REFORM UK, or rather its endlessly slippery leader Nigel Farage, cast immigration in apocalyptic terms, as if migration to these shores is uncontrolled and, as a subset of this narrative, that arrivals by small boats are its characteristic form and one that represents an existential threat to our borders.

Two facts allow us to see this approach, which is replicated in the practice, if not the rhetoric of the parties of government, is false.

First, small boat arrivals, who, if bona fide refugees, are legally given refuge, comprise a minor part of the total, and second, the largest number of migrants arriving do so are licensed by the government at the bidding of employers. This may account for the difficulty the government has in taking on the people-traffickers. A safe route for refugees would put them out of business and, in fact, the government, in collusion with employers, are people-traffickers themselves.

Getting these two facts across to millions of working people would immediately change the political climate. It would allow us to see the movement of large numbers of people as built into the existing system. At some level, people already take this for granted. For instance, in the context of discussion about a massive expansion of council housebuilding or staffing the care sector and the NHS, there is a broad welcome for migrant workers.

Incidentally, bearers of the surname Farage are most likely descended from French Protestant small boat refugees fleeing Catholic persecution and arriving here before border security became a fetish.

Britain, in less than five generations, has exported millions of its citizens to settle, usually at great cost to indigenous peoples, an enormous part of the globe. The US is built on the extermination of the thousands of existing communities and the often forced immigration of millions of settlers.

These are the facts of empire and we can see in the present policy of the imperial powers an endorsement of this strategy in Palestine.

The essential foundation of this phenomenon is the role of capital in shaping every aspect of modern life, by which we mean since the Industrial Revolution.

Since the world historical defeat of socialism at the end of the 20th century, capital has had a more or less clear run. When we talk today about neoliberalism, it is in the context of the deregulation of capital markets, one aspect of which was Margaret Thatcher’s “big bang” just four years before the dismantling of socialist relations of production in Europe and the USSR.

The consequent intensification of the integration of British and US capital is the single fact that most conditions today’s domestic politics and is immediately reflected in Keir Starmer’s abject humiliation before the grotesque figure of Donald Trump as our Prime Minister straddles the deepening contradictions between transatlantic and European capital.

Labour has been pressed into service to manage British capitalism because the first choice party of the British bourgeoisie has proved spectacularly incapable, with its fault lines visible most clearly over immigration.

If the British ruling class needs immigration to sustain its continued accumulation of surplus value, but finds that securing willing consent for this is impossible, then it is not surprising that the principal party of capitalist continuity has to give way to another party shaped to fulfil that role.

The job of Reform UK is to siphon off anti-system revolt.

Britain is thus little different from every other developed capitalist state in which policy convergence between nominally centre-left and centre-right politics is now expressed as submission to the dictatorship of global financial markets that operate to delimit policy choices. Donald Trump is just the latest to feel the pressure of the bond markets, although, if he had paid attention, he would have seen a dry rehearsal in the humiliation of Liz Truss.

In a precursor to this in 1976, Denis Healey, Labour’s chancellor, went to the IMF for a $3.9 billion loan and surrendered any prospect of a progressive economic policy, which, if implemented beyond the limits big capital tolerates, would have been punished just as surely. Since financialisation, government debt has ballooned and become much less easily dealt with.

We can be sure that had Jeremy Corbyn’s spectacular rise in popularity in 2017 been allowed to continue, his government would have immediately felt the heat.

But we are where we are, and the sense that Labour has ceased to be a credible vehicle for working-class politics underpins the reality that there really is no alternative to a systematic challenge to the way things are. We have to look at how to make that challenge.

In the Brexit years, we got used to seeing the European Union as responsible for the imposition of these distinctive features of the neoliberal order. The so-called “free” movement of capital, services, labour and goods brought with them austerity as the price for conforming to EU treaty obligations; limitations on employment rights enforced by the European Court of Justice and precarity as the price for an economic and political regime which deepened the disparities of wealth, health and wellness.

But membership of the EU was simply the device for enforcing this regime, and if Brexit has allowed for an alternative, the actual balance of political and class power in Britain has not.

