HANNAH SELL reviews What if Reform Wins? by The Times journalist Peter Chappell, looking at how the capitalist class sees the prospect of a Reform government, and the tasks facing the workers’ movement.
What if Reform Wins? A Scenario
By Peter Chappell
Published by Bloomsbury, 2026, £16.99
Andy Burham’s victory over Reform in the Makerfield by-election, clearing the way to him becoming prime minister, has temporarily lessened the panic about the prospect of a Reform government. Surveys suggest that with Burnham at the helm, Labour would manage to overtake Reform in national opinion polls. For a little while at least; because, however much Labour MPs tell each other that they must not make the same mistakes as the Tories before them, their party is inexorably on the same path. Both parties are being destroyed as a result of ruling in the interests of decrepit British capitalism.
In a low-growth world, Britain’s productivity record is exceptionally poor, with investment rates the worst of the G7 major economies. Living standards have been squeezed for decades, and with government debt as a share of Gross Domestic Product at the highest level since the 1960s and more expensive to service than other major economies, the capitalist class is ratcheting up the pressure for new austerity measures. Governments attempting to do the capitalists’ bidding inevitably suffer savage punishment from an electorate that is already getting poorer in real terms.
Burnham will win Labour some momentary breathing space, but a more personable prime minister, even if combined with a few concessions to the working class, will not stop the historic processes destroying the two parties via which British capitalism has ruled for a century.
That, of course, leaves the capitalist class in the completely uncharted territory of multi-party politics, scrabbling around to try and work out how they can secure the necessary social base to push through the attacks on the working class that they require. While the Labour government is still standing, they will continue to use it, but capitalism has no reliable ‘second eleven’ to replace Labour when it implodes.
Strenuous efforts are therefore being made to fashion Reform into a more reliable instrument of capitalist rule, above all via the eight ex-Tory ministers that have defected to it. There is even a section of the capitalist class that are toying with a Reform government as a positive option. In the first three months of 2026 Reform received more than £9 million in business donations, more than double either Tories or Labour, mainly from crypto-currency billionaires. In one sign of its support among a section of the elite, Reform now holds fundraisers in the most exclusive private members’ clubs, including Oswald’s, where King Charles held his coronation after-party.
The crypto-billionaires’ motives for backing Reform could not be more obvious. The party promises it would let them make even more cash, with even less regulation. The broader reasons for some capitalists toying with Reform were made clear by the founder of Ineos, Jim Ratcliffe, in February this year, when he argued for backing Reform because it was urgent to “deal” with “people who take benefits rather than working for a living” which would require doing “things which are unpopular, and showing some courage”. Ratcliffe, a tax-avoiding billionaire based in Monaco, backed Labour in the last election but is now frustrated that they have not been brutal enough in attacking public spending and hopes Farage might measure up.
A plea to avert disaster
However, the majority of the capitalist class would still prefer to avoid a Reform government if at all possible, because of its populist character and the mass opposition it would inevitably provoke. What if Reform Wins?, by Times journalist Peter Chappell, is in this camp. It finishes with a plea that “those who wish to avert the disaster still have time to remember a different future is possible, and act”. The book attempts to paint a picture of the chaos he believes would result from a Reform government, but also the ways in which it would be bought down.
It does not set out to be an in-depth analysis, but it gives vivid, and sometimes funny, descriptions of a Reform government attempting to implement some of its policies, and the resulting turmoil. It has two alternative endings, but both include Farage being out of office in little over a year. Chappell imagines that Reform has a majority of twenty, won on a relatively low share of the vote because of “the Greens and Lib Dems eating away the Labour vote and the shocking collapse of the Tories”. This passing remark shows that Chappell is lagging behind reality. The days of a collapse of the Tory vote being shocking are long gone. Instead, it is when they actually manage to win an election, as they did in Aberdeen South, which shocks commentators. Once the most powerful capitalist party on the planet, it got a paltry 1.9% of the vote in the Gorton and Denton by-election in February 2026, and 2.2% in Makerfield.
Nor is it any longer accurate to describe other parties “eating away” at the Labour vote; loyal Labour voters are an almost extinct breed. In 2024 Labour won with just 33% of the vote, a similar level to that which Chappell predicts for Reform. Since then, working-class voters have been picking up whatever weapon appears most effective to express their anger against the government. Even Labour’s Makerfield by-election victory was, in reality, a vote to get rid of the Labour prime minister.
