Noting that the Republicans made pro-working class noises in the lead up to the US election, she ponders whether Reform could copy them. After all, Farage said he was "coming for Labour" in his July victory speech. Very well, but saying and doing are two different things and there are very good reasons for doubting Reform are even capable of shifting to the left.
There are the structural relationships Reform is enmeshed in. Growing out of the Brexit Party, which came out of Farage's parting with UKIP, all of them have been extreme right wing parties. Pro Brexit, anti-immigration, and the sort of hard right economic programme Liz Truss dreams about. This programme, something that Farage has promoted lately with his desire to scrap the NHS, is not a quirk but fundamental to what Reform is about. The party's politics fundamentally aligns with a set of City interests (where, you'll remember, Farage hails from) who want the remnants of the post-war settlement demolished. Theirs is the naked politics of the bourgeoisie where their interests are natural and self-evident, and that having to concede things like public services - even if only to retain consent for their rule - is too much to ask for. We're about to see an experiment along these lines get underway in the United States.
This is the basis for Reform's support within sections of the ruling class. For most of them, Farage and his party are a means for nudging politics further and further to the right, which Labour are never going to try and contest. Dumping the economics for some Blue Labourish social democratic programmes is not going to happen, because trying to stir up working class aspirations around anything positive is the last thing Reform's backers want to do.
How then is Reform poised to do well in Labour seats and has, indeed, made off nicely with seats from Labour in recent council by-elections? For two reasons. Firstly, Reform polls better with older people. Like the Tories, the further up the age gradient one goes the greater the levels of support. A chunk of the party's "working class voters" the press talk up are "ex-workers" by virtue of being disproportionately retired. And this is not without political consequences, and older people are also more likely to vote. Secondly, there is a section of the working class that have always been anti-Labour and more disposed to conservative and right wing politics. I know, this is where I am from. What seems to be happening, looking at Reform's results, is a lot of this layer are switching their allegiance from the Tories to Farage in Labour-held seats. If you add in the perennial protest voters who gravitate toward whatever party is best placed to give the government the middle finger, and the splintering of Labour's vote, there are enough numbers for winning a decent haul of councillors.
Farage and Reform don't appeal to this layer by parading, for instance, their desire to butcher public sector pensions. They have mastered what you might call negative class consciousness. What is often mistakenly referred to as populism appeals because it speaks directly the resentments of being working class. I.e. The fact we have no choice but to sell our time for a living, that we have to swallow whatever rubbish the boss wants us to, and get by with the frustrations and humiliations that come with it. A politics of negative consciousness, however, seeks not to negate this but affirm it. For instance, attacks on social security and immigration are always framed as "you have to work, but look at them living the life of riley off your taxes." Negative consciousness confirms the addressee as an aggrieved person, as someone who sacrifices, and pushes that grievance away from their source (the relations of production) and locates it in imagined figures and archetypes. And this works because everyone thinks they know someone who's swinging the lead and/or has never done a day's work in their life. It's potent, explains the Tory press's obsessive repetition with such stories, and why the Tories have routinely geared their political strategy around negative class consciousness since Thatcher became party leader 50 years ago. It so happens that Farage is a more convincing peddler of this politics than Kemi Badenoch is.
Reform won't be "going left" then. The party has too much to lose if it does, and it doesn't need to. The money is pouring into Farage's bank account. He's treated as a serious figure and now has privileged access to the inner circle of Donald Trump. Why would he risk any of that by saying warm words about trade unions, standing on picket lines, and advocating for higher wages and greater workers' rights? He wouldn't, which us something political commentators might acknowledge if they were in the business of helping people understand politics instead of working to distort it.
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3 comments:
Yes and no. All the stuff about negative class consciousness is on point, but the conclusion that, because Reform is never going to be a vehicle for the development of true class consciousness, Reform is never going to "turn Left", is far too hasty. Was Geraldine Scott thinking about trade unions and picket lines? When Wes Streeting insists he's "on the Left", is that what he's referring to? The question is whether Reform can occupy the political space *currently* held by Labour, not the space where Labour ought to be. Considering how large a part negative class consciousness plays in the current Labour leadership's pitch to the public, I don't think you can rule it out.
Reform will not tack "Left" because for the reasons you cite, it can't. It would undermine its narrative, and its core, petty-bourgeois vote. John Curtice has said the same thing.
However, its wrong to say that this represents the interests of the bourgeoisie, as against the petty-bourgeoisie. The "City Interests" you cite are also not the interests of the bourgeois ruling-class, but of those that make a living from trading financial instruments not from owning them. Financial market traders have always overly represented the ideas of the Miseans/Anarcho-capitalists, whose interests are actually antagonistic to those of the ruling class. The former represent the ideas an interests of the petty-bourgeois free market trader, who wants to go back to those days, whereas the bourgeois ruling class is based on imperialism, the dominance of monopoly capital tied to the state.
Its also why the interests of that bourgeois ruling class do not involve scrapping the NHS, unless it has actually become outdated, and a fetter on an efficient, for them, means of reducing the costs of maintaining a healthy supply of labour-power to exploit. That may, indeed, be the case, as the various socialised healthcare systems across Europe that are far better than the NHS indicate, especially as the development of individualised healthcare provision using the latest technologies makes possible.
As with Brexit, what Reform (and also the Tories and Blue Labour) represent, here, is not the interests of the bourgeois ruling-class, but the petty-bourgeoisie. Similarly, what often is presented as the working-class supporting those parties is not the working-class at all, nor even ex workers, but is, also, the petty bourgeoisie of self-employed, small traders and so on, whose miserable living standards and existence only persists on the basis of cheating, bending the rules, and even breaking them (which is why they wanted Brexit to scrap the rules) and the sweating of any labour they themselves employ.
Its not those representatives of the ideas of the petty-bourgeoisie that represent the interests of the bourgeois ruling-class, but the likes of the Blair-Rights, the Liberals, Greens, SNP, Plaid and the rump Conservatives of the likes of Clarke, Heseltine, Soubry and Co., whose direction of travel in the last case, shows where that is headed.
Dunno though. In its Brexit Party guise it came out in favour of preserving the blast furnaces at Scunthorpe steelworks when their decomissioning was first mooted, and Richard Tice recently argued to preserve virgin steel making at Port Talbot. Notable that neither the Tories nor Labour showed the slightest interest in keeping these facilities open.
Of course Brexit Party/Reform were making these arguments on national security grounds rather than that of preserving jobs, conditions etc. But they seem to be the only party these days that even occasionally sees economic in terms of national interest, and however sincere or insincere this might be, I don't see it as inherently contradictory to an allegiance to the bourgeoisie. Even they need a modicum of state-provided security.
Should point out by the way that the two states that this milieu tends to fetishise - Singapore and Hong Kong - were/are both industrial powerhouses for their diminutive size.
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