The Rise of Reform UK: Inside the Populist Movement Reshaping British Politics
The smoke has cleared from the Birmingham NEC, but the political shockwaves from Reform UK’s annual conference are only just beginning. What was once dismissed as a fringe protest party has undergone a stunning transformation, morphing into a polished political machine with 240,000 members, control of 12 councils, and the unwavering support of a powerful media ecosystem. This isn’t merely a rebranding exercise; it represents a fundamental shift in the UK’s political landscape that threatens to eclipse the Conservative Party and erode Labour’s traditional heartlands.
This comprehensive analysis, drawing on ground reporting from the conference, examines how Nigel Farage has masterfully channelled Britain’s genuine economic despair and cultural anxieties into a potent political force. We dissect the project’s strategic pillars: from its savvy media manipulation through GB News and the Telegraph, to its intellectual justification by figures like David Starkey and Matthew Goodwin, to its concerning lack of coherent economic policy. Beyond the spectacle of signed football shirts and booming rhetoric, this investigation reveals a calculated effort to build a new ruling class—one that offers the aesthetics of rebellion while leaving existing power structures firmly intact.
The rise of Reform UK holds up a mirror to a broken Britain, reflecting deep-seated alienation that mainstream politics has failed to address. This is not just their story; it’s a warning about what happens when genuine pain is left to fester, and a call to build real alternatives from the ground up.
Nigel Farage and Reform UK: The Making of a New Political Force
In a Birmingham conference hall, smoke machines hissed, and the air crackled with a peculiar energy. Nigel Farage, beaming like a game show host, signed £100 football shirts for a queue of adoring fans. A woman showed off a fresh turquoise dragon tattoo, its scales inscribed with “Reform 2025.” Meanwhile, in the shadows, the machinery of power quietly shifted its weight. The sponsors’ stands weren’t just for gold bullion dealers promising fiscal doom; they were flanked by the familiar logo of JCB, a titan of industry that for generations has bankrolled the Conservative Party. This was no fringe gathering of malcontents. This was the carefully stage-managed unveiling of a new political project, one designed not to challenge the status quo, but to rebrand it with a populist fury that leaves the real engines of power untouched.
For those of us who seek a world without masters, this isn’t merely a shift from blue to turquoise. It is a dangerous evolution in the theatre of governance. It is the old guard learning new tricks, dressing up the same old exploitation in the language of rebellion. The real question isn’t whether Farage becomes Prime Minister, but why so many people, battered by years of neglect, see this polished performance as their only hope.
Twenty Points on the Reform Project
The Illusion of Rebellion: A Wolf in Rebel’s Clothing
The old adage warns us that a wolf in sheep’s clothing is a danger to the whole flock. Nowhere is this more evident than in the carefully staged spectacle of the Reform UK conference. To the casual observer, and indeed to thousands of disillusioned voters, it presents itself as a full-throated rebellion against the political class—an insurgency aimed at burning down the established order. But to look past the smoke machines and football shirts is to witness a far more cunning operation: not a rebellion, but a sophisticated hostile takeover of the very establishment it claims to despise.
This is the grand illusion. True rebellion seeks to dismantle power structures. What Reform offers is merely a change of management. Their conference was a masterclass in this deception. On one hand, they channel the very real and justified anger of communities hollowed out by decades of neglect from both Tory and Labour governments. They speak of a “broken Britain,” a feeling that resonates deeply from the forgotten high streets of the North to the struggling coastal towns of the South East. This anger is the fuel, and it is genuine.
Yet, who was there to help them stoke this fire? Not fellow rebels, but the very pillars of the existing order. Corporate sponsors, like the construction machinery giant JCB—a company with a decades-long history of bankrolling the Conservative Party—were proudly displaying their wares. This isn’t the support of the common person; it is capital, pragmatic and cold-eyed, quietly shifting its allegiance to the new winning side. It is a clear signal that the interests of big business sense not a threat, but an opportunity in Reform’s rise.
Furthermore, the event was sanctified by a new priesthood of intellectuals—academics and historians like David Starkey and Matthew Goodwin. These figures provide a phony intellectual justification for the movement, dressing up its grievances in the language of history and theory. Their role is to act as intellectual bodyguards, lending credibility and assuring a wary middle class that this project is respectable. It is the age-old tactic of any new ruling class: seeking approval from courtiers and scholars to legitimise its power.
This reveals the true nature of the project. This is not about overthrowing the system; it is about seizing the levers of the system for a new set of bosses. It is a hostile takeover bid for the British state itself. The goal is not to empower people in their communities and workplaces to manage their own affairs, but to replace one set of rulers in Westminster with another, perhaps even more ruthless, set. They do not want to abolish the authority that has caused so much pain; they simply wish to wield it themselves.
The genuine rebel, the person who truly desires a society free from masters and bosses, should see this for what it is: a dangerous con. It takes the raw material of people’s suffering and moulds it into a weapon for a new elite. It offers a change of face, a change of tone, and a new list of scapegoats, all while leaving the fundamental architecture of power and privilege untouched. The wolf may be wearing the clothing of a rebel, but its eyes are fixed on the same old prizes: control, hierarchy, and the power to command.
The Professionalisation of Protest: Building a New Cage with Better PR
There’s an old saying that you should never trust a rebel who arrives in a chauffeur-driven car. The metamorphosis of Reform UK from a “higgledy-piggledy” collection of disgruntled voices into a slick, professionalised machine is not a sign of success; it is the clearest warning of their true intent. This isn’t the organic growth of a people’s movement; it is the calculated construction of a state-in-waiting, an institution designed not to break power, but to seize and wield it over the population.
Think of the difference. A year ago, their gathering was a chaotic affair, where you might bump into a disgraced candidate with dubious views. Today, it is a glitzy corporate showcase, complete with smoke machines, branded merchandise, and the unwavering support of a dedicated media channel. This shift is deliberate and deeply revealing. It follows a well-trodden path: to be taken seriously by the existing establishment, you must first learn to mimic it. You must adopt its language of professionalism, its reliance on sponsorship, and its top-down command structure.
This professionalisation is the process of taming dissent. It takes raw, legitimate anger—the kind that bubbles up on a picket line or in a community hall—and sanitises it, packages it, and sells it back to people as a branded product. The goal is to make protest safe, predictable, and ultimately, manageable. It is about replacing the unpredictable energy of genuine grassroots resistance with the sterile efficiency of a corporate boardroom.
By building this “credible” institution, what they are really building is a new management team for the same old system. They are not designing tools for liberation; they are designing a more efficient means of control. They see a population struggling with a cost-of-living crisis, crumbling public services, and a deep-seated feeling of being ignored, and their solution is not to give people control over their own lives and communities. Their solution is to offer themselves as the new, more competent bosses who will manage the decline more effectively.
They are practising for power. The conference, with its stage-managed speeches and its squad of would-be ministers, is a dress rehearsal for government. It is an audition aimed at the nervous elites and the wealthy donors, a performance designed to say, “Don’t worry, we can be trusted with the keys to the kingdom. We will not break the system; we will just run it more to our advantage.”