Nonetheless, Chappell’s suggestion that any Reform government would have won with a relatively low share of the vote is accurate. And his descriptions of the crises that would buffet such a government are believable. He has them attempting to implement mass deportations of ‘illegal’ migrants, scrapping all clean energy measures and introducing widespread fracking, attacks on the right to protest, huge cuts to the civil service, attacking the BBC by abolishing the license fee and making it a subscription service, and leaving the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
The book does not focus on the huge struggles that would develop against a Reform government. Nonetheless, they are present in the background, including demonstrations in defence of migrants, widespread strikes of civil servants and BBC employees, and “the largest protest since the Iraq War” with “well over a million people making their way down Whitehall”. Public anger bursts out throughout the book on a wide variety of issues. Devastating floods in Bristol with, post-staffing cuts, the Environment Agency able to do little to help save lives; anger at NHS staffing shortages heightened by cuts to visas; local communities up in arms about the consequences of fracking; and even the threat to axe Strictly Come Dancing; all add to the pressure on the government and lead to Farage’s thin majority crumbling.
The tipping point, however, comes when the European Council declares that leaving the ECHR means Britain has violated the trade agreement with the European Union made by the then Tory prime minister Boris Johnson. In response stock markets fall, and the cost of UK government borrowing soars. In an effort to calm the markets the Reform chancellor moves a budget of incredible brutality, pledging “15% cuts in all unprotected departments”, “post-16 education becoming fee paying”, hikes in university fees, the abolition of the pension triple-lock, and the NHS “to be charged at the point of use for the first time”. No doubt Ratcliffe would be joined by much broader sections of the capitalist class cheering such a budget on, except that it cannot be carried through, but instead leads to revolt and Farage’s exit. Chappell’s prediction of a million people demonstrating in response to such a budget is certainly conservative.
‘Good chaps’
While the book gives a believable flavour of how some of the many crises that would batter and break a Reform government could develop, it does not do so from the point of view of the working class. On the contrary, its central thrust, as Gabby Hinsliff put it in her review in The Guardian, is “how well would an unwritten British constitution, still heavily reliant on good chaps voluntarily being good chaps, cope with full-fat populism?” Reform is also aware of those future battles. For example, the ex-Tory now Reform spokesperson Danny Kruger MP, has written a paper on slashing the civil service, Fixing the Centre, where he quotes a university lecture by a Dr Ben Yong saying that “the Civil Service has duties not just to the incumbent government but to something greater: the Crown” which might require, faced with a government of which the civil service disapproved, it “engaging in ‘guerilla government’ including bureaucratic shirking, leaking and whistleblowing.”
Many readers, alarmed by the growth of Reform and rightly desperate to see it defeated, may read the book cheering on these alleged ‘good chaps’ as they attempt ‘guerilla actions’ against a Reform government. However, the workers’ movement would be making a very serious error if it adopted that approach.
All – and more – of the potential manoeuvres by the unelected ‘good chaps’ against a Reform government described in the book would be carried out against any left government. They would certainly have been deployed against a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour government. Even in opposition Corbyn was publicly briefed against by many senior ‘good chaps’. In 2015 the serving Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Nicholas Houghton, suggested that Corbyn’s position on nuclear weapons made him unfit to be prime minister while an unnamed serving general said that troops would take part in “an event which would effectively be mutiny” if Corbyn was elected.
In 2019, just before the general election, Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service MI6, wrote that Corbyn would be “a danger to our country” and that his political record “rules him out as someone suitable to be prime minister”. Throughout his time as leader of the opposition, he was repeatedly refused access to intelligence reports which previous, more ‘acceptable’, Labour leaders routinely received.
Who can doubt that, had he been elected prime minster, he would have faced an endless succession of senior civil servants telling him that his proposed anti-austerity policies were impractical because they “would spook the markets and the Budget would fall apart”, as the permanent secretary warns the Reform chancellor in one chapter. Something like the imagined joint campaign by former prime ministers – David Cameron, John Major and Gordon Brown – to ‘defend the nation’ against a Farage government would have been a certainty against Corbyn.
Unfortunately, based on the experience of the endless compromises made by Corbynism with the pro-capitalist right of the party, it would have retreated far more quickly under that pressure than is the case with the fictional Reform government in this book. Nonetheless, the capitalist class feared the popular enthusiasm a Corbyn government would have engendered, and therefore the ‘good chaps’ set out to try and ensure he never came to power, aided by Corbynism’s hesitancy and retreats.