Opposition to the neoliberal order finds expression across the political spectrum. The sharp increase in the gap between the rich and the rest, the failure of the political system in general and Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral arrangements in particular — and the sense that deregulation and privatisation have evacuated power to an unaccountable elite — runs across working-class communities and accounts for the collapse in Labour’s appeal. It is a belief shared across the capitalist world.

Where Reform UK picks up on this, it corrals diverse groups of voters, some of whom share a hostility to the rich, support for public ownership and a sense of lost agency. Two bits of Faragiste messaging are designed to serve this strategy. First, he suggested some weeks ago a certain sympathy with Jeremy Corbyn and, second, he most recently tweeted support for the nationalisation of steel production.

Farage typically deploys a racist and xenophobic rhetoric around immigration to capture attention and appeal to the unwary and least class-conscious, but both he and his party/business are vulnerable to a close scrutiny of what they actually stand for. This vulnerability is particularly acute in health privatisation.

A real danger for the working-class movement and the left, especially with Labour in government, is the threat that the far right will capture the sense of anger and insurgency against established power. We had a practical demonstration of these dangers last year when what were fabricated protests against migrants became an inchoate protest directed in these particular circumstances against the police.

The worst possible scenario has the left corralled by riot police while shouting anti-racist slogans at people who see themselves as protesting against the way things have become.

We need a political strategy that allows the left to find common cause with the millions of people who feel the effects of neoliberalism, but which doesn’t succumb to the full spectrum reactionary messaging around immigration.

Trade union action traditionally reduces the gap between in-country and new foreign-born entrants to the workforce. Workers easily understand that “unity” is necessary in confrontation with the employers. At their best, trade unions challenge both government and employers. Failure to do so on issues which divide workers opens the way to the likes of Farage, exposes divisions and weakens the working class as a whole.

Winning clarity about the specific nature of immigration in our country has to take as its starting point criticism of the failure of the capitalist state to develop the full range of human capacity that is present in our society. A vast expansion of skills training and technical education must entail a partnership between local authorities, colleges and employers underpinned by a levy on employers, especially in areas of skills shortage like agriculture, construction, information technology and health.

It is morally unacceptable and economically short-sighted for Britain to plunder poorer and former colonial countries for skilled workers, especially health professionals, when a restoration of the student bursaries and the abolition of tuition fees would vastly increase recruitment.

Similarly, the demand side of an active and green industrial policy driven by government investment and aided by investment incentives and controls on the export of capital would align demand and supply of a more highly skilled domestic workforce.

The question naturally arises, what would be a credible political vehicle for a policy that combined a broadly based welfare state with a state-driven investment strategy in human resources and manufacturing, but one which dealt with the flow of people in and out of the country as part of a human rights-based foreign policy?

Ending employer control of visa certifications for a start. Equal employment rights for migrant and seasonal workers. Breaking the power of criminal gang-masters and expanding housing, health and social services so that the needs of all, including migrant workers, can be met would erode anti-immigrant sentiment.

In our most recent experience, the political polarisation which inevitably accompanies the popular success of a progressive domestic agenda — Labour’s 2017 election manifesto — sharpens the political and class contradictions, mobilises right as well as left, but does so around precisely the issues on which the right is most vulnerable.

Where the left was most vulnerable — liberal illusions about the EU, a failure to deal with the issue of anti-semitism and a silence on the question of Britain’s imperialist foreign policy — was compounded by a failure to deal with immigration as a class issue.

At the same time, the pitch by some anti-racist activists to approach people who support or sympathise with Reform UK exclusively on the question of racism neither changes the views of real racists nor does it reach those who are drawn to right-wing demagoguery on other questions or who are simply confused.

These failed approaches are a continuation of the liberal attempt — embraced by sections of the far left — to explain the Leave vote as all about racial bigotry.

If the left as a whole doesn’t deal with what working people are really thinking, there is little chance of changing minds, and the dangers that Reform UK actually represents are missed.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.