Angela Raynor still doesnt get it.

You also appear to have forgotten her getting trouble with HMRC not once but twice, lying in public, lying about politics to kids in a school, her thuggish outburst in the House of Commons etc etc.

What did she say to kids in a school? And she didn’t lie to HMRC twice.

Lots of companies would volunteer to pay their employees more. I work at one of them. We sat and went through all the finances working out how we could do the annual rises. We couldn’t though. Why? Business rates increased by £10k. That was on top of the extra % on Ni a couple of years ago. All our potential pay rises got absorbed into extra government tax. Had that council tax bill not come in we would have paid that to our employees. Gutting honestly. I know people on mumsnet think that businesses are the bogeymen and the fat cats are creaming off the profits but in my limited experience in a lot of small businesses, most want to pay their employees well and employ lots of people but the grind of every increasing taxes mean it hasn’t been possible for a while. Allowing lower wages for some employees would mean we could employ more young people to gain experience. At the moment we have 1 when a few years ago we’d have had 3/4.

Apart from most of your list being unproven allegations - the major difference here is that she was Deputy Prime Minister and he isn’t.

You also appear to have forgotten her getting trouble with HMRC not once but twice, lying in public, lying about politics to kids in a school, her thuggish outburst in the House of Commons etc etc.

She wasn’t even fit for office she held as her failure to pay tax due - ‘saint’ she is not.

Apart from most of your list being unproven allegations - the major difference here is that she was Deputy Prime Minister and he isn’t.

You also appear to have forgotten her getting trouble with HMRC not once but twice, lying in public, lying about politics to kids in a school, her thuggish outburst in the House of Commons etc etc.

She wasn’t even fit for office she held as her failure to pay tax due - ‘saint’ she is not.

Blair did not change the workers' rights barriers - the Eastern European countries joined the EU and as such their citizens received the right to work anywhere in the EU, including in the UK.

The anti-EU narrative was that alll of these foreign workers were keeping wages low, despite the legal obligation to be paid at least the minimum wage, and one of the Brexit supporters claims was that once these workers all buggered off back where they came from, wages and employment for the poor Brits would boom. Which was quickly proven to be nonsense.

Hundreds of thousands of Europeans left leaving the UK short of agricultural workers, lorry drivers, construction workers, factory workers and healthcare workers. Crops rotted in the fields, delivery times were extended, construction projects delayed - and instead of the British workers filling the gaps, the UK began sourcing labour from Nigeria, Nepal, Zimbabwe and Ukraine instead.
Wages didn't rise and one stick that the right-wing is now trying to beat Labour with is the increase in the minimum wage - necessary because businesses are never going to voluntarily increase wages. Remember too that the "Britannia Unchained" Conservatives and Reform want to abolish the minimum wage on the basis that in order to compete with the low-wage economies of the world, the UK employers need to be able to pay as little as possible. Welcome to Sweatshop Brexitannia - already in place in the fields of East Anglia and the textile factories of the East Midlands, and coming soon to a town near you.

Two things stand out in that report. The two who were caught were advisers giving spurious advice, QED it wasn't the asylum seekers trying to do it until they were advised to do so, and secondly, they've been caught and dealt with.

I heard one of the applicants interviewed, and he couldn't believe he was being advised to say certain things.

And yes, there will always be some who take the piss, but it isn't the majority.

@Mangelwurzelfortea many labour MPs supported Brexit.

The wonderful lord frank field , old Mp for Birkenhead supported it because he saw his poorest of the poor constituents further affected in every way by the huge volume of esteem European immigrants who came when Blair changed the workers rights barriers.

Modicum of dignity? She was on down time, I'd argue should be private but are you really comparing her dignity to someone who's said to have goose-stepped in his youth, sang Hitler Youth songs, said he thought Andrew Tate was an important role model for young men, has taken money and not declared it, lied on brexit campaigns, dodged stamp duty on his Clacton house, lied, lied some more... the list can continue but I guess none of that matters because he wears a suit.

Angela Rayner is a saint in comparison.

Playing gambling games with other people’s money and making millions is not “working in finance”. Accountancy is.

"nobody is abusing the system"? You must not have been keeping up with the news recently...

Two people arrested after BBC asylum investigation

Also, this "convert" tried to blow up a women's hospital when his asylum claim was rejected.