For those who seek a world where people govern themselves without bosses or rulers, this professionalisation is the ultimate betrayal. It represents the channelling of honest discontent back into the dead end of electoral politics and state power. It is the process where the hope for real change is neutered and transformed into a mere demand for a change of management.
The true radical instinct is to be deeply suspicious of any movement that polishes its image instead of empowering its people. Real change doesn’t come from a glossy brochure or a leader on a stage; it comes from the messy, complicated, and powerful work of people organising together from the bottom up, building their own power, and refusing to be managed by anyone.
The Seduction of the Base: A Conjurer’s Trick for a Broken Britain
There’s a old, cunning saying among those who wield power: “To stop people looking at your right hand, make a grand gesture with your left.” This is the essence of the seduction being performed. The appeal to the “median Britain”—to the person fuming about a 20mph speed limit on their street, or the state of the park where their kids play—is not an honest engagement with their concerns. It is a calculated, cynical magician’s trick, designed to channel raw, legitimate frustration away from the powerful forces that cause it and towards targets that are safe for the status quo to blame.
Let’s be clear: the frustration is real. The feeling of being nickel-and-dimed by countless petty regulations while your real living standards collapse is infuriating. The decay of your high street, the struggle to get a dentist appointment, the sense that your community is being ignored—these are not delusions. They are the daily lived experience of millions under a system that prioritises profit and power over people. This pain is the fuel.
But the project in question does not want to use this fuel to power a genuine challenge to that system. That would be far too dangerous for the elites who ultimately back it. Instead, its strategists act like master mechanics, syphoning off this potent fuel of discontent and redirecting it into a smaller, noisier engine that goes nowhere but makes a terrific racket: the politics of cultural grievance and scapegoating.
The 20mph limit is a perfect example. It is a tangible, daily annoyance. It feels like the state micromanaging your life while it fails to provide for your fundamental needs. The clever trick is to take this feeling—which is absolutely correct in its essence: that the state is often incompetent and controlling—and to twist it. The analysis offered is not, “Why does the state have the capacity to control my driving yet not the capacity to ensure I have a good hospital nearby?” That would be a systemic critique, questioning the entire purpose and structure of power.
Instead, the analysis becomes: “They are imposing this on us.” The “they” is deliberately left vague but is easily filled in: distant bureaucrats, out-of-touch politicians, and ultimately, a whole gallery of scapegoats who are implied to be the real beneficiaries of this annoying rule. It’s never about the failures of the system itself; it’s always about a malign group within the system. This is a classic strategy of deflection.
By focusing all this energy on the cultural symptoms of power (like speed limits or flags), the real, material engine of power—the concentration of wealth, the ownership of land and resources by a tiny few, the relentless exploitation of labour for profit—is left humming along undisturbed in the background. The anger that could be directed at the landlord, the privatised water company, or the tax-dodging corporation is expertly pivoted towards the immigrant, the bureaucrat, or the “woke” cultural figure.
This is the ultimate seduction. It offers people the catharsis of anger without the risk of liberation. It gives them a sense of belonging to a group that is “fighting back,” but it carefully directs all their punches away from the actual sources of their misery. It is a controlled opposition, designed to vent popular pressure safely, ensuring the underlying machinery of hierarchy and exploitation remains intact, perhaps even strengthened under a new, more brutal management.
True solidarity means refusing this seductive but poisonous narrative. It means recognising that our fight isn’t against each other, whipped into a frenzy over cultural symbols, but against the very structures that leave all of us—whether in a city, a town, or a village—with poorer lives and less control over them. The answer to a 20mph limit isn’t to blame a convenient “other,” but to ask a more radical question: who gets to decide what happens in our communities, and why don’t we?
Weaponising Despair: The Politics of the Poisoned Well
There’s a grim adage that speaks to the heart of this: “A man who is drowning will clutch at a razor blade.” The profound, gut-wrenching feeling that “Britain is broken” is not a fiction manufactured by clever propagandists. It is the lived reality for millions across the UK, from the post-industrial towns of the Valleys to the struggling coastal communities of Essex. It is the direct result of decades of systemic plunder—the asset-stripping of the Thatcher era, the financialised complacency of New Labour, and the brutal, calculated sadism of Tory austerity that followed. The despair is real, earned, and entirely legitimate.
This despair, this raw material of human anguish, is the most potent resource in politics. And the strategy employed is not to alleviate it, but to weaponise it. The project does not seek to drain the swamp that is drowning people; it seeks to sell them a new, more vicious brand of alligator to blame for their misery.
The system itself is the problem. It is an engine designed to funnel wealth and power upwards, leaving behind hollowed-out public services, precarious work, and communities stripped of their dignity and future. A genuine solution would involve dismantling this engine of privilege—challenging the absolute power of landlords, upending the ownership of utilities by distant shareholders, and creating communities built on mutual aid and collective provision rather than profit and competition.
But this is not the offer. The offer is a sinister sleight of hand. It acknowledges the pain—the crumbling NHS, the schools with leaking ceilings, the fact that work no longer pays—but then performs a cunning trick of misdirection. It points away from the architect of the house that is collapsing and towards the other families living in the same crumbling building. The problem, they insist, is not the rotten foundations or the absentee landlord; the problem is your neighbour.
They offer a narrative of blame, not a blueprint for repair. The language is carefully crafted to channel white-hot rage away from the boardrooms and the tax havens and towards the most vulnerable in society: the immigrant, the refugee, the benefit claimant, the “woke” activist. It is a politics of the poisoned well: rather than leading people to clean water, it convinces them that their thirst is caused by whoever else is also coming to drink.
This is the ultimate betrayal of the desperate. It takes their very valid anger and, instead of arming them with the tools to dismantle the structures that oppress them, it turns them against each other. It offers the cold comfort of a scapegoat. It provides a target for rage that is safe for the powerful, because it leaves their wealth and authority entirely untouched. In fact, it strengthens them, as a divided and infighting population is one that cannot possibly unite to challenge the real sources of its misery.
True radicalism refuses this poisonous narrative. It looks at the broken Britain and agrees wholeheartedly with the diagnosis, but it utterly rejects the prescribed cure of hatred and division. It argues that the energy spent blaming the fellow victim should be redirected towards building collective power from the ground up. The answer to despair is not to be handed a new master who promises to punish your enemies, but to build a society where we are no longer masters or servants of anyone, but partners in our own common care. The well isn’t poisoned by those who drink from it; it’s poisoned by those who own it and charge us for the privilege.
The Farage Mythos: The Stage-Managed Rebel
There’s an old adage that tells us “you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear,” but in the theatre of modern politics, you can certainly dress the ear in a silk waistcoat and sell it as a revolutionary accessory. The careful crafting of Nigel Farage—from the pint-swilling rebel of the Brussels bars to the “statesman” who reluctantly accepts the “inevitability” of power—is not a natural political evolution. It is a piece of pure, calculated political theatre, a demagogue’s playbook brought to life, designed to mask a hunger for authority with the costume of reluctant leadership.
