came second in last year’s general election – 89 out of 98 – Labour came first. If people are so alienated by this awful Starmer government that they are considering voting Reform UK, urging them to vote Labour is not going to work. 

The centre is not the solution 

The second problem would come in the build up to a general election in 2028 or 2029 with Reform UK lying in first or second place. I can see already siren voices urging people to vote for the candidate of whichever party is best placed to beat Reform UK. 
 
That happened twice in France, in 2002 and 2017, when there was a presidential runoff between Marine Le Pen and, first, Jacques Chirac and then Emmanuel Macron. Liberals and leftists urged left-wing voters to vote centre-right to stop Le Pen. On both occasions, it helped establish the National Front/Rally as the main challenger to the established political elite. Secondly, it did not stop Marine Le Pen from building support in ‘left behind’ former industrial towns. 
 
The same pattern appeared in last year’s US presidential election when Bernie Sanders and AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, rallied behind the Biden continuity candidate, Kamala Harris, to stop Donald Trump. Working-class voters rejected their call in droves. 
 
In former industrial or mining communities where people feel left behind, there is a sense of betrayal which has turned nasty. In the Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole dubs Britain the ‘stagnation nation’, which, he writes, is ‘characterised by low public and private investment and high regional and household inequality. Low-income households in Britain are now 27 per cent poorer than their equivalents in France and a staggering 60 per cent poorer than those in Ireland.’ 
 
He then turns to the latest edition of the ongoing Future of England survey run by the political scientists Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones. It’s fascinating reading, finding that: ‘Those voters in England who identify primarily as English rather than British are made both angry and fearful by contemporary political life … among those English-identifiers, we found ambivalence towards the Union [of the UK] as a project and a commonly held sense of grievance about the perceived cost and political influence of the other nations.’ 
 
Over 40% of people in England now identify as ‘English’ rather ‘British’. Those that identify as ‘English’ are more likely to support Farage or the Conservatives than those who identify primarily as British. Supporters of Farage rank ‘being English’ above ‘being a parent’ as a marker of who they think they are. 
 
Henderson and Wyn Jones find ‘an England whose English-identifying inhabitants, at least, are deeply conscious of what they clearly regard as a jarring contrast between past glories and a present brought-low; an England whose eponymous national group seems to feel besieged both from within and without; an England that has secured major changes (not least, Brexit) in order to assuage its concerns, yet remains deeply dissatisfied with the results; an England that is angry at its lot.’ 
 
David Cameron and Rishi Sunak were seen as representing a London-based elite more global in their outlook than British. Starmer is obviously in the same boat but someone in his team picked up on such polls and played to British patriotism with Union Jacks everywhere in Labour’s 2024 election material. 
  
However, Starmer faces serious problems. Firstly, he has set out to ‘improve’ Britain’s relations with the European Union. In truth, under Sunak, Britain got back to the European top table through the support lavished on Ukraine and its key role in Nato. Starmer has continued that, and, with Trump seeming to want to dump Ukraine, has placed himself at the centre of a ‘coalition of the willing’: himself, Macron, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and Poland’s Donald Tusk, in arming and funding Ukraine (this won’t work). For Brexiteers, this is all more evidence that you cannot trust the elite and their parties. 
  
Today, the best reaction to Starmer’s ‘warfare not welfare’ agenda is to say the exact opposite. Few working-class people would support conscription, as mooted by Starmer, for their eighteen-year olds to go to Ukraine. 
  
For once, it would be best to follow Gaby Hinsliff’s advice and stand left-wing candidates independent of Labour on an anti-war, anti-neoliberal, pro-welfare platform. We need candidates rooted in their communities. To achieve that, a road is to build resistance to the genocidal war in Gaza, to support peace in Ukraine and to fight austerity.