Two charts from the FT this morning strongly indicate that the UK has a 'left behind' group in our society, and they are now reshaping UK politics.
The article is data-based and looks at issues that characterise Reform voting constituencies:
Reform constituencies are much more likely to be populated by people born in the UK, and to be pro-Brexit. They are also likely to have low social mobility:
Three things stand out for me.
First, we know this, but it keeps needing to be retold: nothing is being done to address the issue of those 'left behind'.
Second, waves of neoliberal government of varying complexion have come and gone, and nothing has been done to really tackle inequality. In fairness, Labour did well on issues like child poverty under Blair (the data is very clear on that), but the Tories have always been abysmal. The rise of Reform is, then, most especially the consequence of Tory failure.
Third, unless steps are taken to tackle this issue, the false narratives of hope offered by Reform, which would deeply damage the well-being of most of those who might vote for that party, will carry the day, and we will have a crisis with fascism in this country.
How to achieve this?
Start by massively redistributing income and wealth.
Nothing but that can work. Unless people have money to spend, opportunities will not exist in the places where they live.
Then improve the public services that people on lower incomes are most especially dependent upon.
Solving the problems that lead to fascism can be done. What is needed is obvious. What is lacking is any desire to upset those with high income and wealth, who are the true enablers of fascism. The problem is that there is no political party willing to say this, let alone do anything about it.
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It’s clear we’re at a tipping point in British politics. The data suggests what many communities have long felt: a growing segment of the population feels not just economically insecure, but culturally and politically abandoned. The rise of Reform isn’t just a protest vote — it’s a symptom of a deeper failure to offer meaningful inclusion or opportunity to large parts of the country.
What’s worrying is not just the persistence of inequality, but the growing sense that no one in power intends to do anything meaningful about it. If this continues, people will keep turning to those who at least claim to listen — even if those voices offer false hope and destructive answers. That’s how democracies weaken.
But the solution isn’t just shouting “redistribution” into the void. We need to be strategic, specific, and bold. Here’s some possibilities how change can happen:
1. Shift power locally and empower communities
Top-down policy has repeatedly failed. We need a bottom-up model that puts trust and tools into people’s hands:
Participatory budgeting across councils to give residents control over meaningful local spending decisions.
Community wealth-building models, where local authorities, NHS trusts, and anchor institutions commit to hiring, buying, and investing locally.
Local enterprise trusts with seed funding to support cooperatives, start-ups and social enterprises tailored to community needs.
2. Reform tax and redistribute fairly — not punitively
Yes, redistribution is essential. But it must be structured to support dignity, not just dependence:
Close loopholes on capital gains, inheritance, and property wealth that allow the richest to avoid contributing fairly.
Fund an “opportunity dividend” — a guaranteed minimum monthly income for adults in the lowest-income areas, providing security and choice.
3. Reimagine public services as enablers of autonomy
Public services shouldn’t just be safety nets; they should be launchpads:
Transform job centres into “opportunity hubs”, integrating careers support, mental health, training, and child care under one roof.
Introduce a lifetime learning entitlement, with funded access to training, reskilling, and digital education — available whenever people need it.
None of this is utopian. We know these models work — they’ve been piloted in parts of the UK and abroad. What’s lacking is political will, not policy options.
The problem isn’t that we don’t know what to do. The problem is that our political establishment remains reluctant to confront the vested interests who benefit from the status quo. Unless that changes, the vacuum will grow — and the politics that fills it will become more extreme, more divisive, and more dangerous.
This is about rebuilding a social contract — one rooted in dignity, agency, and shared prosperity. We’ve waited long enough. It’s time to act.
Starmer got elected Labour leader on a programme like that. He won, and then immediately dropped it. He was particularly pushing decentralisation. Then he started centralising power in the party, then in the country, with a vengeance.
It’s v discouraging!
I wonder what role the two child limit on benefits, the Benefit Cap and the abolition of Council Tax Benefit had in the rise of Reform?
In one way it is obvious. In another we just don’t hear it enough.
It is amazing the way you hit the nail on the head day after day -on several topics.
I hope the nails are on the lid of neo-liberalism.
I try…..
Much to agree with. Came across this last night. Dunno who they are (or who funds em) they seem like new boys on the block but seem to point in the right direction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2acyRyrla8
“UK’s New Face of Poverty: The Unspoken Truth in 2025”
The vid covers some of the points made. Reform will NEVER tax wealth.
