AIBU to be utterly baffled at how many people are falling for Reform after the Brexit mess?

Our Government are arseholes…. Mad Ed Silliband…mandates putting solar panels onto all hospitals n schools and conversely gives
£57 million to research into dimming the f…king sun!
Read the Kathryn Porter report on Net Zero. Unachievable in the timescale, extortionate costs heaped on bills,
The shower of shite we have atm are complete liars and corrupt charlatans.

And dont even start me on the fishermen debacle. Completely inept negotiators.
Go Reform!

This is a very good point. Hopefully they will give the other main parties a kick up the arse.

Most people I know who are vehemently against Reform haven’t even looked at any of their policies.
What else do we have to go on? All parties have a manifesto and they nearly all back track once they get in to power. So we either don’t vote, or vote for the policies we most align with.

I wish it wasn’t a popularity contest. I wish that, come election time, we were just given key policies and told “this is party A, this is party B” etc so we don’t actually know who we are voting for. Very few people put much thought in to it. You have so many voting Labour, for example, because “my family have always voted labour” almost like they’re supporting a football team.

Im a swing voter. When the next election comes round, I will vote for whichever party most aligns with my views on certain topics.

I've never felt so disappointed in the quality of both the Labour and the Conservatives MPs. I want politicians I can admire and have confidence in.
It's strange, isn't it. There are so many jobs that you can only do if you have the correct qualifications, and it seems that the list grows daily. Yet there is no competency test for politicians. Maybe PPs are wrong to be cross about the quality of voters and should be looking at the quality of politicians instead.

The likes of Reform / Rupert Lowe blow inconsequential minor issues into apparently important topics. Last week - burkas and halal slaughter. Weirdly these issues are almost always linked to immigration and especially Muslims.

If you think that Brexit has been a complete shit show and that most of Farage's policies are half-baked at best, but you would still vote Reform in the next General Election, what would be the benefits for you of a Farage government?

I see him as an accomplished campaigning politician with no track record of successful delivery of his policies and I think that the policies he has spoken about would be a disaster, e.g. getting rid of the NHS. He spends a lot of time on self-promotion and very little time as a constituency MP.

I would be totally fascinated to see what happens if we get a Reform government if I didn't think that it would have a devastating impact on vulnerable people.

All parties and their MPs are self serving grifters, who lie as soon as they open their mouths. 🙄

Reform are no worse than the rest.

Rose tinted spectacles there I think. Those Labour politicians you revere were reviled in their time. Rayner could hold her own with any of them. In fact I imagine Mowlem would have been her greatest cheerleader.

I would go one step further and suggest that politicians not only have to listen to people but also represent their views otherwise someone else will Someone that will bolt on more extreme policies and really start pushing us on to some very dangerous ground.

Time and time again people are telling the government and powers that be about what they care about. Immigration, over taxation and the sky high welfare benefits bill being funded by an overburdened working population, a worrying and unsustainable explosion in disability benefit claims etc. None of these things are easy to tackle but it's imperative that a major, moderate political party has sensible policies in these areas that reflect public opinion otherwise people will look elsewhere for more radical alternatives.

The two main political parties have failed to tackle the biggest issue for Reform voters - immigration.

Whether it's true or not, the perception is that "these people" are costing the country billions of pounds each year, to the detriment of "us".

A quick Google search showed expenditure on asylum support for 2023/24 as over four billion pounds, which Reform voters believe could be better spent elsewhere.

With many hotels being taken over to accommodate "them", with the perception of crime rates increasing in areas where asylum seekers are accommodated, and "our housing" being given to "them", school places being taken by "their children", NHS struggling to cope with the increase in patient numbers etc etc etc, it's not hard to see why Reform are gaining popularity.

Of course, when the only thing their supporters are focusing on is immigration, all their other policies can fly under the radar. Until the time they actually get into government, and the shit hits the fan.

I remember after one election, when UKIP had gained a lot of votes, David Cameron coming out and saying "message received, and understood", i.e. we need to tackle immigration. Yet here we are, with Reform gaining popularity on the grounds of immigration. I suspect if you were to ask most Reform voters what the Reform party's policies are, apart from immigration, they'd be hard-pressed to come up with anything. But they don't care, because - immigration.

I'm no Farage supporter, but I've never felt so disappointed in the quality of both the Labour and the Conservatives MPs. I want politicians I can admire and have confidence in. I look at the Labour Cabinets of the past and the current cabinet is so lightweight. We had Jack Straw, Robin Cook, Mo Mowlem - we are so desperate for leaders, good orators and Statemen. Raynor is none of those.

