MANY of Britain’s economic problems are long-term and chronic, rooted in an imperialist past and reflecting an imperialist present.

These include: 

• the primacy of the City of London and its financial institutions, monopolies and markets 
• the disproportionate accumulation of what Marx called “fictitious” capital, earning profits, rent and interest from the ownership of financial assets, rather than from the investment of fresh capital in the production and supply of goods and services 
• the imbalance between overseas and domestic capital investment, with the British capitalist class owning the fifth biggest share of foreign direct investments around the world (having slipped behind Canada and China), and still worth more than £1.5 trillion 
• the imbalance between short-term speculative and longer-term productive investment 
• Britain’s over-dependence on overseas earnings to offset an otherwise permanent deficit in the UK balance of payments 
• the long-term decline of key industries with reliance instead on imports; and 
• chronic under-investment in new and green technology at home, resulting in comparatively low levels of productivity.

Neoliberal and “free market” policies have exacerbated these problems, not least during Britain’s membership of the EU when capital controls and regional development policies were dismantled and key industries and utilities privatised.

The notion that rejoining the EU or some variety of the Single European Market will solve most or all of Britain’s economic problems beggars belief.

The main rate of corporation tax on company profits was slashed between 1983 and 2017 from 52 to 19 per cent (25 per cent today), while the top rate of income tax was almost halved from 83 to 45 per cent (now 48 per cent in Scotland).

And still big business and the super-rich complain that they are over-taxed as never before.

Britain’s social crisis is illustrated by the condition of our under-funded, under-staffed and over-burdened NHS.

Largely unreported is the extent to which the NHS is bled white by a private sector enjoying the benefits of state sector staff education and training, charging NHS trusts £80bn in PFI payments for buildings that cost £13bn to construct, and reaping at least £10bn a year in “excess profits” from supplying drugs costing the NHS £23bn (five times their cost of production).

At the same time, the drive to militarism and war continues: British spending on armaments escalates at the command of President Trump and Nato, US nuclear bombers return to their English bases and Britain’s stock of nuclear warheads is set to grow from 225 to around 260.

Britain’s social crisis is marked by the severe shortage of affordable housing, inadequate and high-priced public transport, environmental pollution, the commercial “normalisation” of violence (against women in particular), and high levels of drug and alcohol abuse.

All these are rooted in a class system which breeds social inequality, hopelessness, avarice, and anti-social and self-harming behaviour.

For three decades, asylum-seekers and other immigrants have been demonised on the front pages of our gutter press in Britain, abetted by politicians and translated into parliamentary legislation by a series of Tory and Labour governments.

The resurgence of racism that results is hardly unique to Britain, but it has divided our society to a degree not seen since the heyday of the National Front in the 1970s.

Today, after the rise and fall of the British National Party (BNP), yet another right-wing party is on the march. However, unlike the NF and the BNP, Reform UK is not a fascist formation. It does not threaten its political opponents with violence or state-backed repression, nor does it denounce bourgeois-democratic rights and elections.

Far right? In Britain, that would usually mean somewhere outside the Tory mainstream. Yet Kemi Badenoch’s Tories are today’s mainstream. Their politics are those of the Thatcherite Conservative Party, combining “free-market,” tax-cutting economics with anti-welfare state, anti-immigration social policies.

And all wrapped in the Union Jack while kowtowing to US state power and foreign monopoly capital.

This is Reform UK’s agenda too, but with a populist dash of renationalisation that may or may not be sincere.

While Nigel Farage has excluded known fascists from his party, Reform UK’s politics have undoubtedly attracted racists of every degree, together with others who could easily move further rightwards towards fascism.

The crucial question is whether the British ruling class needs Reform UK as a mass party, perhaps even as a party of government at Westminster.

At present, the Establishment’s first XI, the Conservative Party, is not capable of winning a general election and ruling in the interests of British state-monopoly capitalism. Neither, in the foreseeable future, is its second XI — the Labour Party — without the support of the Lib Dems at the very least.

The electoral arithmetic suggests that Reform UK would need the support of most Tory MPs to have any chance of forming even a minority government.

Nevertheless, the recent pattern of political donations reveals a clear turn by the rich and some big corporations to Reform UK. In the final quarter of 2025 alone, for instance, the latter party received more than £10m — twice as much as the Tories and five times more than Labour.

The roulette wheel is spinning. But it is too early to be certain about where the ruling class will place most of its political and financial chips.

Not on Labour, unless a more capable right-wing leader than Starmer can be found.

Some kind of Tory-Reform UK arrangement appears the most likely, although any open association between Farage and Thatcher’s ideological bastard children will be a vote-loser in those working-class areas where people have swallowed his fake anti-Establishment rhetoric.

This political crisis is itself part of a wider, deeper institutional crisis in Britain (and which takes different forms in other capitalist states). Politics, politicians, parliaments, the police and — to a lesser extent — even the monarchy have fallen into disrepute, to depths not known since the 19th century.

Another symptom of this crisis is Britain’s long-running inability or refusal to resolve the national question, not only in northern Ireland but also in Scotland and Wales.

In both countries, the legitimate aspirations of their peoples have long been denied and frustrated, while the present devolution settlement is already proving unstable and incomplete.

Again, this failure in rooted in Britain’s highly centralised capitalist system, opposed as it is to real economic planning and the redistribution of wealth.

But where is the left’s answer to all these dimensions of capitalism’s general crisis and its British characteristics?

Only the Communist Party has responded on every front with a comprehensive, class-based Marxist programme, Britain’s Road to Socialism.

The Labour Party has abandoned — whether or not temporarily — any semblance of class politics, while desperately trying to cadge working-class votes with nationalistic and pro-imperialist platitudes and sound-bites.

The workers and peoples of Britain need a mass, left-wing party capable of winning elections and taking governmental office. They do not need yet another self-righteous far-left sect.

Yet Your Party has been diverted into a civil war that has postponed any such prospect by years if not decades, whichever side wins.

The Green Party’s new leader forcefully puts the case against racism, public spending cuts, militarism and imperialist war. But given the readiness of Green parties across western Europe to sell their principles for a sniff of political office, including his own Green Party’s embrace of the big business EU, scepticism is justified.

The SNP and especially Plaid Cymru have left-wing members and progressive policies that challenge Labour’s appeasement of the capitalist monopolies, the gutter press and Reform UK. Yet the SNP, too, has now embraced Nato membership and shares Plaid Cymru’s enthusiasm for the EU (as does British, French and German imperialism).

Nonetheless, the immediate priority must be to build a united front of working-class, left and progressive forces against the rise of Reform UK, austerity, militarism and war. The correct electoral tactics must and will flow from this perspective.

Robert Griffiths was general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain from 1998-2026.