BRITAIN’S electoral map has changed with a significant shift in the voting behaviour of both the working class and the middle class.
 
The archaic disposition of seats in the Westminster Parliament — with His Majesty’s loyal ministers seated on one side of the chamber and His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition on the opposite benches draws on the liturgical traditions of the Christian church and formalises a now redundant disposition of political forces.
 
The greater diversity of political tendencies now present in Parliament — even though the deeply undemocratic FPTP system still distorts the real relations between the contending forces — would be better represented by the adoption of the republican model of a parliament, like the French and Scottish assemblies.

There the people’s representatives sit in an arc modelled on the epic theatre of classical antiquity which, in the modern era, reveals more clearly the distinctions between the new alignments of the reactionary right and hints at a new popular left constellation.
 
We should make the grotesque Palace of Westminster even more of a museum of oddities and build a new parliament of the people wherever HS2 eventually terminates.

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Within politics, the tectonic plates are shifting and we need to devise a strategy that puts the working class at the centre of political progress on its own account while taking account of the newly salient fact that voting behaviour is far more complex than is accounted for by Westminster’s archaic geometry.
 
The Communist Party’s election co-ordinator Phil Katz reports that voters often agreed with the party’s economic policies but, on a variety of issues, thought a vote for Reform UK expressed their opinions.

This invites comparison with France, where in traditionally left-wing districts National Rally (RN) presents a policy portfolio rather more distributionist than does Nigel Farage and with rhetorically anti-capitalist themes of a highly selective nature, it has displaced the left.
 
While there are some elements of this in the Reform UK approach, it is at present pitched more to the right on economic issues with a sharp concentration on migration as a wedge issue.
 
It is a relatively successful political project. Farage’s privately owned corporate political vehicle clocked up more than 4 million votes and came second in 98 seats, of which 89 were won by Labour.
 
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With Labour in office, and by its own account facing a difficult economic situation, the leadership insists on maintaining the public spending regime bequeathed by the Tories, and, as Rachel Reeves has shown, going further in cutting services.
 
Labour’s popular electoral base is substantially diminished from the high it attained under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Both the political significance and the metrics of this are dismissed by the more blockheaded fantasists in Labour’s enormously inflated parliamentary majority.
 
The more innocent of Labour’s Establishment tendency fetishise parliamentary arithmetic over the class realities of a capitalist crisis, for which they have no remedy much distinguished from that of their Tory predecessors in government. Labour’s leading core, however, are no innocents and know that in pursuing a neoliberal path parallel to that taken by the Tories they will face working-class resistance.
 
Indeed, the first challenge, over the cap on child benefits that leaves families without support for a third or subsequent children, has already resulted in a substantial abstention and a direct challenge by Labour MPs and independents.
 
The government is moving on public-sector pay but pits pay rises against investment in public services and benefits with a strategy that, if allowed to continue, will produce tensions within the labour movement and will give the far right an opening. Already ending the winter fuel allowance is having this effect.
 
Labour movement veterans will recollect that in an earlier, and less severe, crisis of British capitalism the Labour chancellor of the exchequer, Denis Healey, took an IMF loan the public spending conditions of which angered Labour’s constituency and union delegates.
 
In the interregnum — before Brexit — the regulatory framework of the European Union, its stability pact and the provisions of the Lisbon and Maastricht treaties performed the same disciplinary role as the IMF in ensuring that the costs of capitalist crisis were imposed on the people rather than profits.
 
In purely psephological terms, Labour’s victory is owed to the schism in the Tory total accomplished by Reform UK’s 4 million votes. And despite their own mostly creditable efforts so does the election of the extra Greens who have as many seats as Farage but on half his votes.
 
Reform UK’s handful of seats is the tip of a middling iceberg of support that has emerged in seats held both by Labour and the Tories. Farage’s outfit won over 600,000 more voters than the Lib Dems.
 
Take note of how support for Reform UK mushroomed during the campaign. Farage, whose ambitions initially seemed centred on grandstanding Donald Trump’s election campaign, spotted this new opportunity and swiftly reversed his decision not to stand and, with the prerogatives of a CEO, deposed his Clacton candidate. This gave his campaign a boost that the smart-arse tacticians in Keir Starmer’s back office thought they could instrumentalise.
 
They instructed Labour’s Clacton candidate to clear off and campaign elsewhere the better to big-up the Farageist challenge to the Tories.
 
In doing so they gave Reform UK extra momentum to achieve a dangerously high electoral score without, as Farage claimed, much in the way of a political machine or infrastructure.
 
It is important to carefully parse the Reform UK vote, identify its constituent and contradictory parts and begin to devise strategies to differentiate it along class lines.
 
The disputatious Tory factions — in the party to which the ruling class traditionally delegates the management of its affairs — are incapable of forming a government even though the combined popular vote (23.6 per cent for the Tories and 14.3 per cent for Reform UK) is greater than Starmer’s 33.9 per cent.
 
If they found a way to work together — recollect that Reform UK’s predecessor did not challenge in safe Tory seats — getting on for 150 Labour seats would be vulnerable.
 
Quite how we might categorise the slippery, untrustworthy and duplicitous Lib Dems who took 71 seats on a vote lower than Reform UK remains unclear although we might surmise from their role in Cameron’s coalition that they will be reliable defenders of austerity economics in the short term and of capitalism in the longer.
 
The Conservative coalition is in pieces, divided on substantial economic questions while the decisive elements in our ruling class are as comfortable with Keir Starmer as he is with them.
 
Farage made it clear that he is coming after Labour.
 
We should not underestimate either the willingness of Reform UK to mobilise a populist rhetoric that gives voice to the many unmet needs and angry assumptions of working people or its desire to divert them into reactionary channels.
 
Lee Anderson’s demagogic outburst over the altercation at Manchester airport fused crude law-and-order rhetoric with racist undertones. We can expect more of this performative posturing.
 
Again a comparison with the French situation is instructive. Like Reform UK, RN is a fusion of diverse and contradictory elements. But Marine Le Pen artfully refuses the far-right appellation.
 
“We strongly disapprove of this word,” she told Al Jazeera. “We define each other as localists, or nationalists.”
 
Her spokesman, Edwige Diaz, argues that, particularly on the economy, RN is closer to what left-wing parties in France once offered: “It’s not the left against the right any more, it’s the localists against the globalists.”
 
In fact, Marine Le Pen has pursued a “de-diabolisation” campaign that has reshaped her formation from its toxic assembly of Nazi collaborators, Catholic reactionaries, royalist nostalgics, Hitler fans and resettled French Algerian “irreconcilables” into a formidable political machine that now commands big support in former industrial areas and in rural districts and neglected small towns and is the biggest single voting bloc.
 
This draws on a deeply rooted anti-elite sensibility that in some senses risks being reinforced by the “cordon sanitaire” tactics employed to keep it out of parliamentary and presidential power.
 
Reform UK (like its Brexit Party and Ukip predecessors) too likes to present itself as outside the elite and it has, as unacknowledged auxiliaries, a fascist fringe which plays to the same themes and can, as demonstrated last weekend in London, mobilise up to 15,000 on a street demonstration.
 
Unless the labour movement and the left are able to both challenge Labour’s neoliberal project and reach voters vulnerable to the appeal manufactured by the far right it will find itself on the back foot in Parliament and on the streets.
 
Part two will look at the constituent parts of Reform UK’s electoral base, the forces behind it and the right-wing big business elements in its policy platform.