REFORM UK is polling well in opinion surveys, perhaps not so well in actual elections. And like all political parties trying to navigate the new world disorder, it is facing the disruptions and fissures that inevitably accompany the systemic crisis through which our peculiar social and economic formation is passing.
 
For Reform UK the problems are intense precisely because it hasn’t developed the rituals and conventions, and internal disciplinary mechanisms with which other, more established parties equip their leaders and the behind-the-scenes patrons who really call the shots.
 
Where the Tory Party traditionally did extremely well without formal mechanisms to decide vital questions of personnel and politics and instead relied on the barely visible powers of the “men in suits,” today it is saddled with a clumsy electoral procedure that has empowered its declining membership and successively gifted it Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and now Kemi Badenoch, none of whom carry the confidence of our ruling class in quite the same way that former Tory leaders did.
 
Ruling-class confidence now rests in Sir Keir Starmer and he will do for the moment although no-one has real confidence in his shell of a Labour Party, shorn of many of its members, in office by a quirk of our first-past-the-post election system, having shed several million voters and the affection of those remaining and giving every sign that it has lost the plot on issues from economic policy to the defence of the realm.
 
The latest opinion polling figures are quite compelling. The most recent YouGov/Times voting intention survey shows Labour now slightly in front on 26 per cent of the vote, having been on 24 per cent until recent weeks behind Reform UK, who remain on 25 per cent.
 
The Tories mark time on 21 per cent, while the Lib Dems are on 14 per cent, down from 16 per cent. The Greens hang on to a respectable 9 per cent of the vote. The SNP and Plaid retain leverage in their domains but scarcely at British level.
 
One measure of ruling-class confidence in Starmer is the slight rise in his personal popularity since he put himself at the head of the European Union’s war party in pledging to sacrifice welfare, health, overseas aid and education spending to pay for a retooled defence industry and enlarged armed forces.
 
It is the prospect of an end to the ruinous war in Ukraine that has bourgeois politicians (now exemplified by Starmer), the European neoliberal elite and the liberal commentariat lusting for new opportunities for war.
 
The Guardian’s political editor Tony Helm puts it thus: “Strikingly, Labour, rather than the Conservatives who are traditionally seen as stronger on defence, are now seen as by far the best at dealing with key foreign policy and defence challenges.

“Around 30 per cent of voters said they would prefer Labour when it comes to ‘dealing with allies against threats to Britain,’ compared with 18 per cent for the Tories. On ‘allocating funding to the armed forces and defence,’ 27 per cent support Labour to do so best against 20 per cent for the Tories. Some 28 per cent say Labour will best safeguard ‘Britain’s reputation abroad’ against 19 per cent for the Tories.”
 
Thus imperial force projection beyond our borders is presented as “defence challenges” while the Russian army — currently struggling with a demoralised and now under-equipped Ukrainian conscript military — is presented as a territorial threat to the Home Counties.
 
In as far as Russia constitutes a territorial “threat to Britain” it only does so if it could overcome the Polish army, its traditional adversary in the Wehrmacht, the Dutch, Danish, Belgian, and Czech armies — and the French. Plus, of course, any remaining US garrisons who might be inclined to offer resistance.
 
In simply posing such an unlikely scenario, but imagining it as the mythical circumstances which are deployed to justify the massive expansion of war-making capacity which is planned by the rump of the EU and Britain, we can easily see how the expansion of Nato to Russia’s borders gave force to the thinking in the Kremlin that led to the invasion of Ukraine.
 
Herein is the issue. Donald Trump, in giving effect to that shift in US ruling-class opinion that recognised, earlier than did our befuddled politicians, that Nato’s proxy war on the borders of Russia has failed in its main objective of weakening Russian opposition to the eastward march of the Western alliance, has done a deal to divvy up Ukraine’s agricultural and mineral resources.
 
In doing so he has exposed as a sham the whole notion that Nato is an alliance of equals. Nato is revealed as, in essence, the instrument of a cold war US strategy of confrontation with socialism. This appeared in state form as socialist relations of production in the USSR and the socialist states, and politically in each European state as the domestic opposition to the dictatorship of capital.
 