This myth-making is a dangerous seduction. The “man of the people” persona is meticulously constructed. The past scandals, the unapologetic demeanour, the carefully stage-managed “authenticity”—these are not liabilities; they are essential props. In a world where people are sick to the back teeth of polished, robotic career politicians who never utter an unscripted word, this performance of flaw is sold as a virtue. It screams, “I am not one of them! I am like you!” It is a classic trick of the would-be ruler: to present themselves as the ultimate outsider, even as they sit in the studios of their own television channel and are bankrolled by millionaire donors.
But this is the core of the illusion. The performance of reluctance—the sighing acceptance of the “inevitability” of power—is the oldest trick in the authoritarian book. It is designed to make the seizure of power seem not like a naked grab, but a duty, a burden he is willing to bear for us. It disguises ambition as service. He doesn’t want power, the story goes; the people are forcing it upon him. This is not authenticity; it is the highest form of political artifice, designed to absolve him of responsibility before he’s even taken it.
For those who seek a world where power is distributed, not centralised, this mythos is the greatest threat. It reinforces the very idea that we need a singular, strongman figure to solve our problems. It teaches people to look for a saviour, not to their own collective strength. It channels the deep, legitimate desire for change away from building community power and towards worshipping a personality. It is the politics of the father figure, who promises to protect the family while demanding absolute obedience in return.
The radical response is not to debate his policies, but to dismantle his myth. It is to see the performance for what it is: a show. It is to recognise that a man who poses with a pint in one hand and a signed football shirt in the other, while his backers circle in the corridors of the conference hall, is not challenging the system. He is simply auditioning for the lead role in its next act. True change never comes from above, from a single figure who accepts power. It comes from below, from people who, together, decide to dissolve it.
The Team of Managers: Rehearsing for a Hostile Takeover
There’s a shrewd old saying that “you can’t run a circus with just one clown.” The careful promotion of figures like Lee Anderson and Zia Yusuf alongside Nigel Farage is a masterstroke in political theatre, but its message is deadly serious. It is designed to prove that this is not a one-man band, prone to collapse should the frontman fall. Instead, it reveals the project’s true ambition: to present itself as a credible, ready-to-go ruling class—a full cabinet of managers prepared to seize the reins of the state apparatus and run it for their own benefit.
This is the crucial shift from a protest movement to a government-in-waiting. A lone rebel can channel anger, but only a team can administer power. Each member of this new cast is carefully chosen to appeal to a different section of a disaffected electorate, proving the operation’s cold, calculating efficiency.
Lee Anderson plays the part of the “authentic” voice of the Northern Red Wall, the blunt-speaking ex-miner whose performance of plain talking is designed to reassure traditional working-class voters that this new outfit “understands” them, even as its policies would further immiserate them.
Zia Yusuf, a wealthy businessman presented as a policy chief, is the polished face for those unnerved by Anderson’s bluster. He provides a veneer of corporate competence and technocratic seriousness, signalling to capital and the professional classes that the operation can be “trusted” with the economy.
Together, they form a potent coalition. This is not about building a movement from the bottom up; it is about assembling a board of directors for a hostile takeover of the British state. They are not offering to dismantle the machinery of government—the bureaucracy, the police, the borders, the laws that protect property above people. They are offering to install their own people in the control room to pilot that machinery more ruthlessly and in a different direction.
Their function is managerial, not liberatory. They do not speak of empowering communities to control their own housing, healthcare, or resources. They speak of managing these things for us, but with a firmer hand and a different set of priorities. They are the potential new foremen on the same old factory floor, promising to crack the whip more effectively than the last lot.
For those who believe that people should govern their own lives directly, without bosses or rulers, this “team” is the ultimate warning. It represents the professionalisation of discontent into a new hierarchy. It is the promise of a more efficient, more brutal form of management for the same failing system. They are not offering to give us the keys to our own future; they are simply asking us to hire them as our new, tougher landlords.
The radical answer to this team of managers is not to choose a better manager. It is to reject the entire idea that we need to be managed at all. True power lies not in electing a new set of bosses, but in building our own collective capacity to run things ourselves, for ourselves, in our communities and workplaces. The goal is not a smoother-running circus with a new ringmaster, but to dismantle the circus altogether and build something entirely new in its place.
The Media Machine: The Echo Chamber of Control
There’s a powerful adage that warns, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” But what happens when the piper owns the only instrument in town, and plays a melody that drives people into a frenzy? The seamless integration of this political project with outlets like GB News, The Telegraph, and the Daily Express is not an example of a free press debating ideas. It is the construction of a sophisticated apparatus for mass radicalisation, a closed feedback loop designed to manufacture outrage and channel it towards authoritarian solutions.
This is not about offering a platform for diverse views. It is about creating a self-contained universe of thought. A viewer might start their day with a column in the Telegraph decrying “wokeness,” have their anger stoked by a lunchtime monologue on GB News about immigration, and have their convictions confirmed by the Express’s front page about betrayal. This constant, drumbeat reinforcement from different angles creates an echo chamber where dissenting voices are excluded, and the narrative is tightly controlled. It’s a closed circuit, where the outrage generated by one outlet is amplified and validated by the others.
This loop is dangerously effective. It takes genuine, material anxieties—the fear of not being able to afford groceries, the anger at waiting years for an NHS operation—and provides a cultural and identitarian explanation instead of an economic one. The problem is never falling wages, privatised utilities, or a system rigged for the wealthy. The problem is always a “woke agenda,” the EU, or immigrants. This process doesn’t inform; it conditions. It trains its audience to have a specific, Pavlovian response to complex issues: not critical thought, but knee-jerk reaction.
Calling this “free speech” is a perversion of the term. Free speech implies a open marketplace of ideas, where opinions can be tested and challenged. This machine operates more like a propaganda unit, relentlessly broadcasting a single, coherent message designed to bypass rational thought and appeal directly to emotion and prejudice. It is a tool for social control, masquerading as media.
For those who believe in genuine, bottom-up democracy, this machine is the enemy of free thought. It is the opposite of the messy, difficult, and vibrant process of people discussing and deciding their own futures together. It is a top-down broadcast, designed to tell people what to think and who to blame, stifling any real conversation before it can begin. It creates a population that is agitated, divided, and looking for a strongman to restore order—the very “authoritarian solution” the machine is designed to promote.
The radical response is to see this machine for what it is: a weapon aimed at the heart of community solidarity. The answer is not to plead for fairness from the piper, but to build our own instruments. It is to create our own spaces for discussion, to share information freely among ourselves, and to foster a culture of critical thinking that can see through the manufactured outrage. True communication doesn’t come from a screen; it comes from conversation between equals, working together to solve the problems that this media machine only exploits.
