When considering left wing politics in the U.K. there is often an assumption that people in working class communities naturally swing to the left when deciding who to vote for. That has been an accepted narrative for decades, since Attlee came to power in 1945 leading to unhelpful terms like ‘the Red Wall’ – mostly areas of post-industrial England which could be relied on to return Labour MPs, out of habit rather than ideology, even when the rest of the country had turned blue. The simple reality is that most of this is a myth. British people haven’t elected a truly left-wing government, with a working majority, since Harold Wilson in 1966. Britain isn’t a left-wing country, working class people here aren’t naturally left-wing inclined and never have been.

When Margaret Thatcher abandoned industry and introduced draconian anti-union legislation in the 1980s, she broke the main routes to political activism for most working-class communities. Many of the problems with Britain today can be traced back to Thatcher, from blighted post-industrial communities to sewage in the rivers, from obscene levels of wealth inequality to the reinvention of the Labour Party by Blair as a pale reflection of Thatcher’s neoliberal ideals.

In parallel with this around 90% of the media here is owned by right wing billionaires, and right-wing political influence over the BBC has never been greater. In 1948 Nye Bevan, Labour statesman and architect of the NHS, described the U.K. press as “the most prostituted Press in the world, most of it owned by a gang of millionaires” and with the rise of social media the consolidation of right-wing control over what people see and hear in this country has never been greater.

We have to consider the creation of a new left-wing party here, and its likelihood of success, with all of the above in mind. Current polling shows the right-wing populist party of Farage/Reform would win 311 seats in Parliament if there was an election today, just 15 seats short of an overall majority. The breathless reporting about Reform on the BBC by their political editor makes me wonder whether he is their PR manager, and everywhere we look the news reports are that a Reform government is an inevitability. Meanwhile Starmer’s Labour Party has taken a stance that everything Reform is saying is right, but people should ignore that and vote for his Thatcherite version of Labour instead. It is a naïve strategy that validates Reform’s positions and is doomed to failure. 

In addition to this the first past the post system of voting makes it extremely difficult for a new party to gain seats or exercise any form of true political influence unless backed by the media. These are the barriers that the new party of Corbyn and Sultana is going to have to overcome, relentless negative reporting on them versus endless push pieces by the media on the rise of Reform.  This is all happening against a backdrop of an exponential increase in race-related hate crime and a breakdown in social protocols over the use of racist language in public, targeted at minority groups.

There is no doubt that there is an appetite for a new form of politics on both the left and right in this country, but the likelihood of Your Party ever being able to wield true political power seems vanishingly small. If they can make it work then they will no doubt win some seats at the next election, most likely in constituencies where the electorate are appalled by the Government’s stance on Gaza, but unless there is a hung Parliament, and Your Party holds the balance of power with its few seats, it seems the most likely outcome will be that they will split the left-leaning vote and trip the marginal constituencies to either Reform, the Green Party or the Liberal Democrats.

There are 15 million people living in poverty in the U.K. today and the numbers are rising. Meanwhile wealth inequality has never been higher with just 50 families here hoarding as much wealth as 50% of the population. Bevan wrote in 1952 that poverty, great wealth and democracy were fundamentally incompatible elements in any society – either poverty would use its political freedoms to destroy wealth, or wealth would use its power to destroy democracy. We just have to look at what is happening in America under Trump to see that playing out in real time. My pessimistic view is that the U.K. is heading down the same path, and the rise of a new party on the left will just be bows and arrows against the lightning. I hope I am wrong.

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