Nato’s notional role as a guarantor of capitalist Europe’s security is now seen as redundant by that section of the US ruling class presently exercising executive power.
 
The divisions inside Reform UK only tangentially reveal themselves as related to these events. Elon Musk’s preference for Nigel Farage’s main critic in the unrepresentatively small Reform UK parliamentary fraction cannot be seen as expressing Trump’s own capricious views. The empathy he and Farage enjoy itself is a pathological synthesis of the most unwholesome personalities that capitalism’s systemic crisis has thrown up.
 
But Reform UK is a particularly British phenomenon and must be analysed as such.
 
Hope not Hate has performed a useful function in producing, with Focaldata, a survey of 4,000 people prepared to admit to voting Reform UK.
 
The analysis they draw from the data divides Reform UK votes into five tribes thus: the working right comprising 22.5 per cent; radical young men (12.1 per cent); the moderate interventionists (19.1 per cent); the older authoritarian right (26.1 per cent) and traditional conservatives (19 per cent).
 
It is striking that each of these categories contains tendencies that, in broad ideological and political senses, are incompatible.
 
Thus the tribe of so-called working rightwingers are strongly for workers’ rights, are relatively under-educated, are typically renters and possess right-wing views on race, immigration, Muslims and climate change.
 
The tribe of radical young men, including a relatively high number of black and ethnic minority men, have contrary views on race and immigration, by a slight majority think feminism has gone too far, are tolerant of violence in some circumstances and have positive views about characters as diverse as Jeremy Corbyn, Andrew Tate and George Galloway.
 
The third tribe of the moderate interventionists (52 per cent women) favour multiculturalism, are pro-worker, positive about immigration, intolerant of violence, Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate and are disappointed with Labour and other parties.
 
The fourth tribe of older authoritarian rightwingers favour public ownership and state intervention, are largely without higher education, mostly own their own homes, are disillusioned with the political system, are more manifestly Christian than Reform UK voters generally and are pro-climate and anti-immigration.
 
The only internally homogenous tribe are the traditional conservatives who are older, more likely to own their own homes, favour Badenoch and Musk and consume GB News.
 
Even by this mechanically sociological measurement, Reform UK’s voters are a markedly diverse group whose most dominant characteristic, apart from disappointment with and hostility to traditional parliamentary parties and the political system, is a tolerance in parts to immigration, diversity on race and related questions, with education levels at the working-class norm and generally favourable to public ownership and state intervention.
 
Among some, an ambiguity about the utility of political violence sits easily with a preference, not always expressed with ideological clarity, for a different kind of political system that is characterised by public ownership and enhanced workers’ rights.
 
What immediately strikes the rational observer is quite how all this can be reconciled with support for a posturing bourgeois like Nigel Farage whose economic and political views put him closer to the typical ruling-class Tory than the bulk of British people (including, incidentally Tory voters who in a majority favour public ownership) and at serious odds with his own electorate.
 
That segment of Reform UK’s electorate that hang on to delusions about the anti-system views of that notorious grifter Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) is mostly characterised by naivety, lack of experience and a skewed reliance on news outlets even more unreliable than the mainstream media.
 
What should the left make of these findings that Reform UK voters are both much like the rest of the British and that significant numbers agree with the left, perhaps unknowingly, on the main economic and class questions?
 
The lesson must be that the left-wing critique of the existing political system and the political parties that constitute its organisational pillars must become hegemonic. It must entail a systematic demolition of the credibility of Reform UK’s pretensions alongside relentless criticism of conventional consensus politics.
 
The second priority for the left is to reach out to the diverse sectors that favour public ownership and state intervention in the economy to develop a socialist understanding of such a necessity and its incompatibility, from a class point of view, with the right wing with which it is bundled.
 
The third is to take the battle to the main terrain on which the fantasy anti-system rhetoric of Reform UK and its like is grounded.
 
That means winning a decisive section of the British people, principally of the working class, to an understanding of the function of immigration in the management of capitalism’s contradictions and its systemic crisis.
 
In this an understanding of the specifics of British imperialism in shaping both population flows and the present crisis is necessary. And with this an understanding of the role of the European Union in acting as the guarantor of European capitalism’s collective interests, especially in the labour market.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.