Class war is back – but this time the revolt against elites is from the Right

What now? We have a government of the Left, elected with almost no enthusiasm at all, which is going to have to deal with a wave of European governments of the Right which came to power on a wave of genuine mass popularity. Before we can begin to discuss how that is going to work, we must ask how (and why) it happened.

The most obvious answer is that the potential vote for the Right was split. At almost any point during what seemed like an interminable election campaign, if you added up the polling numbers for Reform and the Conservatives the total matched (sometimes exactly) the figure that Labour was expected to achieve. That Labour was able to win an effective landslide in Parliament with just over a third of the popular vote is an anomaly for which historical treatises will have to account. But for the moment it is the immediate consequences that matter.

As almost everyone accepts, the country has not moved to the Left. In fact, its predilections are remarkably aligned with those of the European states which have experienced startling shifts of power to Rightwing parties.

But unlike those more volatile nations, Britain has no tradition of populist movements seizing power: no established template for the rabble rousing nationalism which can sleep for generations only to emerge fully formed when the moment is right. That may be why Reform took the mainstream parties by surprise. Unlike militancy on the Left, there was very little precedent for dealing with a challenge of this kind from a Rightwing outfit.

What was particularly startling about the phenomenon was that its spiritual base was in the working class. In the UK, protest movements from that section of society are almost always Leftwing: trade union activism, Trotskyist protesters carrying Socialist Worker placards, and old lag Communist fellow travellers. A proletarian revolt on the Right may be familiar in Germany or France but it has never really taken hold in Britain.

This is odd when you think of it. Given that the British have found it almost impossible to extinguish class sensitivities as a determinant of social and political attitudes, it should have been predictable that the rise and rise of what everybody now calls the “elites”, with their smug, privileged contempt for those they consider benighted, would lead to something like this.

I have to say I misjudged the ability of Reform to hold its ground after the disastrous mishap over Nato and Putin. It seemed to me that Nigel Farage’s Trump-like line – apparently blaming Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Nato provocation – would damage his party substantially. The British – unlike Americans – do not generally find isolationism morally admirable and they take pride in their resistance to war-mongering tyrants.

Of course, it is possible that those statements did cost Farage some support. In the end Reform won five seats when they might have hoped for a dozen. But in truth this election was not about foreign policy or the concerns of global power players. It was about the people here at home who saw themselves as forgotten, dismissed and despised by the whole political class. That is why Reform performed remarkably well in the Red Wall seats where Labour should have been invincible. This was a revolt against snobbery and condescension. It was about teaching the self-regarding, bien pensant liberals who had ruled unchallenged for so long that they would no longer have it all their own way.

But performing an overnight trick in elections is one thing, looking like a competent potential governing force is quite another. What should have been Reform’s triumphant press conference on Friday was a shambolic, amateurish mess. Not just because it was interrupted by a series of disruptive protesters – something that proper security precautions should have prevented – but because the speeches from the party’s own MPs were embarrassingly inadequate and the whole event seemed ill thought out and directionless.

The only goal, which was reiterated explicitly, was to change the voting system to a form of proportional representation. Reform did not come across as a serious contender for responsible power. It looked like a chaotic sideshow.

You might be thinking that such a lack of professionalism and organisation could turn out to be endearing: a sign of sincerity and spontaneity in a political realm that is altogether too cynically well-rehearsed. But I don’t think so.

Watching that press conference was genuinely disturbing. There was an air of things falling apart, of alarmingly uncontrollable conflicts that could ignite without warning if they were not forcibly suppressed. This is not how politics should be conducted in a democracy.

Whatever Reform’s ultimate fate turns out to be, there is a lesson here that will have to be reckoned with by any political party that wishes to remain in the game. Class war is back on the scene and it is not motivated by the old ideology: the enemy is not capitalist exploitation, or even wealth and privilege. If anything, the new warriors are demanding the right to participate and compete economically without unfair disadvantages being put in their way by politicians who are more sympathetic to migrants than to “our own people”, and more concerned about social minorities than the large left behind communities in unfashionable parts of the country.

What is threatening the stability of the Western countries (not just in Europe but in Trumpian America too) which are witnessing this uprising is a stark disagreement about what government is for and who it is intended to serve.

Even the words that have become most important in the vocabulary of modern progressive speech have a different meaning in the new rebellion. “Unfairness”, used by democratic socialists to describe inequalities of wealth, is understood by the new class warriors as the imbalance of influence between those who hold power and those who do not. What it boils down to is a demand for political leadership that responds to the demands of a population that feels disenfranchised: an end to the benign oligarchy which scarcely bothers to listen, let alone understand, why so many of its people are desperately unhappy.