Perhaps @EasternStandard will believe you because she won’t have it when I tell her.

People are strange.
Look at the SNP in Scotland. Scotland would be hugely poorer after independence but your true believers don’t care. They’d rather be independent and poor than part of the UK.

There has never been a sensible answer to where the money is coming from without the Barnett formula and recourse to the huge English tax revenues. Huge in comparison because there are only 5.5 m people in Scotland and over 10 m in Greater London alone. And of course those few higher rate taxpayers in Scotland who don’t work for the state are likely to decamp to England.

Because the others are crap and if the system totally collapses we might get a reset.

There’s a bit head in the sand here. Reform are picking up voters. Hence Starmer panicking with policy changes. Even he knows it.

It’s not a case of ‘falling’ for Reform. I voted against Brexit, agree Brexit has been a complete shitshow, also agree most of Farage’s policies are half baked at best. I’ll still vote for them at the next election if that’s the only credible conservative alternative to Labour. And no amount of calling me stupid/racist/fascist will change this.

Nigel Farage is the same sort of upper class, privately educated politician as Oswald Moseley in the 1930s. They exploit the politics of grievance and convince working class voters that their quality of life is poor because of foreigners, ethnic minorities (Jews for Oswald Moseley and 'boat people' for Farage) and socialists. People prefer to punch down and blame people that they view as inferior to them.

Of course Nigel Farage, a former public school boy, is going to have more polished oratory skills than Angela Rayner who left school when pregnant at 16 and came from an extremely deprived home with a mother who couldn't read or write. I know who has had the more difficult journey into politics and government.

Apart from Brexit (which I believe has been an unmitigated disaster although I assume that you would disagree), what has Nigel Farage done in office to improve people's lives apart from making it socially acceptable to hate the people that he blames for all the UK's ills?

Obviously not as they wouldn’t have lost so much support since the GE. The poll for them would be static. It’s dropped markedly.

It’s not just conservative areas going to Reform. Scotland a big swing, the by election by 14k and Wales.

I know you feel the same amount of people like Starmer and co as much you do since the GE. It’s not the case.

So who do you think they will vote for now? Do you think Reform or Labour will get their vote?

We don't do enough talking to different people in this country. Middle class people really struggle to understand why bullshitters like Farage/Trump are popular but if you talk to those who do support them, it is because they don't feel represented by anyone else.

They hold views that middle class people find a bit uncomfortable. They see their local areas changing in ways they don't like and they are poorer than they've probably ever been and they see a whole load of issues like Trans rights, BLM that are disproportionately covered in the news because it serves the right wing agenda to whip up hatred and they buy into it all.

Unless the mainstream politicians accept that there are huge swathes of our society who are really pissed off and find ways of appealing to them and having a dialogue with them, then Farage and his goons will fill that gap, by whipping up division and saying any old shit to get themselves more power.

The point is they are looking at “evidence” presented to them within their social media echo chamber and being told that the “mainstream media” from which you and I might take our “evidence” is lying due to <reasons>

And I agree with PP saying sneering and being rude about those with different political outlooks is not helpful. The fact is that millions of people voted for reform in national and local elections. Many thousands have Reform led local authorities (the bodies that arguably most impact our daily lives). Let’s see how that pans out over the next couple of years.

No but they lost those in 2019 when they all voted Tory.

They’re people like you who are pissed off we have a Labour government at all. They were pissed off on 5 July. Once again, because you seem to really be having trouble understanding this, people moving to Reform aren’t those who would ever vote Labour, disillusioned Labour voters are looking to alternatives like the Greens or Libdems.

Yes! It's exactly this - recovery fraud, I think it's called.

"Hello, this is PC Farage from the fraud section at the local police station. I hear you've been the victim of a scam? If you could just please stay on the line, and have your card details and passwords ready to give me, we should be able to recoup your money..."

@BIossomtoes Do you think Labour still have solid support to the traditional Labour voting northern towns? I don't.

Of course voting is linked to who is in power and how those policies are perceived.

Reform is a reaction to that. Labour had a low vote share and that makes a lot of people not supporters already never mind those they are actively alienating. They are pissed off and Reform is there to take those votes.

ETA if Labour stayed at GE polling level they’d be fine so they are losing support early on.