ALEX HALL interviews PAUL HOLDEN, whose bombshell book uses leaked documents to expose how the Starmer faction used systematic dishonesty to seize power and reopen the door to the corrupting ecosystem of corporate lobbying and sleaze
Reform UK: selling out Britain’s workers
In the second of a three-part analysis, PHIL KATZ looks at areas where the labour movement should be able to demolish the new right-wing upstart party: its economic policies and attitude to the welfare state
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage
The recent calls to strip Michelle Mone of her peerage after she was caught scamming the public for £122 million should reinvigorate the longstanding progressive demand to completely abolish the entire undemocratic, corrupt relic, writes ELLIOT TONG
As gold hits $4,000 per ounce, soaring from only $250 back in 2001, the US national debt has reached $37 trillion — it’s all about to come crashing down, warns JOHN ELLISON, which our leaders would have known had they only studied Marx’s magnum opus Capital
Now at 115,000 members and in some polls level with Labour in terms of public support, CHRIS JARVIS looks at the factors behind the rapid rise of the Greens, internal and external
Witnessing a war of words at a meeting on tackling militarism at The World Transformed, BEN COWLES spoke to a union rep who is organising against war from inside the arms industry itself, to hear about worker-led solutions to ending weapons production
FRANCISCO DOMINGUEZ, ROGER D HARRIS and JOHN PERRY contrast Trump’s warships and F-35 fighters threatening Venezuela with the $20bn bailout for Milei’s collapsed economy, all enabled by a highly ideological IMF
IN JULY, Nick Wright and I wrote a pamphlet on Reform UK. It was the first analysis of this party to emerge from within the labour movement. In the process of writing, some of what we discovered surprised us.
There were the obvious surface symptoms of a party with its roots in Ukip and the Brexit Party, not least the racism and a two-faced approach to its core beliefs and public statements.
In my last feature, I was able to demonstrate that Reform UK is very much a class-based political force. It was rooted in a division within the capitalist class that emerged after 1945, with those who looked to the EU to reinforce its ranks weakened in the struggles of the 1960s and ’70s with the unions.
Reform UK champions that section which looked to neoliberalism, the leadership of the capitalist world by the US, but which also included a sizeable economically landlocked grouping of small and medium-sized businesses. There was, too, the residual stench of Thatcherism with its suspicion of foreigners, hatred of unions and belief that the profit system solved all problems.
Reform UK enjoyed a breakthrough in the last general election in a way that Ukip and the Brexit Party could barely dream of. Indeed, the undemocratic first-past-the-post system hid a much bigger layer of support, still regionally concentrated but extending to working-class voters and Britain’s smaller market towns.
Reform UK generally draws its strongest geographical support from areas in northern England, the Midlands, and certain coastal and rural regions. These areas often have populations that feel economically and politically marginalised.
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The left must avoid shouting ‘racist’ and explain that the socialist alternative would benefit all
In the last of a three-part series, PHIL KATZ explains how unions are best placed to present a positive, pro-worker, pro-public services alternative to the narrative of division, deregulation and greed peddled by Farage’s party
Farage's party is a political machine deeply tied to the interests of US big business, writes PHIL KATZ in the first of a series of features on this growing force in British politics