A thread runs through the Labour Party’s failures in the former ‘red wall’. It failed to hear and champion working class interests after the 2008 economic crash, through Brexit and during Reform’s recent march into local councils.
Labour’s arrogant attitude towards the people of Durham‘s villages and towns was summed up by the 2016 Teaching Assistant dispute. Then, a Labour-led council that could find money for ‘unaffordably flash office blocks’ and senior leaders’ clothing allowances plead poverty while slashing low-income school workers’ salaries to the bone. It caused outrage.
That happened during the Corbyn era – a project that tried, rhetorically, to move beyond the ‘top down’ paternalism of post-war social democracy. It too failed to occupy the political space created by Labourism’s historical decline, because Corbynism never actually developed, either in practice or as a convincing vision, a new, truly democratic politics that spoke to people in former Labour heartlands.
These are failings we must acknowledge to have any hope of defeating Reform UK from the left. We must work beyond traditional politics to challenge the pernicious but popular narratives that have taken root in our communities and to offer genuine engagement and solidarity across the board.
The long road to reform
In the May 2025 local elections, Reform won 677 council posts (41 per cent of all contested seats). It took full control of its first, and then nine more English councils – the ‘political earthquake’ Nigel Farage had promised. In former Labour stronghold County Durham, the only sense of shock was over its magnitude. Reform went from zero to 65 of 98 seats, including one taken by hard-right poster boy Darren Grimes. Labour lost 38 seats, retaining just four.
Attempts to explain the rise of Reform have understandably focused on Northern, working-class ‘red wall’ areas. Yet its leaders have tapped into a grievance culture that straddles varied class and geographical boundaries. Its nationwide base includes working-class voters who’ve long since abandoned Labour and many who simply stopped voting, or never voted at all. It maps onto pro-Brexit areas. Increasingly, it includes upwardly mobile and middle-class voters who live in new housing estates and want to ‘protect’ what they’ve got.
Reform has embraced ‘anti-woke’ rhetoric, aggressive anti-immigrant racism, transphobia, and hardened nationalism, and is confident about capturing the public mood. In many ways, the party is building on Margaret Thatcher’s unfinished ‘new right’ project.
Thatcher’s governments created ideological buttresses for free market economic doctrines from early in her tenure. Her MPs focused extensively on traditional families, moral codes and law and order. They proposed Section 28 – an effective ban on gay and lesbian teachers and censorship in schools – through homophobic campaigns that framed gay people as an existential threat to British children.
Thatcherism also promoted rampant individualism, encapsulated in her famous 1987 statement: ‘There is no such thing as society’. Reform have picked up Thatcher’s frequency, turning up the dial on racism, self-interest and flag-waving nationalism.
Its leaders however understand that dogmatic adherence to economic free market ideas will not work today. Instead, they have capitalised on social and economic polarisation created by the post-2008 economic crisis and painted Reform as the saviour of working people ‘left behind’ using mixed messages on wages, taxes and public services that defy traditional ideological brackets.
Undercutting the left, agitating online
New Labour failed to challenge the ‘no society’ mantra beyond a rhetorical commitment to the welfare state. Public services, the NHS, comprehensive education, workers rights and fair wages have all been privatised, shrunk or disappeared under Tory and Labour governments.
The Corbyn project as a whole, even local successes like Jamie Driscoll’s successful campaign to become North of Tyne Mayor, failed to strike a lasting chord in working-class communities. Here, a new ‘common sense’ has become deeply ingrained and won’t be shifted by left groups publishing manifestos or raising banners at labour movement festivals.
A right-wing media stranglehold has promoted anger around issues as varied as Covid-19 denial, immigration, child grooming gangs, ‘cultural Marxism’, Sharia law, gender identity, anti-social behaviour. Framed as ‘common sense’ or ‘legitimate concerns’, anger has percolated through informal social media channels, particularly Facebook community groups, creating the appearance that people’s friends, neighbours and family are setting the agenda, not politicians or journalists.
We must revive the socialist traditions of co-operation, solidarity and anti-racism which have been buried in the communities openly targeted by the right
Reform has recognised and exploited this fertile soil to entrench right-wing hegemony. In many communities, both online and in ‘real life’, the left has simply disappeared from view. Believing that there is an opportunity to ‘flip’ Reform supporters to left-wing politics because we share grievances about the economic system seriously underestimates the size of the task we face.
Reform councillors have manoeuvred themselves into spaces focused on ‘winning hearts and minds’ far more than concern with policies, treaties or regulations. In Durham, even before their first full council meeting, they took down the Pride Flag outside County Hall with Grimes, now Deputy Leader, saying the party was ‘anti-tokenism’.
They renamed departments to remove references to climate change and equality and inclusion. Significantly, they scrapped the Net Zero pledge by promising to spend savings on ‘the critical and escalating crisis’ in children’s social care, effectively pitting SEND provision against environmental breakdown. In Grimes’ words, ‘protecting communities’ by ‘put[ing] children over carbon’.
Rethinking our response
Since the 1990s, the English left has been used to opposing small but aggressive groups of far-right racists and Conservatives given to xenophobic scapegoating and dog-whistles. Things have changed. Anti-immigrant rhetoric has become so widely popularised that lines between hardened racists and quieter, ingrained xenophobes are blurred.
Reform reflects a culmination of that shift. To label their leaders and supporters ‘fascists’ does nothing to address the failures of left parties and groups. It does nothing to fill the gaps in our collective engagement with working-class communities.
To stem its rise, activists must engage in deep community organising, helping to bring together local people repelled by racism and eager to create change locally through collaboration, not sloganeering from afar. We must offer a very different, tangible agenda than the toxic one offered locally and propagated widely by Reform. In short: we must revive the socialist traditions of co-operation, solidarity, and anti-racism which have been buried in the communities openly targeted by the right.
There are seeds of hope. Three hundred people gathered outside Reform’s second full council meeting on July 16 to challenge its policies. This year’s Miners’ Gala – which retains credibility in former pit villages – saw Durham Pride lead the procession alongside a large Palestinian presence under the theme ‘We’re Still Here’. The Durham Miners’ Association (organiser of the Gala) is developing its former headquarters, Redhills, into a community organising resource. Heather Wood is a former leader of Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC), explains:
‘The situation is horrendous but things are happening to bring communities together. Ken Loach’s Old Oak isn’t fiction. We’ve welcomed Syrian refugees to eat with us in the miners welfare hall. Redhills is advertising for six posts, including a community organising in the villages. In Horden, with Redhills support, theatre group Ensemble 84 is paying young actors from different communities and performing political work in an old Methodist Hall. Recently, Coalfields Communities and The Humanist Society co-organised an anti-racist workshop which drew 70 people, most of whom I hadn’t met before. That event will be repeated. It’s not going to be easy, as I know from my own organising in Easington. We are talking about a five-ten year process’.
WAPC itself has become the National Women’s Action for Positive Change (NWAPC). The group is based at the People’s Bookshop in Durham city centre, and brings together local women community organisers every month. Members include women from the No To Hassockfield campaign, which is organising communities near Medomsley to support migrant women held in the nearby Immigration Removal Centre.
These efforts show that it’s past time to return to the deep local organising habits that have been lost in modern left movements. Embedding them in the everyday practices of wider organising will involve conflict and new understandings. It is a necessary, urgent challenge to undertake.
