“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” - George Orwell,
How the British Left Traded Solidarity For Virtue Signalling,
And Why the Working Class Is No Longer Listening
There is a speech circulating in left-wing circles in Dublin that ought to unsettle every socialist in Britain. Not the kind of unsettling that produces a conference resolution or a letter to the Guardian. The kind that keeps you awake at three in the morning. The kind that names a thing you have been half-knowing for years but have lacked the honesty, or the courage, to say aloud.
The speech was delivered by László Molnárfi, former President of Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union, at an event organised by the Socialist Workers Network. It is, in the truest sense of the word, a reckoning. Molnárfi names what many on the left have known for years but have been too comfortable, or too afraid, to say: the socialist left has lost the working class. Not because the working class has turned fascist. But because the left abandoned it first.
He describes a scene from April 2025. An anti-immigration march of ten thousand people down O’Connell Street. A counter-protest of two hundred left-wing activists. The class disparity was unmistakable. On one side stood working-class people, expressing a deep and complex dissatisfaction that no serious observer could reduce to simple racism. On the other stood leftists, primarily students and self-styled thought activists, shouting “Nazi scum” at the very people they claimed to represent.
“The Socialist left rushes to defend the system, but this defends neither asylum seekers nor the working class. In fact, it defends the government.” — László Molnárfi, TCD Students’ Union
He was speaking about Ireland. He might just as well have been speaking about Britain.
Today, as this article is published, the Together Alliance is marching through London from Park Lane to Whitehall. The organisers announced from the stage that half a million people had gathered. The Metropolitan Police put the figure closer to fifty thousand. The gap between those two numbers tells you something about a movement’s relationship with reality that no opinion poll could. A left that cannot accurately count itself is a left that has prioritised how it feels over what it is actually doing.
But here is the deeper point. The people who have walked farthest from the left are not in London today. They are in Scunthorpe, where only this week Reform UK took the Brumby ward by-election from Labour on a turnout of seventeen per cent. The Greens polled one hundred and thirty-three votes. The march in London will not speak to a single one of the four thousand five hundred people in Brumby who did not vote at all. And it is those four thousand five hundred, the silent and the exhausted, whose absence should terrify the left far more than the eight hundred who voted for Reform.
Continue @ Labour Heartlands.
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