Political formations trading on racist incitement and utterly false promises of looking after the poor, while propping up the worst excesses of capitalist exploitation, have gained ground in the likes of Hungary, Poland, Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Germany.
Closer to home, the obnoxious Nigel Farage scapegoats immigrants and people of colour for the collapse in housing and other public services which his class of bankers created.
He demonises migrant workers – despite 35% of NHS doctors and 28% of NHS nurses being born outside the UK – but gives less prominence to Reform UK’s call for complete privatisation of health services, and tax cuts of £88 billion on big business and the super-rich.
After Reform UK’s recent Scottish council by-election results, the media is bulging with speculation about Farage’s racist demagogues gaining a dozen MSPs in 2026. We need to take this threat seriously. But to confront and defeat the far-right we first need to identify why some people are voting for them, and what alternatives need to be forcefully popularised by socialists, trade unionists, and decent human beings wanting to halt the far-right from wreaking havoc in our communities.
Why did Donald Trump – a billionaire pretending to be an outsider and a misogynist bigot – increase the Republicans’ vote by 2.4 million, not only from chunks of the white working class but also black and Latino workers, and many women?
Fundamentally through mass disillusionment with the political system run by and for the billionaires, in what amounts to a one-party state with two rival factions, leading to 130m Americans not voting, and the loss of 7.2m votes for the Democrats.
The billionaires funded this election to the tune of an unprecedented $16bn, with 83 of them (including Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg) supporting Kamala Harris, and 52 billionaires (including Elon Musk) funding Trump’s election. America truly is “a dollar democracy”, where money buys presidents, and thereby the legislation to keep money in the hands of the few at the expense of the many.
Despite being the benefactor of a rigged system that upholds the dictatorship of capital over labour, of millionaires over millions of working-class Americans, with wealth inequality wider than the Grand Canyon, Trump tapped into the mass alienation of millions of working-class people.
When he posed the question “do you feel better off?”, this found an echo in a society where 60% live from paycheque to paycheque, standing on the brink of disaster if they fall sick or meet an unexpected bill, when wages have fallen in 25 consecutive months.
The failure of the Democrats’ capitalist administration to meet the basic needs, let alone dreams, of the working-class majority fuelled disillusionment, despair and the search for scapegoats and messiahs, with billionaire Trump demagogically pretending to speak for the poor.
The millions duped by his rhetoric, as they raged against the capitalist status quo openly defended by the Democrats, will rue the day they voted for him – when his tariffs put prices up, or he repeats his tax cuts of 2016-20, which meant the richest 400 families paid less tax than their servants!
Much of the same can be said of Britain. For instance, in just the six months prior to the General Election, rich individuals and capitalist companies donated £9.9m to the Tory Party, but £15.5m to Keir Starmer’s Labour. They clearly know which side their bread is buttered on!
Labour are hellbent on upholding the rule of the rich over the rest of us. Ideologically, they are fundamentally identical to the Tories. And the mass disillusionment with their capitalist policies, careerism and corruption threatens to fuel the growth of Reform UK.
When Labour freezes pensioners to death by scrapping the universal Winter Fuel Payment but freezes Corporation Tax on big business profits – including energy companies – they are fuelling disgust and anger at the capitalist status quo that they seek to uphold.
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| Farage helped incite the racist riots last summer |
Rather than let the far-right exploit this disillusionment, the SSP appeals to the potentially powerful trade union movement and community activists to demand immediate reinstatement of pensioners’ universal Winter Fuel Payments now, this winter. And a doubling of Corporation Tax on big business to its pre-Thatcher 52% level, which would raise an extra £85bn for jobs, pensions, wages, disability benefits, and public services.
Not only Starmer’s Labour Government, but the Scottish Government of John Swinney and free marketeer Kate Forbes, are both busily wooing international capitalists to seize the opportunity to profiteer from wind, wave and tidal power.
Instead of the capitalist status quo where privatised energy harvested £45bn in profits in 2022, alongside escalating fuel poverty in energy-rich Scotland, a socialist government would take all forms of energy into democratic public ownership.
That would make every household £1800 better off purely by removal of profiteering, but also allow rapid transition to green, affordable energy production, with plans drafted by the expertise of energy workers themselves. Last week, I was proud to march alongside Grangemouth, North Sea and other workers, demanding investment and green production to save every Grangemouth job.
This goes to the heart of worldwide issues of climate change, fossil fuel industries, and how to simultaneously defend workers’ livelihoods and the planet we live on.
The planet is on fire, with drought, floods and mudslides creating 386 million climate refugees since 2008, with predictions of 1.2bn people being thus displaced by 2050.
Savage job losses in the likes of oil, gas and car industries underline the utter inability of the capitalist profiteers to create clean, green jobs.
The abject failure of governments internationally, variously comprising conservatives, social democrats and Green parties, has fuelled the fires of the far-right – who mostly deny climate change even exists, and feed on the anger at job losses in, for example, Germany’s Volkswagen car plants, as demand for electric vehicles decline.
The abject failure of both Labour and SNP governments to take Grangemouth into public ownership in defence of all the jobs, with investment in a workers’ alternative plan of green production, could potentially also assist the far-right.
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| https://scottishsocialistparty.org/product/socialist-change-not-climate-change-poverty-pollution-and-working-class-solutions/ |
The SSP’s alternative of a Socialist Green New Deal, founded on democratic public ownership of energy, transport, construction, and banking – which I demonstrated in our book, Socialist Change Not Climate Change, could create at least 350,000 new green jobs – is more urgent than ever.
It could provide free retrofits to every home, free public transport for all, and 100,000 eco-friendly council homes at affordable rent.
It should be taken up by the 600,000-strong Scottish trade union movement as an alternative to the failures of the profit-crazed free market – regardless of which party is in government – and the lies and demagogy of the far-right.
This generation faces the choice of socialism or the barbarism of the capitalist far-right. It’s time for genuine socialist change.
Originally published as my column in The National paper on 3 Dec 2024
