The New Dark Age

Monday, 5 May 2025 — Geopolitics and Climate Change

Roger Boyd

I wrote earlier about the role of the oligarch funded AfD, founded by neoliberal economists and now lead by the grand-daughter of a Hitler-appointed judge and acolyte of a neoliberal economist, as a party being kept in the wings in case oligarch rule through social democracy breaks down. With the CDU/CSU government immediately after its election carrying out a complete 180 from its election promises, pushing for massive new war spending and an oligarch “infrastructure” slush fund to enable German oligarch profiteering. As shown below with the biggest German defence firm Rheinmetall.

In the UK, the Labour Party has played the role of the German CDU/CSU. It is lead by an utter UK establishment tool, Prime Minister Starmer. Quickly after the election of the Labour government, election promises were thrown away and replaced with a focus on austerity for the people combined with business-friendly policies (including the further privatization of state functions such as the NHS) and a massive war spending buildup. The government’s popularity has plummeted within months of taking office, but it will not be forced to call another election until August 15th, 2029. In the interim, it can continue to serve the British oligarchy and not care about the British majority.

The British version of the AfD is the Reform Party, lead by Nigel Farage. He is the son of a wealthy stockbroker in the City of London, and was educated at the private elitist Dulwich College in London. After leaving school in 1982, he became a commodities trader in the City of London; where he worked for over two decades. He was elected to the European Parliament as a UKIP member (UK Independence Party, founded by Farage) in 1999 and re-elected in 2004, 2009 and 2014. In 2016, Farage was a key public figure in the successful push for BREXIT (British exit from the EU). In 2019, Farage founded the Brexit party, which was renamed to Reform in 2021.

Unlike other political parties, Reform is a corporate entity with shareholders. Farage owns 60% of the voting shares, hardly a democratic structure. Its paying membership has no voting power. As with the AfD, there is a single very large financial backer who does not live within the country. In the case of Reform it is Christopher Harborne, a British businessman and technology investor who has lived in Thailand since 2019. He is pure British establishment, educated at Westminster School and Cambridge University (ME, MEng, MBA) while also receiving an MBA from INSEAD (the leading French and highly globally-ranked MBA school). He has given over GBP 10 million to the Brexit/Reform party. He founded an aviation fuel company, is a crypto investor, and is the biggest shareholder in UK defence company Qiniteq. Other very large funders are deca-millionaire Zia Yusuf (party chief) of immigrant Sri Lankan parentage, and multi-millionaire property developer Richard Tice (deputy leader). Most definitely not the “populist” party that it has sold itself as, much more like a copy of the Trump coterie of the rich.

In the 2024 election, the Conservative Party collapsed to 23.7% of the vote, freeing the way for a large Labour majority gained with only 33.7% of the vote and for Reform to gain five parliamentary seats (including one for Farage) with 14.3% of the vote. Since then, the Labour volte face has lead to an utter collapse in its support among the British electorate. But, as stated above, it can hang on until August 2029 to do the bidding of the UK establishment, of which Starmer is an utter tool.

In the UK local elections, held on May 1st 2025, Reform is projected to gain the largest share of the vote at 30%, Labour at 20%, the Liberal Democrats at 17%, and the Conservatives at 15%. Reform won 676 council seats and control of 7 councils. Reform also won a parliamentary by-election in what had been one of Labour’s safest seats on the same day. This represents a massive change in British politics, with the previously dominant Labour and Conservatives being pushed to second (only just ahead of the Liberal Democrats) and fourth. The traditional bastion of the right wing, the Conservative Party, has been severely damaged, which will make it much easier for Reform to push itself as the true leader of the right.

The Conservative Party has been utterly delegitimized by its rule from 2010 to 2024, during which it implemented policies of widespread austerity, creeping privatization, and mass immigration. The result was a GDP per capita in 2023 in local currency that was hardly higher than in 2007, and probably lower given a more accurate measure of the inflation hitting the majority of UK citizens; with the UK falling far behind other nations and public services seriously degraded. The Labour Party has already begun to, and will continue to, destroy its legitimacy as it continues with establishment-directed policies that are not supported by the British electorate.

By 2029 Britain will be an even poorer nation, with an even greater level of wealth and income inequality, an increased population through further immigration (in 2023, 1.2 million people migrated to the UK and 479,000 emigrated, for a net migration of 782,000; the population of the UK in 2023 was 68.35 million), in very significant financial and economic crisis while greater and greater amounts of government funds are spent on war making and being sifted off to offshore tax havens through fraudulent “public-private” partnerships. Mass immigration will have continued, with the Labour government making the same performative gestures as the Conservatives previously. To drive the immiseration of the British populace and the increased wealth of the British establishment further will need a very strong and authoritarian hand.

And that is the Reform Party, acting as a fake populist alternatives to Labour and Conservative parties. The real alternative should of course have been a Labour Party lead by Jeremy Corbyn which would have won the 2017 election but for the treachery of the establishment-tools in its head office. It took a few more years of full on establishment, media, Zionist, and Labour right-swing manipulation to fully destroy the real socialist alternative. Just as with the BSW in Germany, a true socialist party will not be allowed to flourish.

So what are the policies put forward by the Reform Party?

• Limit “uncontrolled immigration” and replace it with “smart immigration”
• Continued state austerity, coded as “slashing wasteful spending”
• Cut taxes mostly for the rich, as with getting rid of inheritance tax and cutting the tax on the selling/buying of properties.
• Cut corporate taxes
• Slash regulations, coded as “cutting red tape”
• Privatize the National Health Service, coded as “reform”
• Full on climate denial and support for the oil and gas industry
• Expand the police force to help keep the citizenry under control
• Increase the authoritarian powers of the criminal justice system, and build more prisons
• A “patriotic curriculum” and tax breaks for private schools
• Increase powers to discipline university students and provide 2-year vocational degrees (i.e. ones that don’t teach critical thinking)
• Further denigrate, discipline and manipulate those on government benefits to reduce the number of claimants, irrespective of need
• Slash all those pesky regulations and lasw left over from the EU
• Increase war spending to 3% of GDP
• Make Landlords Great Again, no thought to the government just building more homes to overcome the housing shortage, as in Singapore
• Scrap HS2 (the high speed rail link), get rid of “traffic calming” laws and support for electric vehicles.
• Make all of the utilities (trains, water, electricity etc.) into 50/50 public private partnerships by purchasing 50% of utilities. This will be in essence a massive government giveaway to private shareholders just at the time when the bill for decades of neglect is coming due.
• Subsidize British farming and cut related regulations
• Protect the UK fishing industry
• “Reform” the pension and social care system
• Drive a “patriotic” British culture and gut the BBC

There is the odd positive in the above, but it is basically an extreme neoliberalism buttressed by authoritarianism and widespread patriotic propaganda while the UK oligarchy continues to feast on the declining British economy and society. Britain will continue to decline, but its rich may very well keep on getting richer. As a group, they are highly adept at moving their riches offshore, into trusts, and generally dodging any taxation. Farage is now their preferential choice to take over from Starmer, and he will be the only “alternative” allowed for the British electorate in 2029.