Interesting
Made with AI from a typed script
I don’t like that, but 89,000 views
Some half awake neurons were churning in my brain as I was reading this blog with my morning tea. If people “left behind” are more likely to vote for the hard right then it’s in the interests of those on the far right (Reform, Tories, most of the current governing Labour Party) to foster social engineering that consign more and more the “left behind” category. Fascism is then all but guaranteed, not by accident but by design. And isn’t that the objective of the oligarchs?
Yes…
One interesting aspect is the association of support for the preeminently anti-immigration party not with high, but with low immigration. In other research, this has also been demonstrated for whole countries – for example countries in Eastern Europe, that actually have extremely low immigration, oppose it most vehemently. I wonder what this evidences? Perhaps that real contact with immigrants enables us to see them as human beings just like us – perhaps that the lack of this direct experience is what enables malicious politicians to ‘other’ immigrants – or perhaps that the lack of opportunity in such places – the very factor that puts immigrants off going there – leads to a festering resentment and anger about things in general, easily focused on something like demographic or cultural change, but bendable to any hateful narrative.
Much to agree with
But why Richard?
Because the political parties are more and more financially dependent on those who don’t want inequality to be tackled.
Fossil fuel interests, private healthcare interests, asset strippers, big builders who benefit from keeping housing supply down and prices up – while they encourage politicians to fiddle around with false gods like the planning system, migratns etc.
This is corruption at the heart of the political system , and has to be made illegal. Political parties have to become mass membership institutions again – but how?
“Political parties have to become mass membership institutions again – but how?”
The Labour Party has to split. Corbyn turned Labour into the largest political party in Europe – a membership that has since almost halved. A UK friend of mine – a branch chair and indefatigable fundraiser – was one that left the party, so I know it wasn’t just the membership subscriptions that were lost. Labour was indeed in serious financial trouble until the corporate fundraising of Starmer et al. So you’re right – In the UK now there are really only 2 viable sources of political funding: it’s either mass active membership or wealthy corporations and individuals. You have to choose – but the right wing of the Labour Party simply don’t trust the party members – they just can’t cope with a mass, active membership. So the left of the party has to split.
Incidentally, I noticed the following in a recent Guardian article by Zoe Williams on Zack Polanski:
“I’ve heard rumours of imminent Labour defections to the Greens… Polanski is confident of one but won’t say who.”
Thank-you for this. I heartily agree. My ward is currently spending a £12m levelling up grant, on a very rundown shopping street/community centre/housing. The money is welcome, as are the refurbished community facilities, but the plans are more vague with regard to the shop units. High rents go to distant landlords, local people do not have disposable income to spend in local shops, cafes struggle to survive through the winter. Some community workers and local entrepreneurs and volunteers will do brilliant first aid work, but against a rising tide of poverty and desperation.
Of course there is a thriving hi-tech big chain betting shop, extracting ££££ so fast you can feel the draught blowing down the street.
We have a large “Youth Zone” being built nearby, serving 2 rival postcode areas, to “replace” all the small local council/church youth clubs, guides, scouts etc. It will do good work, but it won’t substitute for the smaller groups with long term embedded presence who knew all the kids by name.
We are grateful to our masters for throwing us the £12m, so building firms can bring in builders, architects and consultants from some other neighbourhood far away, who will extract the £££££ back again. We will get some improved infrastructure out of it, which we certainly need. I suppose Reeves will refer to it as growth. But without significant wealth redistribution, those shops won’t be any more viable than before. A family will try to run a cafe, but fold during their 2nd winter. Vape shops will come and go, unbeknown to HMRC or Companies House, and the betting shop will thrive, with whatever infernal hi-tech, hi-speed theft and mugging devices they install next.
Welcome though our levelling-up grant is, virtually none of it will increase the disposable income of my neighbours. It won’t actually level us UP very much at all.
However unfashionable it might be, central government action is required – intelligent intentional SPENDING focussed on making a visible difference to the disposable incomes of the less well off, as well as improving their acces to housing, health, public transport, education and social care (whatever their race, gender, sexuality, faith, health status, age, or neurotype).
Do this, and Reform will become irrelevant.
Don’t do it, and Reform (or their successors on the populist far right) will become the next (fascist) government.
The good news is – it is do-able, and the country (and my neighbourhood) are full of amazing people who can help make it happen.
Unfortunately, Downing St. doesn’t get it, nor does the House of Commons, nor does the City of London.
Still, what do they matter?
So much to agree with.
The need to recycle money in local communities seems to be an idea beyond the wit of thosee promoting these schenes, and yet it is vital.
When Farage came up North he went to Stanley in County Durham, then to Morpeth in Northumberland.
