All that Farage and Reform represent is the inevitable progression of all of those reactionary petty-bourgeois sentiments championed inside the Conservative Party, over the last 40 years, as the social weight of the petty-bourgeoisie grew inside it, eating its flesh, and hollowing it out. The reactionary delusions of petty-bourgeois nationalism, inevitably led to a narrative of betrayal, as reality imposed itself. It was always easy to portray the idea that the failure of Brexit, or of the failure to control immigration, and so on, was the result of Conservative governments that were not true believers, rather than that what had been said was itself a lie, and what had been promised could never be delivered. So, the Conservative Party, which itself had its origins in the same ideological battles over protectionism, and the Repeal of The Corn Laws, ratcheted inexorably back into becoming a protectionist, petty-bourgeois, nationalist, Tory Party, with the conservative social-democratic wing, increasingly restricted to a few MP's, usually representing Blue Wall constituencies, in which it is the professional middle-class that continues to dominate its electoral and membership base.
In the likes of Heseltine, Clarke, Hammond, Soubry they fought a last stand, but the writing was clearly on the wall, with some of them even being expelled, and, at the grass roots, those middle class voters and members, simply migrated to their natural home in the Liberals, or even the Greens, as well as in Scotland and Wales to the SNP and Plaid. In 2017, some even moved in the direction of Labour. But, that was before Blue Labour seized control of the Labour Party, expelled large numbers of members, suspended MP's, and set course for the fantasy island of Brexit itself.
Blue Labour's 2024 election victory was, itself, a delusion. It was a delusion that the party, as well as many of its apologists were happy to foster, but it was only a mirage created by the fraudulent nature of the first past the post system. Blue Labour got fewer votes than Corbyn's Labour got in 2019, and more or less the same share of the vote, as huge numbers of voters just sat on their hands. Labour won, not because of any clever strategy of focusing on target seats, but simply because Reform took millions of votes from the Tories. Appearance and reality have come into alignment, as now a Conservative Party that had become, in reality, a petty-bourgeois, nationalist Tory Party, again, is now, burst from its previous shell, and replaced the hollowed out shell, which is itself now being eaten by others.
The Tory Party is now simply rebranded as Reform, and the Conservative Party is in a state of decomposition. The defection of Soubry et al, was simply a preview of its future, and, now, with Starmer and Blue Labour seeking to dominate the same camp of petty-bourgeois, nationalism as Reform, the Blair-Right, conservative social democrats are also faced with the choice of engaging in a political struggle against Starmer and Blue Labour, inside the party, or else, of following the example of the other component of Change UK, Umunna et al, and splitting. We already have large numbers having defected to the Liberals. We have also had the creation of the Rejoin EU Party, which seeks to do the same thing from the opposite pole that UKIP did. Its founders are also former Conservatives, but it is unlikely to be able to perform the same role. Unlike UKIP's relation to the Tories inside the Conservative Party, there is already an established alternative to the petty bourgeois nationalism of the Tories and Blue Labour. It is the Liberals, and to a lesser extent, the Greens, as well as the SNP and Plaid in Scotland and Wales. They would be better simply acting inside those parties.
For socialists, and for progressive social-democrats, the same applies in relation to Blue Labour. The idea of creating some new party to the “Left” of Labour, may seem an attractive idea, especially given the continued surge of Starmer to the authoritarian Right, as witnessed by his love-in with Trump and Netanyahu, the ever growing curtailment of civil liberties and free speech in order to sustain their support for and arming of the genocide in Palestine. However, we have to ask what the politics of such a party would actually be? If its simply, a repetition of those same petty-bourgeois nationalist ideas of Corbyn and his Stalinist advisors that destroyed Labour in 2019, just with the added measures of a more progressive, but still delusional, economic-nationalism, of the type of the 1970's Alternative Economic Strategy, tagged on, it will also fail, ad cause further demoralisation.
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