BATTLE lines are emerging that could determine whether the left re-emerges as a serious challenger in British politics.

For most of the year the main disruptor has been the right, with Reform establishing a steady lead in opinion polls and a huge march through London led by “Tommy Robinson” showcasing global far-right leaders including the world’s richest man Elon Musk.

Musk is a vile megalomaniac using his wealth to promote race war while fantasising about a dystopian future in which tycoons like him rule via robot armies, all-encompassing surveillance and even slave labour.

Those whose fear a modern Britain dominated by precarious work, extortionate housing costs and faceless, unaccountable authority should fear the likes of Musk above all — but so far, the right has been effective at blaming immigration for the results of nearly 50 years of government of, by and for the rich.

Nigel Farage’s economic speech at the start of the week shows our opportunity. Reform UK’s prescription is just more of the same for Britain.

Farage thinks the key to growth is to unleash the City of London. Deregulate the banks, unleash the hedge fund and private equity wizards.

Yet the accumulation of staggering wealth by financiers and the asset-rich does not make ordinary people better off. We know, because it has been going on for years. Another Reform UK gimmick is selling the super-rich a “Britannia card” for £250,000 that would exempt them from tax on wealth, capital gains or income “earned” abroad: a loose concept, given the ease with which profits can be shunted from country to country.

That’s supposed to deal with the alleged flight of wealthy individuals from Britain’s shores. Actually, Britain’s rich have never had it so good. The number of billionaires in the country has more than doubled since 2010, from 74 to 156. Last year, British billionaires increased their wealth by £35 million every single day.

Not only is Reform’s claim that Britain is a hostile environment for the rich total nonsense, its prescriptions — more deregulation and tax cuts — are what we’ve had from every government for decades. As are its proposals for cutting public spending, which would make ordinary people poorer by withdrawing defined-benefit pension schemes and slashing welfare. No wonder Farage seldom dwells on his economic vision, preferring to rail about immigration.

This should be a recipe for failure. The rich and the City are not popular in Britain.

But Reform thrives, because the class argument against the rich is too often absent from our politics.

Labour doesn’t make it: Chancellor Rachel Reeves pushes the delusion that deregulation will promote growth, while taking advice on turning the economy around from the very asset-managers, like Blackrock, who do best from the status quo.

So it is vital that as “Your Party” builds towards its founding conference at the end of the month — days after Reeves’s Budget, likely to impose still more pain on working-class households — it focuses its message on the great class divide, the haves and the have-nots, and the relationship between the two: the fact that our rising rents, bills and council and income taxes, our failing services and crumbling infrastructure, are down to the daily robbery of the many by the few.

That is not an “Old Labour” prescription to stick to “bread-and-butter issues” and ignore the wider picture: the billionaires’ class war is a global project spearheaded by the likes of Donald Trump, who also fuels the resurgent far-right racism and dictates the European rearmament drive (at the expense of our public services).

All are about dividing workers, within and between countries, to cement the supremacy of the plutocrat class and US imperialism.

All must be confronted and defeated. But it is class conflict that is fundamental: and a rich versus the rest narrative that can turn the tables on Reform.