The Intellectual Bodyguards: Polishing the Boot that Kicks You
There’s a grimly effective old tactic used by those who seek power: “If you want to make a poison taste sweet, hire a respected apothecary to bless the bottle.” The recruitment of figures like the historian David Starkey and the academic Matthew Goodwin is a masterful application of this principle. It is not about engaging in genuine intellectual debate; it is a calculated strategy to provide a phony intellectual sheen to a project built on prejudice, attempting to dress up policies of exclusion and control in the respectable garb of history and scholarship.
These figures act as intellectual bodyguards for a project that would otherwise be exposed as nakedly reactionary. Their function is to stand in front of the raw, often ugly, populist energy and lend it their credibility. When a movement can boast a Cambridge historian or a university professor among its champions, it becomes harder for nervous onlookers to dismiss it as a mere rabble. It sends a signal to the educated middle classes: “See, this is not just about anger; it is a respectable, intellectually defensible position.”
This is a classic tactic of legitimisation. David Starkey’s role, for instance, is to provide a historical narrative—a selective, often distorted reading of British history—that frames the project’s nativist ambitions not as a break with tradition, but as a return to a purer, more authentic past. He offers a story of national decline that blames cultural contamination, allowing people to ignore the more complex, economic causes of their distress.
Similarly, an academic like Matthew Goodwin uses the language of data and polling to give a statistical gloss to what is essentially a cultural argument. He translates raw prejudice into the sterile jargon of “cultural values” and “social change,” making fear and resentment sound like analytical categories. This provides a pseudo-scientific justification for closing borders and rolling back rights, making it seem like a rational, rather than an emotional, response.
For those who believe in thinking for themselves and challenging all forms of authority, this is a particularly insidious form of control. It represents the hijacking of knowledge and scholarship to serve a power agenda. It teaches people to outsource their critical thinking to “experts” who are paid to provide the right answers. It is designed to shut down questioning—after all, who are you to argue with a professor?The radical response is to see through this performance of authority. It is to understand that a title or a degree does not grant someone a monopoly on truth, especially when they are in the pay of a political movement. True intellectualism is about questioning power, not providing it with a bibliography. It is about digging into the material realities of people’s lives—who owns what, who profits, who suffers—rather than getting lost in abstract debates about culture and identity designed to divide us.
We must refuse to be impressed by letters after a name. The goal is not to find better intellectuals to justify a different politics, but to create a world where knowledge is a common tool for liberation, owned by everyone, not a weapon to be wielded by a privileged few to justify the boot that kicks us all.
Capital’s Warning Shot: The Pragmatism of Power
There’s a brutal adage known in the corridors of power: “The king is dead, long live the king.” It signifies a seamless, pragmatic transfer of allegiance where the institution of monarchy continues, regardless of the individual on the throne. The presence of a corporate giant like JCB—a historic pillar of Conservative Party funding—at the Reform UK conference is not a quirky detail. It is the most telling and chilling signal of all. It is capital, in its most cold-eyed and pragmatic form, firing a warning shot across the bows of the Tory establishment. The message is simple: it will back whichever political horse appears strongest at protecting its property and managing the simmering social unrest its own practices help to create.
This is a fundamental revelation. The loyalty of big capital is not to a party, a colour, or an ideology. Its loyalty is to itself—to the preservation and expansion of its wealth and the systems that guarantee it. Parties are merely management teams hired to administer the state in a way that maintains a stable environment for business and keeps the population sufficiently pacified. When the current management team—the Conservatives—appears weak, divided, and incapable of containing public anger, capital simply begins interviewing for a new one.
JCB’s presence is a stark lesson in where real power lies. It isn’t ultimately wielded in the House of Commons; it is wielded in boardrooms like theirs. The political class in Westminster are not the masters of the universe; they are often the hired help, and their employment is contingent on performance. Reform UK, with its blunt talk of law and order and its promise to channel popular fury onto cultural battlegrounds instead of economic ones, is auditioning for the role of the tougher, more competent foreman.
For those who seek a world where people and planet come before profit, this is a critical moment of clarity. It exposes the entire charade of parliamentary politics as a battle between different factions of the same managing class. The debate between Labour and the Tories, or now the Tories and Reform, is not a battle of fundamentally different visions for society. It is a dispute over management style: a softer, more liberal manager versus a harder, more authoritarian one, both serving the same bottom line.
The radical response to this warning shot is not to plead with the Tories to be more effective, nor to hope Reform might be less harsh. It is to recognise that the entire system is designed to be responsive to capital, not to people. The goal, therefore, cannot be to find a better boss. It must be to dismantle the very structure that allows a tiny minority to hold such sway over our collective lives.
The energy spent on electoral cycles is energy diverted from the real work: building community power that is entirely independent of these corporate interests. It means creating systems of mutual aid that make us resilient against their economic shocks, and organising in our workplaces to challenge their authority at the source. We must see JCB’s pragmatism for what it is, and respond with our own ruthless pragmatism: building a world where their power is irrelevant because we have learned to run things for ourselves.
The Empty Economic Promise: The Magician’s Misdirection
There’s a cunning old saying: “The right hand shows you the shiny coin, so you don’t notice the left hand-picking your pocket.” The so-called “nonsensical” economic policy on offer—the promises that simply do not add up—is frequently dismissed as a weakness, a sign of amateurism. But to see it that way is to miss the point entirely. The emptiness is not a bug; it is the central, deliberate feature. It reveals a terrifying truth: this project has no intention of delivering material improvement for the working class. Its entire purpose is to wage a culture war, a strategy designed to seize power without ever challenging the fundamental wealth and property relations that are the true source of people’s misery.
The promises are a calculated diversion. Pledging to keep the triple lock, abolish the two-child benefit cap, and cut taxes is not a programme for government; it is a list of shiny coins designed to distract. It is a performance of generosity meant to placate and confuse, safe in the knowledge that the numbers will never be scrutinised by a base hungry for respect and recognition rather than spreadsheet analysis. The goal is to generate a feeling, not a fact—a feeling that “at last, someone is on our side.”
This is because a genuine economic plan would require confronting the powerful. It would mean taking on the landlords who leech off communities, challenging the privatised utilities that profit from misery, and dismantling the financial system that funnels wealth upwards. But this project is funded and supported by those very interests. The presence of JCB and the backing of wealthy media barons are not accidents; they are proof that the agenda is to protect the status quo, not overthrow it.
Therefore, the economic void is necessary. To fill it with a coherent plan would be to pick a side in the class war, and they have already chosen theirs. Instead, they offer a culture war. By directing all attention and fury towards immigrants, “wokeness,” and a remote liberal elite, they perform a brilliant trick of misdirection. They make the struggle about identity and values, not about money and power. This allows them to rally a coalition of the dispossessed and the privileged under one banner, united not by a common economic interest, but by a common cultural enemy.
For those who believe in a world where resources are shared for the benefit of all, this is the ultimate con. It is a politics that asks people to get angrier about a statue than about the fact they can’t heat their home. It is a strategy that offers the catharsis of rage instead of the security of a full fridge and a safe roof.
