DURING the May Day March in Liverpool, which incorporated a regular Palestine march by Liverpool Friends of Palestine, there was a guy presenting a cardboard sign saying: “Our kids with cancer are more important than them.”

We never argue that one group of people should be prioritised over others, yet let’s face it, that’s how we might have looked.

One person’s view does not reflect the perspective of the entire working class; nevertheless, the placard was a warning sign that we have failed to build a logical scaffold between international solidarity/anti-militarism and local suffering, actively alienating the very people we need to engage.

The far right has been successfully stepping into the vacuum and weaponised that resentment into a toxic “Us v Them” narrative, which was reflected in the recent local elections in St Helens.

St Helens is on Merseyside, situated between Liverpool and Manchester. Since the formation of the local authority in 1974, Labour had dominant control, holding 27 out of 48 seats before the elections. It has completely changed since Reform UK won a landslide victory last May, gaining 34 seats out of 46 elected, whereas Labour lost 25 councillors and secured merely two seats.

This can be explained by the material reality of the town. It used to be a prominent industrial town with coal mining and glassmaking as core industries; however, it has experienced a significant decline since deindustrialisation.

Today, traditional industries have been replaced by a heavy reliance on low-paid retail, precarious service-sector employment, and a disproportionately high concentration of logistics and warehousing.

Major deeply rooted industrial employers like glass manufacturer NSG and Knauf Insulation still form a vital backbone of unionised manufacturing in the town. Yet, even these traditional union strongholds face constant economic pressure, such as recent restructuring and redundancy consultations at Knauf due to wider industrial slowdowns.

This socioeconomic deprivation has severely impacted local communities; St Helens is ranked 29th out of 296 local authority districts in England in the 2025 Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) report, with nearly a quarter of neighbourhoods in the town considered highly deprived.

Since taking office, Reform has been deploying toxic culture wars. The first action they took was to spend £50,000 per year on a political assistant while ceasing the £60,000 funding allocated for Refugee Week, to put “British people first.” They also withdrew support from LGBTQ+ Pride.

Dr George Woodward, Reform UK Leader of St Helens Borough Council, shared a statement on Facebook: “We don’t consider celebrations of sexuality, especially those with left-wing political leanings such as Pride, to be appropriate for St Helens Borough Council to dedicate valuable officer resources.”

Both events still went ahead thanks to community fundraising. Yet, it is a staggering warning of what will come under a Reform government.

To fight back against these divisive cultural wars, local communities have formed their own resistance. There have been counter-protests organised by Stand Up to Racism, as well as community-led initiatives, particularly to counter anti-immigrant narratives.

Yet this pushback remains dangerously fragmented, with activists on the ground reporting deep internal divisions within the anti-Reform movement. If this movement is to succeed, it must move past its current internal divisions and address the stark material realities highlighted by the town’s Index of Multiple Deprivation data.

As manifested in the recent by-election in the neighbouring Makerfield, the result of council elections does not necessarily determine the results of parliamentary elections.

In the May local elections, constituencies in Ashton-in-Makerfield elected Reform councillors, and they took all but one of 25 seats up for election in Wigan.

Despite this trend, Andy Burnham won a comfortable majority, which may be due to his personality politics. One thing that is clear, though, is there is a chance that we can push back the far right if the left manages to back one candidate.

While tactical voting is necessary to prevent a Reform government, it is essential to engage with the local working class. Reform UK consistently came second in both the Gorton & Denton and Makerfield by-elections with 28.7 per cent and 34.5 per cent of the vote share, respectively.

Without addressing deep-rooted resentments shared among people in deprived areas, Reform will attract them and sweep to a landslide victory. We need to make it clear that their “cost-cutting” is a complete hypocrisy, as shown in St Helens; they will use taxpayers’ money for their own gain while cutting funding for communities.

It is also vital to build a logical bridge between increasing military spending and austerity measures, directly affecting local communities.

As former Communist MP Phil Piratin argued when confronting the rise of fascism in the 1930s, ordinary working-class people support the far-right because its “appeal struck a chord.”

The left cannot defeat populism by simply dismissing ordinary people living in neglected conditions. Instead, Piratin urged that we must “help the people to improve their conditions of life, in the course of which we could show them who was really responsible for their conditions.”

Organising against Reform in St Helens today requires that exact material approach. We must get out on the streets, listen to their struggles and provide tangible support.