The nature of the state
The treatment of Corbyn is one example of the real character of Britain’s state machine. It is, in the final analysis, a vehicle for maintaining and defending the interests of the tiny minority in society that rule: the capitalist class. The founders of scientific socialism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, explained how the state developed from the irreconcilable class antagonisms in society, appearing to rise above society as ‘neutral’ force for keeping order, but in fact acting in the overall interests of the dominant class, including mediating between its different wings. The police, the army, the courts and intelligence agencies form the repressive apparatus that is the core of the state. However, the monarchy, the House of the Lords, the civil service, state broadcasters, and the education system are all part of the apparatus that defends capitalist rule too.
We are told that this view is outdated, and does not apply to a modern ‘democratic’ state like Britain. Yet today the staff of these institutions still remain carefully selected to reliably represent the views of the capitalist class. According to the 2025 Elitist Britain report almost half, 47%, of Permanent Secretaries, the most senior civil servants, for example, were privately educated at a public school, compared to 6.5% of the population as a whole, and 66% were Oxbridge educated. The figures are even higher for senior judges, with 62% going to public school and three quarters to Oxbridge, and for generals, of whom 63% are privately educated.
Gaby Hinsliff worries about Britain’s ‘good chaps’ lack of a written constitution, but their forebears did not have one when they oversaw British capitalism in its days as the most powerful country on the planet, with a quarter of the world’s population under its direct rule. Historically, the British capitalist class combined cold cruelty with far-sighted flexibility in defence of its rule. Today declining Britain is a second-rate power, and is consequently far more short-termist than in the past, but its state machine is nonetheless trenchant in defence of ruling class interests.
Chappell inadvertently gives numerous examples of how, as Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Russian revolution, put it, the real business of state “is performed behind the scenes and is carried on by the departments, chancelleries, and General Staffs. Parliament is given up to talk for the special purpose of fooling the ‘common people’.” This does not at all mean that Lenin underestimated the importance of democratic gains – especially trade union organisation and the rights of political parties – won by the working class in countries like Britain which, while very truncated, are nonetheless the embryo of an alternative society within the womb of the old. But, as Chappell inadvertently makes clear, the ‘common people’ getting to vote for a candidate to be their MP every five years gives barely any real say in the running of society.
One example What if Reform Wins? emphasises is the way the monarchy’s considerable reserve powers could be used against a Reform government. It imagines debates as Farage is elected, with some arguing that “if the King refused to ask Farage to the palace, maybe he could be stopped”. Chappell explains that this is theoretically possible because the King has the power to ask “the person who appears to be most likely to command the confidence of the House of Commons” to be the next prime minister.
This option is not taken, however, because “it hasn’t been exercised since 1834, and even then, caused ‘embarrassment’.” This is true regarding Britain itself, but Chappell doesn’t mention how in 1975 Australia’s governor-general, the Queen’s official representative, did use her powers to remove an elected Labour prime minister, Gough Whitlam, who, under pressure from below, was carrying out reforms including free higher education and universal healthcare.
Nor is ‘embarrassment’ a sufficient explanation of the imagined decision not to act in this way. The real reason to hold back would be to avoid fatally undermining the reserve powers of the monarchy, already weakened by the Andrew scandal – by crudely demonstrating that, contrary to its carefully curated image, it is not merely a decorative tourist attraction but a ‘back stop’ means to defend capitalist rule. Later in the book, as mass opposition to the Reform government grows, the monarchy does play a central role in bringing Farage down, but with a fig leaf provided by parliament passing a “humble address to the monarch” appealing to him to act.
Capitalists’ attitude to repression
In the book, as Farage’s parliamentary majority crumbles, it is suggested that he “should declare an official state of emergency under the Civil Contingencies Act (CCA)” and therefore “have sweeping powers to enact policy with minimal parliamentary oversight”. The CCA’s predecessor Act, Farage is informed, was used “five times by Ted Heath” during the massive class struggles of the early 1970s, and “during the general strike of 1926.” Enacting it would require the King’s agreement but would then enable “the prime minister and three or four other senior ministers who are members of the Privy Council meeting the King and requesting he sign” whatever orders they have drawn up, again showing the reserve powers of the monarchy.
Chappell has Farage quickly drop this idea in the face of civil service opposition. He does not paint a Reform government as a step towards military dictatorship or fascism, but correctly describes it as a populist party, without any armed-wing or organised street fighters that a fascist party would have, that has been picked up as an electoral weapon by a section of the population. The Reform government is portrayed as acting within the parameters of capitalist democracy, while also pushing against and undermining some of the existing institutions of the state. To one degree or another the same could be said of all the right populist governments elected in economically-developed countries in the last period, even Trump, notwithstanding the greater power the US presidential system gives him.
