THERE is little need to imagine life under a Reform UK government — that dystopian future is being played out in full view in Minnesota.

Armed agents of the Trump administration, recruited from among white nationalists across the United States and permitted to behave with impunity and immunity from any consequences of their actions, have murdered two peaceful protestors in Minneapolis in recent weeks.

This is in the course of flooding that liberal city with a small army of right-wing goons for no purpose beyond terrorising the community, black and migrant workers in particular.

Ostensibly targeting criminals in the US illegally, they have swept up hundreds of legal residents, and those placed in detention include small children, aged as young as two.

These thugs have been commanded on the ground by one Gregory Bovino, who struts around — armed, uniformed and in flowing greatcoat — for all the world like a nazi gauleiter on the eastern front in the second world war.

The events in Minnesota are meeting mass resistance from the population, which is producing splits in the Trump regime and may put its overtly fascist elements on the back foot. But the march of Trump is clear — towards a racist, violent authoritarianism in the service of a ruling plutocracy.

Couldn’t happen here? The hard right in Britain is fast consolidating around Reform, with former Home Secretary Suella Braverman this week’s trophy defector from the Conservatives.

Braverman was the most fascist-adjacent leading Tory in the last government. She wanted to ban the Palestine solidarity marches altogether and was quite happy to see far-right thugs mobilise against it in November 2023.

She was fired from her post by Rishi Sunak for publicly complaining that the Metropolitan Police where not cracking down hard enough on the pro-Gaza protests. She has since kept up a running stream of ultra-right talking points on social media and elsewhere.

She now joins Robert Jenrick on the Reform bench in the Commons.  Jenrick has himself moved to the far right. At Tory conference last year he called for the sacking of judges whose rulings displeased him, to be replaced by political appointees.

He also famously complained that he saw too few white faces during a brief visit to the district of Handsworth in Birmingham. And he has developed a line in vigilante videos, striding around the streets in search of wrongdoers to confront.

Braverman and Jenrick have thus between them incrementally outlined a programme of aggressive reaction, to be targeted at ethnic minorities and the left, deploying the power of a reshaped police-judicial apparatus to impose their will.

And these two are by far the most experienced politicians in Nigel Farage’s team, having both served in Cabinet. It is fair to assume they would have key roles in any Reform-led government.

And they are the real, snarling, face of the party, behind Farage’s faux bonhomie. Even more than Trump in Washington, the Reform leader would likely be just front-of-house for a brutal and undemocratic regime, simply guaranteeing the interests of the plutocracy he forms part of.

So unless we are prepared to countenance the scenes in Minneapolis being recreated in Birmingham or Bradford in just three years’ time, it is imperative to mobilise the widest possible range of forces against the far-right menace immediately.

The broad-based Together demonstration in London on March 28 must be the first national rallying of the democratic forces. But it can only be a start. The Reform gang need to be exposed in every forum, confronted in every community, challenged from every platform, by a movement for equality, democracy and social justice.