In his speech in Morpeth he told the people that Stanley was full of vape shops and betting shops, but he knew Morpeth wasn’t like that. The people in Stanley still voted for reform, along with most of County Durham, so we now have a reform council.
Next time we will have a reform government unless this government changes the way we vote.
https://leftfootforward.org/2025/05/why-the-local-election-results-this-year-were-unprecedented-and-show-the-need-to-fix-our-broken-electoral-system/
As long as the criminal global oligarchy, high on their oil based perpetual growth personal wealth, continue to control all mass media portals, no one is safe from their destructive often fatal social cruelty.
Witnessing how easily they turned Covid around with continuing mass media coverups and lately defunding of research, as they all doubled their wealth betting against their fellow human beings, it seems it will now take a slower catastrophe that is more complex and gruelling in its horror to unseat them.
Perhaps we are living through it now and so we are all sensing it and struggling with how to survive the actions of the inhumane, the arrogant and the ignorant who currently make up our ruling class.
Redistribution is vital yes, but also a more fundamental reshaping/rebalancing of the economy is required.
There needs to be ways to ensure that the redistributed funds are available for people to spend on things in their local economy.
Too much income (be that personal or for that matter the income of companies actually producing things and providing services) is swallowed up in rents extracted by the wealthy, leaving individuals with little to spend and for businesses to invest in paying their staff. It’s as if policymakers are unaware of the marginal propensity to spend/save of the different parts of the electorate
Two items of news today that highlight the “left behind”.
1) The Sunday Times Rich List has been put together for this year.
The BBC highlight that King Charles’ personal wealth has jumped to equal former prime minister Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty.
In the last year his wealth has grown by £30m to £640m, increasing his rank by 20 places.
That puts him at number 258 on the list alongside Sunak and Murty.
Top 3.
1. Gopi Hinduja and family (£35.3bn, down £37.2bn)
2. David and Simon Reuben and family (£26.87bn)
3. Sir Leonard Blavatnik (£25.73bn)
The BBC seems to be more concerned about reporting the tax concerns of the rich, and the fact that the number of billionaires and super rich living in the UK has fallen a little.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0lnzx73pl3o
2) They also report today the following.
One in ten Brits have no savings, while buy now, pay later is surging.
Moreover, anxiety and stress levels were relatively high, particularly among those burdened by debt.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgv6z5pr92o
Left behind Britain.
Labour need to come to grips with the real cost of living crisis that has not gone away and just gets worse. I noticed this week at PM’s question time that Starmer was using the wages ahead of inflation mantra again. He needs to live in the real world, otherwise he is going to lose big time.
70% of people in the UK have very few savings.
The world has, howver, a glut of savings
“First, we know this, but it keeps needing to be retold: nothing is being done to address the issue of those ‘left behind’.”
Other than the 10% who are and always will be Right Wing Nuts House Cases (Moral Majority, John Birch Society, etc…etc…) the USA cousins of the “UK left behinders” were the 30% that “swung” their vote and put Trump in the White House for the second time.
This swing vote did not like Trump the first go-around so they put Biden in office. Biden was unable, though he did much good, to enact policies that made a direct tangible financial benefit to individual households.
Trump failed once, will fail again and so will Reform fail.
Getting rid of every immigrant of color will NOT put any money in the “left behinders” wallets. The only wat to increase the direct tangible financial benefit to individual households is to fully fund public services then widen the net of those public services that are means tested.
Agreed
If you can, have a look at who is the new leader of Derbyshire County Council.
I cannot post links – but I know this individual who is ex-Labour and UKIP local councillor in the County’s capital.
All I can say is that if a person of this dubious quality can rise to such a position, then we are truly living in the realm of the absurd.
I’ll say it again: ABSURD.
This fellow?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgnp0vl69ro
He seems to have been an interesting mayor…
To say the least…..
Yes – that’s him.
Trust me – he is beneath contempt and is a shit stirrer.
”The problem is that there is no political party willing to say this, let alone do anything about it.”
It seems that Zack Polanski, if elected leader of the Green Party this summer, will be saying it:
“If you were trying to create the circumstances for the far right to rise, you would be doing exactly what Keir Starmer is doing now, which is protecting the wealth and power of the super rich” (quoted in Guardian, 5th May).
Compare this to Scotland Richard! We are hardly a socialist paradise up here but when it comes to attacking poverty we are at least in the game. It will be interesting (and terrifying) to see what Reform does up here in 2026.
Agreed. They have a worrying and utterly illogical support base in Scotland.