Can Reform replace the Conservatives?

Reform is the party to watch in UK and its leader, Nigel Farage, who was an also-ran in previous elections, is now an elected MP and odds-on favourite at 7/4 to become prime minister in the next election in 2029.

In the 2024 election, the Conservatives suffered what they feared would happen in 2015 when they agreed to hold a referendum to prevent losing Conservative supporters to Farage over membership of the EU. He was leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) at the time and riding high amongst Conservative voters who wanted out.

The referendum ploy worked and the Conservatives won the 2015 election and UKIP ceased to matter politically after people voted for Brexit in 2016. But they were not rid of Farage who resurfaced in another guise and is now a major player in UK politics.

He left UKIP in 2018 and founded the Brexit party that changed its name to Reform UK in 2021 and siphoned off Conservative support on the right of British politics in the 2024 election and now poses an even greater threat to replace the Conservatives as the party of government.

The political issue is the same as before because what Brexit was really about was not Europe but control of the UK’s borders — a euphemism for the effective management of immigrants and immigration into the UK. Immigration is the issue of our times on which the popularity of Reform is primarily based and on which it is poised to eclipse the Conservatives.

A split in popular support for parties on the right is normally good for Labour. But Reform and Farage are odds-on favourites to win next time because they also pose a threat to Labour’s working-class support that, coupled with splits in its support on the left, could easily let Reform in and Farage as PM.

Obviously, it is too early to make any worthwhile prediction as it is events, not betting odds, that determine the outcome of elections. The best that can be done is to look back to the last time a political party eclipsed another as a party of government and the conditions that prevailed that enabled that to happen.

The decline of one party of government and the rise of another last happened in UK when Labour replaced the Liberal party in the 1920s. The process was gradual and began much earlier. The Labour movement was politicised in the late nineteenth century in a climate in which the exploitation of workers was rampant; it was harsh and the impotence of bourgeoise society to represent and promote the interests of the working class was palpable.

Only the Labour Party, with its strong trade union links and socialist political ideology, could represent working people in their struggle against exploitation and harsh working conditions.

Karl Marx had been preaching about the class struggle in England where he escaped as a refugee in 1849 and lived until his death in 1883. It is relevant to observe that at the time refugee aliens were welcome and free to come and settle in England — there was no immigration control as such.

Marx’s close associate Fredrich Engels also escaped to England.  He lived with Marx for a while and wrote a book called ‘the condition of the working class in England’ about worker exploitation and class oppression and the harsh conditions they had to endure.

Both revolutionaries were influential about the need for workers to get organised politically to engage in the class struggle although what Marx predicted was revolution not political involvement — it has been said of Marx that he was very good at diagnosis but not good at prognosis.

Contrary to Marx’s predictions, the working class in England did not engage in revolution to improve its lot.  Instead, it formed the Labour Party that replaced the Liberal Party to promote the rights and welfare of working people.

Labour became the natural alternative government to that of the Conservatives from 1922 onwards. The final push was electoral reform in 1918 that extended the right to vote to all men over the age 21 which meant the workers could vote their very own representatives to parliament. 

It formed two minority governments with the Liberals in the 1920s until it won a by landslide at the end of World War II in 1945 when Labour fully established itself as a natural party of government.

Defeating Churchill and the Conservatives in a landslide in 1945 was a clear sign that society had tilted in favour of the common man and woman and although the Conservatives were returned to power on and off afterwards, the centre ground in UK politics shifted leftward in favour of a mixed economy and social liberalism for a while.

It shifted halfway back with the market economics of Margaret Thatcher 1979-1997 but social liberalism remained a force in British society and strengthened during the Labour governments 1997-2010 and the Conservatives-Liberal Democrat coalition government 2010-2015 until it began to deteriorate into what its detractors call woke ideology.

The question now is whether British society has had enough of social liberalism/woke ideology and whether Reform is the party to reverse it. Can Reform and its leader Nigel Farage and their mouthpiece GB News replace the Conservatives like Labour did the Liberals?

They are literally right-wing reactionaries obsessing against immigrants, refugees and human rights. Scapegoating refugees and immigrants does not compare with the changes in working-class political power that occurred in the early 20th century. The issue of immigration is too small a peg on which to hang the end of the Conservative party.