The radical response is to refuse to be distracted by the shiny coin. It is to relentlessly bring the focus back to the material conditions of our lives: Who owns our homes? Who profits from our labour? Who decides whether we live in dignity? The empty promise is a confession. It admits they have no answers to these questions. Our task is to build our own answers from the ground up, through tenant unions, workers’ cooperatives, and community networks that put people before profit. We must see the culture war for what it is: a magician’s trick, designed to stop us noticing whose hands are in our pockets.
The Failure of the Left: A Betrayal of the Heartlands
There’s a painful adage that fits this perfectly: “A house built on sand cannot stand.” For decades, the political left claimed to be the house built for and by the working people. But Reform’s success in its former heartlands is a damning indictment, revealing that foundation to be little more than shifting sand. This is not merely a political setback; it is a moral failure. It is the direct result of a left that too often abandoned the language of solidarity for the jargon of managerialism, and traded listening for lecturing.
The pain in these communities is deep and genuine. It is the pain of the managed, the processed, the ignored. For years, people have watched as their industries were dismantled, their high streets decayed, and their futures became more precarious. They didn’t need a government minister to arrive with a PowerPoint presentation on “levelling up” or a focus group on “aspiration.” They needed someone to stand with them, to recognise their anger, and to channel it into a collective project of rebuilding.
Instead, what did they get? Too often, they were offered a condescending, top-down managerialism. They were told what was good for them by a professional political class that spoke of “stakeholders” and “delivery units” but had forgotten how to speak the language of human dignity and mutual respect. When they expressed legitimate fears about their communities changing, they were met not with understanding, but with a lecture on ethics. They were called “bigots” or “ignorant” for feeling the symptoms of an economic disease they didn’t have the language to diagnose.
This created a vacuum of solidarity—a hollowed-out space where the left’s banner of collective action once flew. Into this vacuum stepped a movement that, however cynically, at least acknowledged the pain. It didn’t offer solutions, but it offered recognition. It didn’t offer solidarity, but it offered a target for their rage. The left offered a clipboard and a policy memo; the right offered a megaphone.
This is the ultimate betrayal. The job of a true radical is to go to where the hurt is, to listen, and to help people translate their raw, inchoate anger into a understanding of the systems that cause it. It is to show that the problem isn’t the immigrant next door, but the landlord who charges extortionate rent, the boss who pays poverty wages, and the politician who serves them both. The left failed to do this. It became another manager in the system, another voice telling people what to think and how to behave.The radical task now is not to lecture harder, but to listen better. It is to reject managerial politics entirely and rebuild a politics of raw, solidaristic action from the ground up. It means organising tenant unions to fight the landlords, building community kitchens to fight hunger, and creating networks of mutual aid that demonstrate what real care looks like—not something delivered by the state, but something built by the community itself. The left offered a better-managed decline. We must offer the tools for people to build their own future, without permission from any manager at all.
The Politics of “Vibes”: The Triumph of Feeling Over Fact
There’s an old warning that tells us “you shouldn’t let the tail wag the dog.” The potential triumph of “vibes” over factual argument is precisely that: a dangerous inversion, where the emotional response—the tail—is now violently shaking the entire body politic. This isn’t just a shift in style; it signals a deliberate move towards a post-truth politics where raw feeling actively trumps material reality. This makes a rational, collective debate about how we organise our society—the most important debate we can have—utterly impossible.
This politics of “vibes” is a weapon against genuine understanding. It operates on a simple, devastating principle: if a fact feels untrue or inconvenient to a chosen narrative, it is dismissed as part of a “woke,” “globalist,” or “elite” conspiracy. The feeling of being ignored, for instance, is transformed into the “fact” that a specific group is to blame. The feeling of economic insecurity is rebranded as a cultural threat. This is not an argument you can win with data; you cannot debate someone whose entire worldview is built on the foundation of their own resentment.
For those who believe in people’s capacity to reason together and manage their own affairs, this is a direct attack on the very tools of liberation. How can a community collectively decide on how to run its water supply, its energy, or its housing if it cannot agree on basic, verifiable realities? This politics destroys the common ground of fact upon which co-operation and mutual aid must be built. It replaces the difficult, messy work of building consensus with the easy, addictive rush of shared grievance.
This is why it is so dangerously effective. It doesn’t require a party to have a coherent plan; it only requires them to feel right. It doesn’t demand policies that would materially improve lives; it only demands a performance that resonates with the prevailing mood of anger and disillusionment. It is the ultimate politics of spectacle, designed to bypass the brain and speak directly to the gut.
The radical response to this cannot be to simply shout facts louder. That is like bringing a book to a knife fight. We must understand that the “vibe” is powerful because it taps into a real, material pain that the sterile, managerial politics of the centre-left and right have ignored for decades. The answer is to offer a different, more powerful feeling: the feeling of solidarity. The feeling of agency. The feeling of collective power.
We must build projects that allow people to feel what it is like to have control over their lives—through tenant unions that successfully confront a landlord, through community gardens that feed people, through mutual aid networks that provide what the state will not. We must show that the cold, hard fact of collective action produces a warmer, more empowering feeling than any demagogue’s empty promise ever could.
The goal is not to reject emotion for cold reason, but to unite them. To show that true security comes not from vibes, but from verifiable, collective power built from the ground up. We must offer a reality that feels better than the fantasy.
The Local Power Grab: Building the New Regime from the Ground Up
There is an old and cunning strategy, understood by every would-be ruler: “To capture a castle, you must first secure the villages that surround it.” The winning of 12 local councils is frequently dismissed as a triviality, a minor foothold in the grand scheme of national politics. This is a grave misreading. It is, in fact, a classic and calculated strategy for building state power from the ground up. It provides the perfect platform to embed influence, experiment with social policy, and weave a network of localised control—normalising their authority long before a single vote is cast in a general election.
This is the quiet, patient work of institutional capture. A national party makes promises; a local council acts. It controls the levers of immediate, everyday life: housing allocations, planning permission, local ordinances, and community funding. This is where abstract rhetoric becomes material reality. It is a laboratory where they can experiment with policies, testing what resonates and what provokes resistance on a manageable scale, refining their tactics for broader application.
For instance, a council can use its power to decide:
Who gets help and who doesn’t: Prioritising funding for groups that align with their cultural vision while sidelining others.
How public space is used: Sanctioning certain gatherings or messages while restricting others, effectively shaping public discourse at a hyper-local level.
The narrative of “community”: Defining insiders and outsiders, fostering a parochialism that serves their wider nationalist agenda.
This process builds a network of control. Each council becomes a node in a new political machine, staffed by loyalists learning the mechanics of administration. It creates a cadre of experienced foot soldiers—mayors, councillors, officers—who are loyal to the project and being trained for bigger roles. It is the political equivalent of apprenticeship, building a new class of administrators for a future state.
For those who believe in genuine, bottom-up community power, this local grab is the greatest threat. It represents the hijacking of localism. The idea that communities should have control over their own affairs is radical; but this is not that. This is not about empowering neighbourhoods or tenants’ associations to make decisions for themselves. It is about installing a new, centralised management team at the town hall to impose a different set of orders from the top down. They are not dissolving power; they are relocating it to a more immediate, and thus more potent, level.
