The racists of Reform, with their extra-parliamentary auxiliaries from the various neo-fascist organisations have targeted the hotels where the government has located asylum seekers who have escaped various hell-holes across the globe. Many of those hell-holes are the product of past British colonialism, as well as more recent British-US military adventures, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. Indeed, many of them are people who collaborated with British and US invading forces in those countries, and whose position was made impossible when British and US forces scuttled.
The tactic was designed to create a hostile environment, and whip up racist hysteria along the lines of what happened in 2024, and has been facilitated by the same sensationalist media that whipped up those same forces to vote for Brexit in 2016, which has also created such chaos and economic disaster that the racists of Reform try to blame on migrants.
In relation to those “migrants”, the racists always refer to them as “illegal” migrants, but there is nothing illegal about them. Those being housed in these run down hotels, many of which would have simply closed were it not for being put to this use, are refugees and asylum seekers. That is a perfectly legal status. Just look at all the old films from the Cold War era, where people escaped Eastern Europe by various means to sneak into Western Europe, and claim asylum.
The reason the government has had to resort to more of these run down hotels to put asylum seekers in is that the previous Tory government stopped processing the applications for asylum, as well as the fact that a growing austerity, since 2010, means that the state bureaucracy, in general, does not have the resources required to function. Indeed, the same austerity measures, introduced following the bailing out of the financial speculators, who lost paper wealth in the global crash of 2008, that means asylum claims do not get processed effectively is, also, the same reason that schools, hospitals, roads and other vital services have been run down, but which the racists, now, seek to blame on “migrants”.
Of course, the Tories who implemented that austerity over the last 15 years, were also the same ones that inflicted Brexit on the country, which has cost it around £40 billion a year in lost taxes as a result of the 4% reduction in GDP caused by the loss of trade with the EU as Britain's largest trading partner. That £40 billion a year would go a long way to financing many of those services that the racists that backed Brexit, now seek to blame on migrants. With the vast majority of people now seeing that they were lied to over Brexit, and now wanting to re-join the EU, the Tories in their old form have been destroyed, reduced to their central core of racists, which has emerged from its chrysalis form into the shape of Reform. They can only relate to that racist hardcore, and the more Reform grows, on that basis, the more the Tories, left in the old Conservative Party are squeezed out of existence.
Hence the attempts of the Tories to respond by making themselves appear even more hardline racists than Reform. That, of course, simply drives the Conservative element of the Tory party further into the hands of the Liberals, where many of them had found a natural home following Brexit. The Conservative Party can no more compete with Reform on that ground than can the petty-bourgeois nationalists and racists of Starmer's Blue Labour, because the hardcore racists will not believe them, and those who are gulled by the lies of the racists will always vote for the original rather than some pale imitation of it. The only thing that trying to out Reform Reform will bring for Blue Labour and the Tories is a further collapse of their own core vote as it surges towrds the Liberals, Greens, Plaid, SNP, and Your Party.
That is already apparent. At the last local elections, it became obvious that the Tory vote had simply moved en masse to Reform, whilst much of its Conservative voter base switched to the Liberals, or Greens. The claim of Reform, put to Tory voters, that a vote for the Tories was a vote for Starmer was not only vindicated but heeded by Tory voters. In 2024, Starmer's Blue Labour only managed to sustain the meagre vote it managed, by similarly claiming that a vote for more progressive parties, such as the Liberals, Greens or various independents, would be a vote for the Tories. That clearly was not true. Not only did the Liberals win large numbers of additional seats, and would have won more had their been proportional representation, but the Greens also won more seats, and, again would have won many more had their been proportional representation. Even independent candidates, such as Corbyn, won their seats, such is the extent of the distaste for Starmer's reactionary nationalist Blue Labour, and that has intensified since then.
In a number of local by-elections, Labour has lost not to Reform, but to Green candidates standing on platforms, at least on paper, to the left of Blue Labour.
That, also, gives the lie to the Left nationalists who purvey the myth that Labour has lost support to Reform, and so needs to accommodate that reactionary agenda. If Your Party were to allow itself to be sent down that dead-end, it would quickly destroy itself. Your Party can only provide a real alternative to Blue Labour if it stands on a progressive, internationalist and socialist platform. Having nearly a million people already having signed up to it, gives it an unprecedented advantage in starting out on that basis. It must suck up all of the progressive support for the Greens, Liberals, Plaid and SNP on that basis, again, not by accommodating itself to their liberal, bourgeois agenda, but by offering a clear and principled socialist alternative.
The ideas of calling Your Party “The People's Party”, and such like, are an abysmal, popular frontist betrayal. A true alternative to Blue Labour can never be formed on the basis of such populist nonsense. The “people”, after all, also includes the 30% of the population who are petty-bourgeois, the same social forces that formed the hard core of the Tory Party, and worse, the same kinds of social layers that have always provided the foot soldiers of fascism. They are the same social forces that look to the ideas of Faragism, Trussism and so on, because their inefficient small businesses cannot function without scrapping all of the social protections that have been hard won over the last century. Nothing sustainable can come from trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, and seeking to accommodate and appease the reactionary interests and ideas of that section of society.
One suggestion that follows that same line of thinking was to call it the "New Party", with all of the Mosleyite connotations that has! Mosley himself of course created the New Party as a supposedly "Left" alternative to Labour after he resigned as a Labour Minister. All of the claims that it should appeal to reactionary elements by following the example of Blue Labour in brandishing its "Britishness" and patriotism are also disastrous. I would favour the opposite, proclaiming its internationalism, and specifically the thing that won over tens of thousands to Corbyn's Labour Party, in 2015, its opposition to Brexit and Europeanism. On that basis, I would favour either the International Labour Party, or the European Workers' Party.
In the coming months, it will become apparent that Starmer's refuge in 2024, will, now, turn against him. Everywhere, Blue Labour is losing, and it is losing because progressive voters are abandoning it to vote for other parties such as the Liberals, Greens and so on. That is even before Your Party is actually formed, and begins fighting elections. As with Blair's New Labour, which was an empty vessel, and lost all of its activists on the ground, Blue Labour, also, has no large activist base, working in local communities, campaigns, and workplaces. Your Party, especially if the trades unions give up on Starmer and affiliate to it, will have that implantation in the working-class, much as happened when the trades unions created the Labour Party itself, as they split from the Liberals. It will quickly become apparent that a vote for Blue Labour, as against a vote for Your Party, or in some seats, the Greens or Liberals, or Plaid or SNP, will be a vote for Reform. To avoid splitting the anti-Reform vote, it will be necessary for the remaining Labour voters to switch to these other progressive alternatives.
The latest polls show that Your Party is already set to overtake and replace Blue Labour as the main workers' party.
Blue Labour has been sucked down the rabbit hole of reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalism. It may still be possible to save it, but only if the trades unions act, in the next few weeks, to oust Starmer, and set it on a different track. As a start, they should be demanding that instead of Blue Labour responding to the racist attacks on refugees and migrants, by adopting an even more reactionary and racist stance itself, that it begins to stand up to the racists. Part of the problem was the fact that the Tories stopped processing asylum claims, and its now been revealed that Jenrick had himself signed up a load of these run down hotels to house them, before the Tories lost the election in 2024. The simple answer to the tactic of taking legal action by racist councils is for the government to simply give a blanket approval of asylum to everyone currently seeking it. That would mean that all of those asylum seekers would be able to take up employment, and find their own accommodation, as well as contributing to the production of goods and services, and paying taxes etc. It would immediately remove all of the objections put forward by the racists.
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