Liverpool Women's Hospital bomber had asylum grievance, police say - BBC News

There is little proof of that happening though, and even if it does, their applications are reviewed every five years.

Also, as I said, if we don't like the criteria, we should change the system.

I think the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (as she was at the time) should have a modicum of dignity in public, yes.

She had access to the best media training available in the British government but still managed to do that.

She also had access to the best tax advisors in the country but look where that ended - I wonder if she’s paid us what she owes yet? It might seem to some that her behaviour and judgement is pretty poor. She is not remotely a good representative for our country.

Farage seems to have hypnotised the country to believe that all their problems are down to refugees in small boats. It simply isn't true. His worst nightmare would be another government dealing with the problem because he truly has nothing else to offer and he seems to be drunk on the idea of power. The councils where Reform won last time have had lots of problems. Many of the councillors have walked out because they were just names on paper - they didn't really want the job and they weren't community minded. All this nonsense about a Doge-style clean up of council waste was empty rhetoric - most of the council budget goes on social care, housing etc. There isn't enough money from central government so they are always broke. And the small boat problem became much worse after Brexit. As for flying out 1000s of asylum seekers every day - where does he think he is going to fly them to? You can't send people to a country that won't accept them.

Farage seems to have hypnotised the country to believe that all their problems are down to refugees in small boats. It simply isn't true. His worst nightmare would be another government dealing with the problem because he truly has nothing else to offer and he seems to be drunk on the idea of power. The councils where Reform won last time have had lots of problems. Many of the councillors have walked out because they were just names on paper - they didn't really want the job and they weren't community minded. All this nonsense about a Doge-style clean up of council waste was empty rhetoric - most of the council budget goes on social care, housing etc. There isn't enough money from central government so they are always broke. And the small boat problem became much worse after Brexit. As for flying out 1000s of asylum seekers every day - where does he think he is going to fly them to? You can't send people to a country that won't accept them.

The irony is that net migration is down 69% under this government.

Sadly, I think it could get to zero, and Farage would still be spouting "stop the boats".

How dare she be in a vest in a boat eh?! Put that woman in her place, now!

As a note, Nige's photo's are carefully curated media shots, she was photographed with a long lens on downtime and yet still judged.

Ooh, forgotten about her, but now I think about her i recall her saying it was ok to give your left over antbiotics to a friend or relative during her brief tenure as Health Secretary, what a loss to health and wellbing she was!

The cult of Trump..

Some Trump voters are refusing to accept it tbh.

Although arguably slightly less healthy, as Nigel Farage was standing fully clothed enjoying his pint and his fag - Angela was looking far less dignified floating around in her vest on a dinghy with her vape.

I don’t understand your point about different standard as that is not what happened here. If Angela was standing around fully clothed with a pint and a fag but got slated for it you might have a point but she didn’t.

I’ll look forward to your Farage thread - if the extent of the gripes that people have with him are the often fictional or creative ones being aired on this thread, it will be a pretty positive one.

Surely unless you’re a millionaire you don’t need the mainstream media to tell you living standards are falling? Because you’ll notice it with your own eyes

You're making stuff up (or lieing as you would say).

US GDP in 2024 was 2.8% vs 1.1% for the UK
US GDP in 2025 was 2.1% vs 1.4% for the UK
US GDP forecast 2026 is 1.9-2.6% vs 0.6-1.1% for the UK

Looking at numbers alone it looks like Trump's economic policies deliver far better growth than Starmer's by a very long way. So if Reform's policies are simply a copy of Trump's as you assert the the evidence is that GDP growth wise Reform will do far better than Labour are.

I think many Trump voters aren’t aware of falling living standards in the US because they exclusively consume pro-Trump media and distrust any mainstream/legacy media. I spoke about this with a British relative who supports Trump (and Reform), doesn’t read any mainstream media and didn’t seem aware of falling living standards (and likely didn’t want to accept it).

Because people believed the lies.

We all know that change needs to happen. Think of it this way, if the Reform policies, that are a cut out from Trump's policies, really work, then why is the US in the shitter and the global economy failing?

Look it up. The standard of living in the US is going down big time. This must be what Reform voters want. The evidence is there for everyone to see. If people want to blindly believe something else, then that's going to be on them.