The radical response to this cannot be to abandon local politics. That would be to cede the entire battlefield. The answer is to confront this localised power grab with a true, uncompromising localism of our own. It is to build dual power—creating our own resilient community structures that operate on principles of mutual aid and direct democracy.
We must:
Build tenant unions so strong they can defy unjust council housing policies.
Create food distribution networks and community kitchens that operate irrespective of town hall funding.
Organise neighbourhood assemblies that can act as a counterweight to the council chamber, making real decisions for the community.
The goal is to show that real local power doesn’t come from taking over the council; it comes from the collective ability of people to organise their own lives, support one another, and flatly refuse to be managed. We must render their control irrelevant by building a society from the ground up that is based on solidarity, not authority. The castle is not saved by defending its walls, but by ensuring the villages are already free.
The Diversionary Tactics: The Oldest Trick in the Book
There’s a well-worn adage that perfectly captures the strategy: “When the house is on fire, argue about the colour of the curtains.” The relentless focus on immigration and cultural grievances is not an honest engagement with complex issues. It is the oldest trick in the ruler’s playbook: a calculated, diversionary tactic designed to redirect white-hot public anger away from the centralisation of economic power and the relentless exploitation carried out by the owning class.
This is a deliberate and cynical magician’s trick. The real, material problems people face are undeniable: the landlord hiking the rent on a mouldy flat, the energy giant posting record profits while millions choose between heating and eating, the boss who threatens your zero-hours contract if you dare complain. These are the fires raging through people’s lives.
But addressing these fires would mean confronting the powerful. It would mean challenging the sacred rights of property and wealth. This is a fight the political and economic elite have no interest in having.
So, they perform a sleight of hand. They point to the curtains. They take the legitimate fear and anger generated by economic insecurity, and they skilfully redirect it towards a cultural scapegoat—often the immigrant, the refugee, or the “woke” activist. They offer a simple, satisfying narrative: your life is hard because of them. Not because of the system designed to funnel wealth upwards, but because of a new group of people who have arrived to claim a share of the dwindling scraps.
This tactic is devastatingly effective because it provides an easy answer. It is far easier to blame a neighbour who looks different than to understand the complex, abstract machinations of global capital. It is more emotionally satisfying to rage against a cultural change you dislike than to organise against your landlord or your employer. It turns class anger inwards, setting the exploited against each other in a brutal fight over who is the most victimised, while the victors of the economic system watch on, unscathed.
For those who seek a world built on mutual aid and collective benefit, this diversion is the primary obstacle to solidarity. It fractures communities that should be uniting against common oppressors. It teaches people to see a fellow victim as the enemy, ensuring they never pool their strength to challenge the real source of their shared misery.
The radical task, therefore, is to relentlessly drag the conversation back to the fire. It is to refuse to be distracted by the colour of the curtains. We must constantly ask the questions that power wants to avoid: Who owns your home? Who profits from your labour? Who is polluting your river and getting away with it?
We must build organisations that cut across these manufactured divisions—tenant unions that unite everyone against the landlord, regardless of passport; workplace committees that organise all workers, regardless of background. We must demonstrate, through direct action and mutual support, that our enemy is not the person next to us, struggling to get by, but the system that benefits from our division. The goal is to see through the trick, to turn away from the scapegoat, and to confront the arsonist who set the house on fire in the first place.
The Rebranding of Control: A New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
There’s a stark adage that has echoed through generations of working people: “The wolf may change its coat, but it does not change its nature.” The political project on offer is the ultimate embodiment of this truth. It masquerades as a fundamental challenge to authority, but it is nothing of the sort. It is merely a proposal for a different, more brutal kind of authority—one that speaks in a coarser accent, drinks pints, and wears a football shirt, but whose ultimate function is to protect the same old property lines and power structures with renewed viciousness.
This is not a rebellion; it is a rebrand. It understands that people are sick of the polished, condescending management of the traditional ruling class. So, it offers a new manager: a tougher foreman, a more ruthless shop steward for the nation. This foreman might use blunter language, he might seem to “tell it like it is,” and he might even share a photograph with a pint. But his job description remains exactly the same: to keep the workers in line and ensure the factory owners’ profits are secure.
The system itself—the real architecture of power—remains untouched. The concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny few, the private ownership of essential utilities, the rights of landlords to extract wealth from tenants, the entire apparatus that allows property to be privileged over people—all of this is left safely intact. The new management might even strengthen these structures, presenting their defence not as a service to capital, but as a patriotic duty or a blow for “common sense.”This is why its targets are always cultural and never economic. It rails against immigrants, “wokeness,” and remote elites because these are safe enemies. Attacking them does not threaten the flow of capital or the rights of property. In fact, it secures them. By directing popular fury onto these scapegoats, it ensures that no one is paying attention to the quiet, ongoing work of enriching the already rich. It is a spectacle of control designed to make you feel like things are changing, while everything that truly matters remains locked in place.
For those who believe in a world without masters, this is the most dangerous form of deception. It preys on a genuine desire for change to reinforce the oldest forms of domination. It offers the illusion of revolution to prevent the reality of one.
The radical response is to see through the new coat and recognise the same old wolf. It is to understand that a change in style does not mean a change in substance. The goal is not to find a more polite or more brutal manager, but to dismantle the entire hierarchy that makes managers necessary. It is to build a world where control is not rebranded, but rendered obsolete—where communities organise their own affairs collectively, from the bottom up, without the need for a boss, a foreman, or a strongman to tell them what to do. True change doesn’t come from a new person giving orders; it comes from a world where no one has the right to give orders at all.
The Rejection of Hypocrisy: The Honest Knave and the Lying Courtiers
There is a fable about a court full of nobles who all pretend the king is wearing magnificent robes, while a lone servant, considered a fool, points out that the king is naked. The political class in Britain has been insisting on the quality of their robes for decades, while people feel the cold draught of reality. Nigel Farage’s perceived “untouchability” is built on him playing the role of that fool. His power doesn’t come from his virtue, but from his audience’s utter rejection of the hypocrisy of the political class. They see him as honest in his dishonesty—a sad, damning testament to how catastrophically low our expectations of those in power have fallen.
The established political parties have long operated on a currency of broken promises and masked intentions. They preach austerity while living in luxury; they promise change and deliver managed decline; they speak of “British values” while selling weapons to despots. This gap between their words and their actions, their public morality and their private dealings, is a festering wound on the body politic. People are not just angry about their policies; they are sickened by the sanctimonious performance that accompanies them.
Enter Farage. He doesn’t pretend to wear the robes. He openly scorns them. His scandals, his affairs, his financial opportunism—they are not hidden. They are worn as a badge of honour. To his supporters, this doesn’t make him immoral; it makes him authentic. In a system built on a lie, a man who is openly out for himself can seem more trustworthy than the politician who claims to be a public servant while quietly serving their own interests and those of their wealthy backers. He is the honest knave in a court of lying courtiers.
