REFORM UK is on the skids. And it is mostly Nigel Farage’s fault.

His resignation as Clacton’s MP, swiftly followed by the news that the will seek re-election and “let the people decide” rather than the “Establishment” or the media, is a transparent attempt to wriggle out of the mounting problems that threaten to derail his parliamentary career.

Not that he devotes very much time to his public duties or to the problems that beset his constituents in what is among the most deprived places in Britain.

Farage faces declining poll results, a growing rival to his right flank and a serious entanglement with the parliamentary privileges committee.

There is the outstanding question of the donation from convicted fraudster George Cottrell in the weeks before the 2014 election and a £500,000 donation from Cottrell’s mother.

Resignation is the action of a chancer. The re-election ploy is designed to deflect attention from his real-life problems that themselves have arisen from his own tendency, where money is concerned, to play fast and loose with the conventions of politics and Parliament.

That this itself added some appeal to his brand is extra evidence that big swathes of public opinion are so alienated from the consensual politics of the neoliberal elite and Westminster that even so transparent a chancer as he can surf the tide of anti-Establishment opinion.

Part of his bigger problem is the increasingly obvious fact that Reform UK is a dumping ground for the Tory Party. Reform UK’s line-up includes much of Boris Johnson’s Cabinet while presenting baseline policies that are a mish-mash of populist misrepresentation and opportunist appeals to the pressing real-life problems of working people.

It is clear that the Establishment — if by this we mean the big banks and corporations, the City of London mainstream and networks of entitlement that make up the decision-making strata of British society — are really out to put him in his place.

Our ruling class is conscious that confidence in the institutions of British political life are in meltdown, that the Tory Party had become a busted flush, that Labour — hitherto a reliable partner in managing British capitalism — could no longer count on its working-class base and that new strategies are necessary to secure Britain as the territorial base for their global operations.

We should not fall victim to conspiracy theories here. There is no central co-ordinating centre of our rulers plotting in secret to carry out a grand plan to manage capitalism.

Rather there are a whole range of institutions, often staffed by capable and well-educated individuals, who function as guardians of each part of a system that has taken generation to perfect.

It is a measure of the depth of the global capitalist crisis and of the peculiar nature of our parasitic domestic capitalism that our country endures that all these hallowed institutions are themselves in crisis.

The Murdoch media has turned on Farage, the parliamentary processes continue and will be weaponised again if Farage is re-elected .Sections of the working-class electorate who invested the hopes raised by the Brexit process in Farage and his ever-changing political vehicle are disengaging.

Farage’s aim is to limit such appeal as Andy Burnham can generate in Labour’s much-neglected  working-class base.

The pressure is on to confine Labour’s putative new leadership to a lightly modified version of the Starmer regime, leaving the option of a revived Tory Party able to corral Reform UK into a regime of corporate continuity as the alternative government.

If Labour wants to be a party of government in the future, it must present a radical alternative to the EU and Nato’s war drive funded by austerity.