However, What if Reform Wins? does assume that the capitalist state would be acting to hold back a Farage government’s attempts to undermine democratic rights. Looking on at the repressive measures taken by successive governments, including, for example, Starmer’s banning of Palestine Action on the utterly spurious grounds that it is a terrorist organisation, now backed up by the High Court, many readers will rightly conclude that this book is prettifying the role of the civil service and state more generally. And actually, even Chappell in passing gives examples of extremely repressive measures being taken against the working class by ‘traditional’ Tory capitalist governments in the 1970s and 1926.
Clearly the state is not a neutral force but ultimately acts in the interests of the capitalist class. So, would the capitalist state actually welcome a Farage government taking dictatorial powers or, at least, massively stepping up state repression? After all, almost half a century ago, Ian Gilmour – a one-nation Tory – summed up the attitude of the capitalist class to democracy in his book Inside Right: A Study In Conservatism, declaring that “for Conservatives, democracy is a means to an end and not an end in itself”. Such was the pre-eminence of the Tories as the party of British capitalism at that stage, he may well have said ‘for the ruling class’. That summation of the capitalists’ real attitude to democracy remains true today.
However, at this stage parliamentary democracy still best serves the interests of the ruling class in Britain and other economically-developed countries, because it acts as a certain ‘safety valve’ by drawing the heat off poplar concerns while also mediating between the different sectional agendas of the capitalists. Nonetheless, in virtually every country, capitalist classes are having greater difficulty finding stable governments that will rule in the interests of their system. This flows from the deep sickness of capitalism and its increasing inability to take society forward. In the face of that, there is a general trend for increasing repressive and anti-democratic measures.
According to a report from the Freedom House Institution in the US, global democracy has now declined for twenty consecutive years. This is from a high point, in the years following the collapse of Stalinism in Russia and Eastern Europe, when US imperialism promised peace, prosperity and democracy to the planet. This was hubris, however, and ailing capitalism has instead delivered growing inequality, conflict and repression. Nonetheless, the number of capitalist democracies, however truncated, today are still far higher than in the early 1970s, for example, when military dictatorships were ruling European countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal.
The danger of greater repression and attacks on democratic rights does not only come from a future Reform government. Particularly in the face of a new economic crisis further undermining British capitalism, it is not difficult to imagine the ruling class backing some form of national government, allegedly to ‘save the nation’ in a time of crisis, and use the involvement of politicians from all the major capitalist parties as justification for more repressive measures being taken by the executive without having to go through the normal ‘checks and balances’ of parliamentary democracy.
Nonetheless, there is no doubt a Reform government would be likely to introduce crude, divisive repressive measures aimed at minorities, probably particularly migrants, Muslims and transpeople. It would also go further than recent governments in, for example, ordering police brutality or mass arrests against anti-racist and workers’ protests. Attempts at ‘Trump-style’, blatantly vindictive, prosecutions of individuals and groups that Farage considers to be his enemies could also be on the agenda.
The majority of the capitalist elite’s apprehension about a Reform government has nothing to do with opposing repressive measures, however, but rather stems from a fear that Reform would undermine the ability of the capitalist state to act effectively, by Trump-style attacks on its institutions – including the civil service, the BBC and the judiciary – thereby undermining the perceptions of the state’s neutrality. They also fear Reform’s recklessness, both in relations with other capitalist powers and, above all, in provoking mass movements of the working class. They are right to be worried on all scores. However, the Italian capitalist class had the same fears about Meloni’s right-populist government but in practice – no doubt under huge pressure from the Italian capitalist class and state – she has proven to be a ‘pragmatic’ leader from the point of view of Italy’s ruling elite. (See the article by Christine Thomas, Assessing The ‘Fascist’ Meloni Government, in Socialism Today No.294, February 2026)
Nonetheless, the majority of the capitalist class in Britain will look for other options, including perhaps considering changes to the electoral system to try and prevent them having to make the Reform experiment. Martin Wolf, the Financial Times chief economics commentator, for example, calls for a rapid move to proportional representation as “an essential safeguard” to protect “the rule of law, safe property rights, effective government, advanced science, and the freedom of the media”. The second item in his list tells you everything about what ‘liberal’ capitalists mean by defending democracy.
How workers could defeat a Reform government
The workers’ movement has entirely different reasons to fight to prevent the election of a Reform government and will only achieve this by taking an independent position from the capitalist opposition to Farage. Since the general election it is among working-class voters that Reform’s support has grown most. Polling at the start of this year showed 39% support for Reform in ‘routine and manual occupations’ compared to only 19% in ‘higher managerial and professional’ jobs.