This is a tragedy of immense proportions. It represents the bankruptcy of the political establishment. When a population starts to value a politician’s willingness to admit they are a rogue over a politician’s promise to be virtuous, it means they have given up on the possibility of goodness in power altogether. They have settled. They would rather have a leader who is predictably self-interested than one who pretends to be altruistic while selling them down the river. It is a politics of despair, not of hope.
For those who believe in a world built on genuine solidarity and collective good, this presents a profound challenge. We cannot defend the hypocrisy of the established order. To do so would be to align ourselves with the courtiers praising the non-existent robes.
Instead, the radical task is to reject both the lying courtier and the honest knave. It is to argue that the entire court is the problem. We must demonstrate that real integrity isn’t found in choosing a more transparently self-serving leader, but in building a society where leadership itself is unnecessary—where communities are empowered to manage their own affairs through direct participation and mutual accountability.
We must show that true honesty isn’t about admitting you’ll look after yourself first; it’s about building systems where everyone’s needs are met and no one has the power to exploit another. The goal is to raise expectations so high that we reject both the liar and the knave, not by choosing a different master, but by rejecting the very idea of masters altogether.
A Threat to All Social Gains: Resentment as a Wrecking Ball
There is a profound adage that reminds us: “Do not burn down the barn to kill the rats.” The project currently gaining traction is precisely that—a dangerous conflagration that, under the guise of tackling perceived problems, threatens to incinerate the remaining fragments of the welfare state, hard-won workers’ rights, and the very spirit of community solidarity that holds society together. A movement built not on a vision of collective improvement but on the fuel of resentment, and devoid of any coherent economic plan, is not a government-in-waiting; it is a wrecking ball aimed at the foundations of communal life.
The welfare state, for all its flaws and constant erosion, represents a fundamental principle: that we have a collective responsibility for one another. It is the tangible result of generations of struggle to ensure that no one is left destitute by illness, old age, or misfortune. It is the embodiment of the idea that healthcare, education, and dignity are rights, not commodities. A party whose entire energy is derived from blaming sections of the community for societal ills cannot uphold this principle. Its logic demands the opposite: the division of society into deserving and undeserving, the shredding of the safety net for those deemed ‘other’, and the further privatisation of common goods. Resentment cannot build; it can only dismantle.
Similarly, workers’ rights—from the weekend to sick pay to the right to organise—were not gifts from enlightened rulers. They were wrested from the owning class through decades of bloody struggle and collective action. A politics of division is the ultimate weapon against this class solidarity. It teaches the worker to see the immigrant colleague or the union rep not as an ally in a common fight for better conditions, but as a competitor or an enemy. This fractures the collective power necessary to resist exploitation, leaving workers isolated, weaker, and more vulnerable to the whims of their employers. Without a coherent economic policy to actually improve wages and conditions, the only offer on the table is the bitter consolation of seeing someone else pushed down even further.
Ultimately, this project is a direct attack on the very idea of community solidarity. It seeks to replace a ‘we’ built on mutual aid and common interest with a ‘we’ built against a ‘them’. It fosters suspicion between neighbours and hostility towards those in need. It is the politics of the lifeboat, where people are encouraged to fight each other for a place instead of working together to build a better ship for all.
For those who believe in a society where people care for one another, the threat is existential. This is not a simple political disagreement; it is an assault on the very notion of a shared society. The radical response, therefore, cannot be to defend the status quo, which has already failed so many. It must be to build a deeper, more resilient solidarity from the ground up. It means organising tenant unions to resist evictions, creating community support networks to plug the gaps left by a retreating state, and organising in workplaces to defend rights directly, without permission from a government that may be openly hostile.
We must demonstrate, through action, that our security does not come from hating others, but from organising with our neighbours. The barn might be dilapidated, but it still offers shelter. Our task is not to burn it down, but to repair it, together, and to ensure it protects everyone.
The Mirror to Society: A Reflection of Our Broken Bonds
There is a stark adage that forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: “A fish rots from the head down.” But sometimes, the decay is so advanced it emanates from the entire body. The rise of this political project is not an alien invasion; it is a home-grown symptom. It functions as a terrifying mirror held up to British society, reflecting a profound sickness within—a society where the communal ties that once bound people together have been systematically severed by the relentless logic of capitalism, leaving individuals isolated, atomised, and so desperately searching for belonging that they will find it in the most dangerous of places.
For decades, the project of market fundamentalism has taught a brutal lesson: that we are not neighbours, but competitors; not comrades, but consumers. Our high streets have been replaced by identical retail parks, our pubs—the old centres of community life—have been closing, and our work has become increasingly precarious and isolating. The things that once fostered a sense of shared identity and mutual reliance have been eroded, leaving a vacuum of loneliness and powerlessness. People are not just angry about immigration or speed limits; they are grieving for a sense of place, purpose, and connection that has been stolen from them.
This project did not create this void. It simply recognised it and moved in to fill it. For those feeling invisible and adrift, it offers a powerful sense of identity and belonging. It provides clear enemies to blame for the loneliness, and a fierce, tribal community to replace the one that was lost. The rallies, the merchandise, the shared slogans—they are all a substitute for the genuine solidarity that has been destroyed. It is a dangerous, perverted form of community, built not on mutual aid but on shared resentment, but it is a community nonetheless for those who have been left with nothing else.
This is the darkest reflection in the mirror: the exposure of a deep, unmet hunger for collective life. The established political order, with its focus on managerial efficiency and individual aspiration, has no answer to this hunger. It offers economic metrics, not meaning; it offers consumer choice, not community.
For those who believe in a world built on genuine human connection, this mirror should be a urgent call to action. It reveals that the greatest threat is not the movement itself, but the conditions of isolation and despair that allow it to flourish. The answer, therefore, is not to lecture people on their choices, but to offer a better, more powerful form of belonging.
We must actively build the world we want to see, from the ground up:
We must create real community spaces—community gardens, social centres, libraries of things—where people can connect as human beings, not as consumers.
We must forge new bonds of solidarity through tenant unions that fight landlords together, and through workplace organising that rebuilds collective power.
We must practice mutual aid directly, looking after one another’s needs, from childcare to food sharing, proving that security comes from co-operation, not from competition or hatred.
The project’s rise is a warning. It shows that if we do not build a society based on real solidarity, people will flock to the cruel imitation of it offered by demagogues. The mirror shows us our own sickness. Our task is to heal it, not by smashing the mirror, but by changing the reflection it is forced to show.
The Need for Real Alternatives: Filling the Void
There’s a powerful adage that warns, “Nature abhors a vacuum.” The alarming rise of this movement is not merely a sign of its own strength, but a damning indictment of the void it has filled. It highlights a desperate, aching vacuum where truly radical, bottom-up alternatives should be. People are offered a choice between different managers for the same failing system, but never the tools to run things for themselves. What is missing are not new politicians, but a whole new vision of society based on real self-determination and community power.
