LAST December, Stefan O Nuallain of Trademark Belfast warned a TUC anti-racism summit that we had four years to stop the far right winning power.

The warning cannot be dismissed. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has established a consistent polling lead over other parties.

While various anxieties feed protests outside hotels in which asylum-seekers are held, the role of experienced far-right agitators in organising many of them is clear — so the extreme right is helping shape a dominant political narrative. Community organisations such as the Indian Workers’ Association report a frightening rise in street racism and racist attacks, linked to the “open hostility towards migrants prevailing across the country.”

Parts of the press revel in the wave of England flags being hoisted in public places or painted on roundabouts. The Telegraph’s excitable Dubai-resident columnist Isabel Oakeshott, wife of Reform MP Richard Tice, even suggests the country is at “tipping point.”

We should not be panicked by an impression, cultivated by powerful political and media players, that this represents settled opinion. The protests Oakeshott thinks mark a tipping point are a fraction of the size of the Palestine solidarity demonstrations, whose organisers are of the left.

Nor have they encompassed as many parts of the country as the Palestine movement, which is the biggest mobilising force in Britain today and in surveys enjoys majority support, something not true of Reform or even combined Reform-Tory polling figures.

The Palestine movement is not a direct counterpart to the rise of the right. The comparison simply reminds us that the Establishment exaggerates the significance of some trends and downplays others, casting British politics in a sometimes misleading light.

But there is no room for complacency. Reform does not need majority support to form a government — the current Labour government, elected on less than a third of the vote, shows that. It does not need it either to have the older parties dancing to its tune. Already Blair-era Labour grandees David Blunkett and Jack Straw are urging the government to decouple from the European Convention on Human Rights to accelerate deportations.

As with Rishi Sunak’s “stop the boats” mantra, the narrative that irregular immigration is the biggest problem facing the country is taking hold and helps obscure the real causes of the crises in housing and public services or the long-term erosion of working-class incomes.

So the left needs to propagate its own narrative. The foundation of the new left party announced by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana will play a huge part in this. Starmer loyalists claiming it will help Reform by splitting the Labour vote are wrong: the right must be challenged, not appeased, and a combative left is essential to that.

The class politics needed to replace the politics of division has to come from somewhere, and it is inconceivable that it could come from Labour as currently led, though the party still has many in it who can contribute.

The emergence of scores of local groups meeting to discuss “Your Party” shows potential for a community-rooted movement of real weight, though navigating the party’s relationship with these groups, in some of which self-appointed leaders are seeking to police their own political lines or exclude people on sectarian grounds, will require discipline. Differing views on party structure should not risk a loss of unity, when the left needs to put itself back on the map.

But articulating a left alternative is just the start. Success means winning mass working-class support for socialist politics, possible only through readiness to learn from past mistakes, free and open debate — a call-out culture based on denouncing heretical views breeds a bubble mentality — and an outward, alliance-building approach to local labour movements and grassroots campaigns.

The right flourishes where working-class culture and politics have been uprooted. Our task is to put them back.