By Paul Gerrard
Labour has been dreading the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, and so they should have. Having won the seat with a 15,000 majority less than a year ago, they lost one of the 50 safest Labour seats to Reform UK. What a verdict on ten months of Labour government that 15,000 votes have simply evaporated!
Reform UK have targeted “left behind” impoverished seats in northern, rural and seaside towns where Labour (and Tory) councils have presided over long-term decline. Reform UK offers a simple solution: blame immigration. As if new hospitals and schools would surge out of the ground and good jobs would spring up, if only there were fewer immigrants! Reform UK openly admires Trump’s vile and divisive policies of deportations, and they also call for Musk-style ‘task forces’ in every council to slash expenditure. We’ve fought the Tories austerity, we’re fighting Labour’s austerity 2.0, and we don’t want another austerity with extra racism.
How has it come to this?
Since winning a huge parliamentary majority last July, pushed into office by anger and frustration after fourteen years of the Tories, Labour has continued to govern in much the same way as them. Labour campaigned on the slogan of ‘we need change’, but there is precious little of it to be seen. Winter fuel payments for pensioners were cancelled, the two-child limit on child benefit was retained and now swingeing cuts to benefits for disabled people are coming.
Public sector workers are told that they are inefficient, that we need a lot less of them, and they will only get a below-inflation pay rise. Labour is showing itself to be a big business party, a party of the well-heeled and hated establishment.
So who is campaigning to ‘shake up the establishment’? None other than the leaders of Reform UK – bankers, stockbrokers, privately educated millionaires. You couldn’t make it up. And Labour can’t call them out because they love millionaires – and there are more than a few millionaires among their MPs and Lords! So Reform can continue to pose as ‘the party of the little man’.
Reform’s success at this election is a dire warning to Labour, but it is one they will not heed. We will even hear the fool’s argument from Labour politicians that if we want to beat Reform, we need to sound more like them. Wrong. But to the extent that people are won over to the false and dangerous idea that immigrants or trans people are ‘the problem’, they will support the authentic racists and transphobes rather than some tribute band.
Labour will never lay Reform to rest. To do that we will need a party of struggle, a party which is unambiguously on the side of working-class people and all the oppressed, and which can unite their struggles and defeat the billionaire class. If you want to help us in the campaign to build such a party, join Socialist Alternative!