For decades, the political horizon has been narrowed to a managerial dispute. The debate has been over who can best administer the decline: who can tweak the taxes, who can slightly adjust the spending, who can manage the public with a firmer or a softer touch. This is a politics of the caretaker, not the architect. It offers no future, only a marginally different version of a stifling present. It is no wonder people are turning to a movement that at least promises a dramatic rupture, even if that rupture is towards a darker form of authority.
This creates a desperate hunger for something real. People do not just want to be listened to; they want to be heard. They do not just want a better manager; they want to be the authors of their own lives. They want control over their work, their homes, their communities, and their environment. The current system, and the opposition to it, offers only representation—the chance to elect a master, never the chance to be free of masters altogether.
This is where the real work begins. The task is not to win the next election, but to make the very idea of being ruled obsolete. It is to build the real alternatives now, from the ground up, that demonstrate what genuine self-determination looks like. This means:
Building community power: Creating assemblies and networks where people on your street or in your town can come together to solve problems directly, without waiting for permission from the council or a political party. Taking over neglected spaces and turning them into gardens, workshops, or centres for mutual care.
Forging economic democracy: Setting up co-operatives where workers own and manage their workplaces, making decisions together without a boss. Supporting union drives that aren’t just about better pay, but about workers’ control over their conditions and their time.
Practising mutual aid: Developing robust networks where people provide for each other’s needs—from food and clothing to childcare and elderly support—based on solidarity, not charity. This proves that security comes from our relationships with each other, not from a distant state or a predatory market.
These are not protests. They are the construction of a new society within the shell of the old. They are the tangible, lived alternative to the politics of resentment. They offer a belonging based on creation and care, not on hatred and exclusion.
The vacuum exists because we have been told no alternative is possible. The most radical act is to build that alternative with our own hands, to show that a world without masters is not a utopian fantasy, but a practical, daily reality waiting to be built. We must fill the void not with a new leader, but with our own collective power.
Our Task: To Build a World That Makes Power Obsolete
There is an old, radical adage that says, “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Our task today is to go far, together. It is to recognise that the answer to the political circus is not to demand a better ringmaster, a more competent or kinder government. That is merely pleading for a gentler jailer. The real task is to render the entire spectacle irrelevant by building a collective power from below—in our workplaces, our estates, and our neighbourhoods—that is so resilient, so effective, and so tangible that the pageantry in Birmingham becomes nothing more than a curious sideshow.
The politicians in Birmingham, and in Westminster, operate on a single, unchallenged assumption: that we need them to manage our lives for us. Our mission is to prove them wrong. This is not about creating a new political party to seize their power. It is about making their kind of power obsolete by reclaiming our own.
This means building a world where:
Real Mutual Aid replaces state neglect. We must create networks that directly meet people’s needs—community kitchens, tool libraries, childcare circles, and health support groups. These acts of practical solidarity show that we can care for one another without waiting for a council grant or a ministerial directive. It proves our security comes from each other, not from above.
Real Solidarity replaces manufactured division. We must actively organise across the lines we are told to hate. This means building tenant unions that unite everyone against the landlord, regardless of their background. It means workplace organising that fights for all workers, not just a select few. It means demonstrating, through action, that our enemy is not the person next to us, but the system that profits from setting us against each other.
A Real Vision replaces empty promises. We must articulate and, more importantly, build a vision of a society organised from the bottom up. This is a society where workplaces are run by those who do the work, where homes are communities rather than investments, and where decisions are made by those affected by them. It is a vision of a world without bosses, because workers are their own bosses; without landlords, because communities control their housing; and without demagogues, because people have no need for a saviour when they have each other.
This is not a distant utopia. It is a practical, daily project. It starts when neighbours get together to tackle a damp problem a landlord ignores. It grows when workers in a shop collectively refuse unsafe conditions. It expands when a community takes over a derelict lot and turns it into a garden for everyone.
Our task is to make the political class redundant. To build a power so deep and so rooted in everyday life that their conferences, their soundbites, and their promises seem increasingly absurd, irrelevant, and ultimately, powerless. We are not protesting. We are building. And what we are building makes their world obsolete.
For those who believe in thinking for themselves and challenging all forms of authority, this is a particularly insidious form of control. It represents the hijacking of knowledge and scholarship to serve a power agenda. It teaches people to outsource their critical thinking to “experts” who are paid to provide the right answers. It is designed to shut down questioning—after all, who are you to argue with a professor?
This is the ultimate betrayal. The job of a true radical is to go to where the hurt is, to listen, and to help people translate their raw, inchoate anger into a understanding of the systems that cause it. It is to show that the problem isn’t the immigrant next door, but the landlord who charges extortionate rent, the boss who pays poverty wages, and the politician who serves them both. The left failed to do this. It became another manager in the system, another voice telling people what to think and how to behave.
The system itself—the real architecture of power—remains untouched. The concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny few, the private ownership of essential utilities, the rights of landlords to extract wealth from tenants, the entire apparatus that allows property to be privileged over people—all of this is left safely intact. The new management might even strengthen these structures, presenting their defence not as a service to capital, but as a patriotic duty or a blow for “common sense.”Conclusion: The Task Before Us
There’s an old saying that reminds us: “You cannot fill a broken cup.” The spectacle in Birmingham—the smoke, the slogans, the signed shirts—will fade. But the thirst that drew people there will not. The alienation, the anger, the raw desire for something truly different: these forces remain, waiting to be channelled. The rise of this project is not a call to panic, but a stark warning. It shows us what happens when genuine pain is ignored—it becomes a weapon for those who promise order in exchange for freedom, a familiar cage with a fresh coat of paint.
Our response cannot be to simply fear this—or worse, to beg the very system that created this misery for protection. Pleading for a kinder manager misses the point entirely. The answer is not to change the hands that hold the leash, but to break the leash itself.
Our task is to start filling the cup ourselves—with water that we draw together.
This begins not in the conference halls of power, but in the spaces they have abandoned: our housing estates, our high streets, our workplaces. It means building real power from below:
Creating networks of mutual aid that feed people, house people, and care for people—not as charity, but as solidarity. Showing that we can provide for each other without permission from above.
Organising tenant assemblies that can collectively resist evictions, resist rent hikes, and challenge the very idea that housing should be a source of profit rather than a home.
Taking back our workplaces through cooperatives and syndicates, where those who do the work make the decisions—democratically, without bosses or shareholders dictating terms.
Building community defence against the politics of division, protecting one another not with walls, but with solidarity—making it clear that an attack on one is an attack on all.
This is the quiet, patient work of making the old politics irrelevant. It is about creating a society where people are connected not by shared resentment, but by shared responsibility. Where we look to each other for strength, not to a leader on a stage.
The future won’t be won in a voting booth or a party conference. It will be built in the streets, in the estates, in the pubs and community centres—where ordinary people, together, remember that real power was never given. It was always built.
The smoke will clear. The audience will grow restless. And when the lights dim on the spectacle of power, we will be there—not as spectators, but as builders. Ready.
- The New Face of the Bosses: Reform UK and the Theatre of Power - 11 September 2025