IT LOOKS like Nigel Farage is getting better at politics than any of the Establishment parties.

Last week’s round of local elections sampled the mood of English voters in some counties and towns. Reform UK harvested a good crop of Tory seats hung over from the big boost Boris Johnson’s party got for Getting Brexit Done. And what remained of Labour in these parts was humiliated.

In every one of the more prosperous shires — where even the middle class is beginning to feel the pinch — there are many thousands of workers, many on low pay and in insecure or seasonal jobs. Labour has abandoned any vestige of being a party for workers and its presence in these areas is now equally vestigial.

When Reform UK can take a supposedly rock-solid Labour seat the loss cannot be put down simply to the drunken antics of its former MP. Reform UK’s harvest of council seats, its capture of several local authorities — most particularly the Tory heartland of Kent — and a mayoral win or two means it has arrived as a serious contender.

You would expect in Kent, where the “small boats” narrative so assiduously promoted by bourgeois politicians of all stripes has a particularly toxic effect, that immigration would feature strongly in Reform UK’s pitch. And it does.

But look at the way it is presented. “Nothing works any more. You struggle to get a GP appointment. Your taxes keep rising. Last year the small boats saw over 36,800 people arrive illegally in the UK. This year illegal migration is up 42 per cent under Keir Starmer.”

Actually small boat arrivals were vastly down on the 2023 Home Office prediction that crossings could reach 85,000. Over a quarter of a million NHS staff, one in five, are immigrants. Ten thousand GPs, one in five, were not born here. Of course, last year approximately 479,000 people emigrated from Britain including 211,000 EU citizens, 189,000 non-EU nationals, and 79,000 British citizens.

The political problem is that a rational repetition of the actual statistics stands little chance against the rhetorical excesses of a bourgeois politician on the make, especially one like Farage who presentation of this issue is given extra potency precisely because his narrative is sustained by the very Establishment politicians he affects to despise.

Nevertheless, whilst immigration is the hook on which Reform UK hangs much of its political raiment Farage has many more opportunities to pose as an anti-Establishment figure, many handed to him by the Starmer-Labour government.

At the strategic level the Reform UK pitch is enabled by Labour’s branding exercise most closely associated with Morgan McSweeney. Starmer’s very own Tomas de Torquemada is charged with upholding Labour’s new orthodoxy. Whereas the Catholic Church had its Grand Inquisitor to first torture and then root out apostates and false believers, Labour simply casts them into limbo.

My earnest hope is that McSweeney avoids the fate of Torquemada whose bones, two years after he was buried, were torn from his grave and ritually burned as symbolic penance for his earthly transgressions.

Labour apparatchiks should note that long before he was disinterred and when his regime began to compromise the Church’s authority Torquemada was stripped of his powers and sent to monastic contemplation.

Where Reform UK’s election leaflet sports a tiny bullet point flag, Labour’s ubiquitous union flags are designed to subliminally associate Starmer’s Labour with empire and stand as signifiers of the prime minister’s strategic view that Tory voters are the vote bank that Labour in office needs to woo, and that Farage is his foe in this endeavour.

Last week demonstrated that not only is there a run on that bank but that the commodity trader has already emptied the ATM.

The present crop of Labour leaders tack right because they fear like the devil himself any obligation owed to working people’s economic interests when these come into conflict with the neoliberal elite to which they are wedded by both ambition and fear.

They have grasped the truth that to break with Treasury orthodoxy will draw to themselves both the character assassination carried out on Corbyn or the market “correction” dealt to Liz Truss.

Not for the first time this column finds itself ploughing the same furrows as that house journal of bourgeois political punditry The Spectator.

Its columnist James Kirkup (he of the free market think tank the Social Market Foundation) tells us of a revealing survey conducted by his determinedly iconoclastic paper that showed Reform UK voters are quite open to a left-wing economic agenda of nationalising utilities — 67 per cent support the public ownership of the water, rail and energy sectors and near seven out of 10 believe foreign ownership of British firms is bad for the country, while most think big business doesn’t pay enough tax.

It appears that Reform UK voters are further to the left on these questions than the average British voter, while one in 10 2024 Labour voters say they might switch to Reform UK.

Torquemada’s problem was the tendency of God’s earthly flock to think for themselves. The Inquisitor’s remedy, exotic tortures of the body to compel intellectual conformity, is not immediately available to our Establishment parties although only the bold would exclude it from the consideration of Labour’s Inquisitors.

Farage’s problem would be vastly more complex if he were to encounter a credible electoral challenge from a left that took the progressive economic views of the great bulk of the British working class as an indication of what policies might galvanise support.

The tendency on the left and among liberals of all stripes to panic at the advance of Reform UK has obscured the significant fact that millions of voters are shifting away from the tweedledee-tweedldumber conception of parliamentary politics that allowed the Tory Party to function as the preferred party of capitalist continuity with Labour occasionally permitted to administer the system when in crisis.

Where once his formula depended on Labour retaining authority and prestige as the guarantor of the welfare state and more or less full employment, the depth of capitalism’s enduring crises and Westminster Labour’s capitulation to neoliberal thinking has put an end to such binary politics.

Labour’s electoral decline is doing away with the Mandelson notion that workers have nowhere else to go and the self-serving idea that voting for a left-wing alternative is a wasted vote.

It is Labour that begins to look like a wasted vote not only because it brings little in the way of political gain for the working class but also because it may not get anyone elected.

It is not only that electors are willingly sampling a more varied choices but that for people across the political spectrum the neoliberal model is discredited.

When Reform UK says Labour and the Conservatives have broken Britain it speaks to the settled views of millions of people.

When it says wages are stagnant, energy bills are up and pensioners have been robbed of their winter fuel payments it is putting into operation a demagogic “left” turn that fuses its immigration narrative with an economic content that appeals to working people.

In taking this turn — in allowing a breach in the neoliberal consensus that binds Tory, Labour, Lib Dem and, as often as not, the nationalist parties — Farage is playing with fire.

In Britain, as in global politics, the divisions between the different bourgeois tendencies is playing out as a clash between those elements in big capital that trust to the projection of military power buttressed by economic and institutional imperial power — through bodies such as the IMF and World Bank — to maintain profits and those who see more utility in tariffs and more autarkic national economies the better to insulate themselves from the changing balance of global plower.

Where wannabe Trumps takes a turn in office even greater chaos results — check out the Javier Milei mess up in Argentina.

The wise money is that finance capital will find a way to clip Trump’s wings or, failing that, rediscover an specifically American way to terminate his rule with more or less extreme prejudice.

Similarly, disposing of the fantasies that flatter Farage is well within the skill set of the British bourgeoisie which mobilised its considerable assets to see off Corbyn and his movement when it represented a threat to the system.

This is a system of class rule in crisis and opens up new opportunities for the working-class movement.

We really need to do better this time.