Working-class young people, women and those from ethnic minorities are much less likely to vote Reform. Nonetheless, the primary reason that a section of the working class is doing so is to express rage at capitalist politicians. Polling of Reform voters shows that 87% support nationalisation of the water companies, and 65% the energy companies. Just as over a million UKIP voters switched to Corbyn’s Labour in 2017, many of those currently voting Reform could be won to a workers’ party, founded by at least a section of the trade unions, and fighting against division and in the interests of the whole working class. Of course, such a party coming to power would be a far greater threat to the capitalist class than a Reform government, and would certainly face every kind of obstruction and sabotage by the capitalist class and its state, which could only be overcome by the active mobilisation of the working-class majority in favour of a socialist programme.
Even before Burnham’s return to parliament, the big majority of national trade union leaders were clinging to support for Labour as, allegedly, the only way to ‘stop Reform’. They will double down on that approach now. But, in reality, continuing to back a pro-capitalist Labour government would make a Reform government more likely.
Such a government would certainly not improve the living standards of the section of the working class that voted for them, but would instead launch savage attacks on all workers’ living conditions. Many who voted Reform would quickly find themselves demonstrating on the streets against it. Another ex-Tory minister, Robert Jenrick, now Reform’s economic spokesperson, emphasises the need to cut benefits and lower public spending. Reform has pledged to scrap the Employment Rights Act, which has given some very limited improvements in workers’ legal protections under this government. In Reform-led councils Unison has reported a 200% increase in union membership. There is no doubt that a Reform government would face huge working-class opposition from the start.
However, it would be vital for that opposition to be organised on an independent class basis. To give one example – not fiction but fact – Kruger’s paper on the civil service predicts mass strike action against a Reform government by the Public and Civil Servants Union (PCS), and threatens mass sackings in response. Kruger, of course, cynically links this to the need to prevent the civil service sabotaging an elected government. It would be enormously counterproductive if Reform was able to paint PCS strike action against it, and trade union action more generally, as backing up ‘the establishment’ opposition to Reform. It could delay the inevitable shattering of Reform’s lie that it stands up for the ‘little people’ against that ‘establishment’. On the other hand, PCS action as part of a coordinated struggle of public service workers to defend workers’ pay, conditions and public services under attack from Reform, would win mass support.
Nor is it only a question of trade union action. Even a small block of socialist MPs offering opposition to Reform in parliament from the point of view of the working class, would hugely speed up the shattering of Reform’s laughable claims to stand for workers. Those MPs would also need to advance a socialist programme to massively extend democracy, starting with repeal of all anti-union laws, abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords, and for all MPs to be subject to the right of recall by their constituents at any time and to only receive a worker’s wage. Before and after the next general election, therefore, the battle to defeat Reform is not separate to the general tasks facing the workers’ movement, above all for the formation of a mass workers’ party with a socialist programme.
Nonetheless, there are some specific tasks which are becoming more pressing in the current situation. While racism is not the central driver for the increased Reform vote, it is nonetheless true that the relentless anti-migrant propaganda of Tories and Labour over the last period is now being significantly further whipped up by Reform. Many migrants and people from ethnic minorities feel increasingly under threat. The Muslim Council of Britain’s recent advice to mosques on how to prevent violent attacks is one example of that.
It is already long overdue for the trade union movement to launch a mass struggle against New Labour austerity – and for ‘jobs, homes and public services not racist division’. Under a Reform government such an approach would be vital, including fighting for every worker, whatever their nationality, to receive the ‘rate for the job’, defending the right to asylum, and combating all attempts to divide the working class on national and ethnic lines.
It is also increasingly urgent for the workers’ movement to take seriously the need for stewarding against far-right thugs. While Reform is not fascist, its growth is giving confidence to the – still only loosely organised – fascistic thugs and grouplets, some of whom are gravitating to Restore Britain at this point. It has always been a serious mistake to rely on police protection against them. Under a Reform government, where police chiefs would be far more likely to give express orders to attack workers’ movement, anti-racist and left protests, the question of a serious approach to workers’ defence will be a necessity.
In conclusion, the growing electoral support for Reform is just one symptom of the profound crisis of British capitalism. It will not be defeated by the ‘good chaps’ whose job is defence of the capitalist system, but by the potentially most powerful force in Britain: the organised working class armed with a socialist programme.