Starmer is fuelling the rise of the far-right

B ritain is broken, and sadly, things are going to get much worse. Indeed, there is currently no clear route to a UK which is more just, more humane, and more equitable. Even the drubbing that the Labour party received at the local elections in England on 1 May do not seem to be forcing Starmer to rethink his disastrous and unsuccessful wooing of right-wing voters in the English north and Midlands.

The simple truth is that Starmer and the right-wing Labour think tank Labour Together, which has captured this government, to the extent that an anonymous government minister told The Guardian that Starmer is a passenger in his own government, hate the left more than they are afraid of the far right. Labour has an impregnable majority in the Commons, but it’s still chasing after the right.

The calculation of Starmer and his allies is that left-wing and anti-Brexit voters are in the bag, so Labour can afford to ignore their concerns, telling themselves that although Labour took a hammering from Reform in last week’s local elections, the damage done to the Tories was far worse, and left-wing voters have no one else to vote for. History has shown us that poverty and inequality, combined with the demonisation of minorities, are rocket fuel for the far-right. The job of a responsible Labour government should be to tackle poverty and inequality, not to put rocket boosters on the far-right missile heading our way.

— Is Keir Starmer a passenger in his own governmen?

Starmer continues to preach his mantra of ‘growth’ even as he turns his back on the single measure which more than any other would boost economic growth, the UK rejoining the single market and customs union and restoring freedom of movement with the EU. Opinion polls consistently show a substantial majority support for this in the UK, never mind in remain-supporting Scotland, where opposition to Brexit has only grown over time. All our futures are being held hostage to Starmer’s spinelessness in the face of the right-wing media.

However, without significant and substantial reform of the tax system, which neither Starmer nor his Chancellor Rachel Reeves are prepared to consider, all that economic growth achieves is putting more money in the bank accounts of the wealthy, money that they will squirrel away in overseas tax havens. Growth for growth’s sake is not the solution to the problems that ail the UK. It is how that growth is harnessed and the profits from it are directed that is the key issue, and on that subject, Starmer and his allies are silent.

Right-wing populists like Farage preach a misleadingly simple solution to structural inequality. Can’t get an NHS appointment? Struggling to find a decent home or a secure job? It’s all the fault of immigrants and the “woke elites”. Funnily enough it’s never the fault of the tax evading millionaires and billionaires whose wealth has grown exponentially in recent years and who have benefited from the hollowing out, privatisation, and enshittification of public services, the same super rich who fund far right parties like Reform UK and the far-right media ecosystem and think tanks which form the manure filled compost in which Farage’s message of hate grows.

It remains inexplicable that the mainstream British media continues to indulge Farage’s self-serving fantasies, allowing this upper-middle-class, privately educated former commodities broker, who has been involved in right-wing politics for thirty years, to continue to pose as the champion of the common man against the ‘elites’. Farage is an agent of the elites, an agent of the wealthy, of vested interests and inherited wealth and privilege.

Farage is selling a lie, in the ten English local authorities which have fallen into his grasping hands, Durham, Kent, Lincolnshire, Lancashire, Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, North Northamptonshire, Doncaster, and West Northamptonshire, plus the Mayoralties of Greater Lincolnshire and Hull and East Yorkshire, Farage has pledged that these Reform-run councils and mayoralties would block asylum seeker accommodation and dismantle equalities programmes. Because that will improve bin collection. He has also promised a swathe of “efficiency savings”, warning council staff to watch out for their jobs, telling council staff in Durham: “I would advise anyone who’s working for Durham county council on climate change initiatives, or diversity, equity and inclusion, or thinks they can go on working from home, I think you had all better really be seeking alternative careers very, very quickly.”

After a decade and a half of Conservative austerity, it’s a cruel myth that there are still efficiency savings to be found. Voters in the councils Reform now controls are about to find that their local services are going to get much worse.

Labour’s response is to say that the government needs to get on with delivering, but the problem is that what they have delivered is loathsome. Reform will continue to gain ground, especially if more and more Tories choose to throw in their lot with them.

The main reason Reform is gaining traction in Scotland is due to the influence of the British media. It’s a far-right English nationalist party which has very little local organisation or membership base in Scotland, and which still has few Scotland-specific policies to speak of. Despite this, it has leap Farage-frogged Alba, which, notwithstanding its many shortcomings, is a homegrown Scottish party with a raft of Scottish policies and a Scottish membership base.

Until the death of Alex Salmond, Alba also had an experienced and politically savvy leader, yet Reform is expected to take a haul of seats in next year’s Holyrood election while Alba will most likely win none. The difference is that Alba, like the Greens in both Scotland and England and the SNP in Scotland, does not have a British media eagerly platforming it at every opportunity. Reform UK in Scotland is very much a creature of a Unionist establishment which wants Scotland to be kept in the UK at all costs and regards the quality and nature of the UK’s keeping Scotland in as a secondary consideration, if it cares about it at all. That’s pretty much the definition of blind and unthinking nationalism. An establishment-backed nationalist party which claims to oppose the elites and nationalism, that’s a whole new level of irony

GOING FURTHER

• Eyes on the prize: thinktank that put Keir Starmer and Labour on front foot | THE GUARDIAN

• Labour must avoid ‘naive’ lurch to right after Reform success, Haigh warns | THE GUARDIAN

Sources:

▪ This piece was first published in Wee Ginger Dug and re-published in Europeans TODAY on 5 May 2025 under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. | The author writes in a personal capacity.

▪ Cover: Dreamstime/John Gomez.