Why on earth are Farage and Reform so popular ?

[Nonamenoblame]

Their ideology is essentially heated up Thatcherism, more deregulation (if that’s possible) and laissez faire light touch for businesses, more cuts to public services because they love an even smaller state, cuts to benefits apart from those for pensioners, no real solution to the immigration issue apart from sinking the small boats.
So why isn’t Farage being challenged ? Everywhere you read that Farage is the next PM in waiting but his policies are a rerun of the last 14 years but worse, they haven’t worked so far, why would they work with a Reform government ? What’s an even worse thought is a Tory/Reform coalition, are we as country daft enough to fall for it ?
And how long would we give a Reform government to turn things around ? 6 months, a year ?

A better question is surely 'Why are the other parties so bad?'

Greens and lib Dems are a joke
Conservatives were useless
Labour are truly awful, hell bent on destroying everything. It really is something to be even worse than the tories!

This leaves Reform which become very attractive based on the above.

That is an excellent (if not sadly depressing) assessment of where we are at the moment.

I run a pub so we have discussions about this from time to time, I have a real mixture of customers.

Some see Farage as their only choice, because in their words, they won't vote Tory because they were screwed by them, but they don't feel Starmer offers a convincing alternative this far. I think this type of person expected a very quick fix in circumstances when Labour came in. As we know, things have not changed, if anything things are getting worse again and rather than understand they've inherited a legacy of failure financially speaking, they expect better than is possible.

Some blame Labour way back and the Tories for the issues with mass immigration, which they also associate with how bad our countries finances are. Just this week our local area has been rife with reports on Facebook groups of "300 men" being placed in a large local hotel, who have apparently been chasing school girls across the towns. There is massive panic over this, anger at the lack of Police presence. Is it true? Who knows!? Also, mass immigration to many equals an increase of terror attacks. There are lots of use of "usual suspects" when something is reported on sky news.

Sadly, what they don't hear when nodding blindly along with the gospel according to Farage and his party should they take over is his attitudes towards the NHS (won't exist) and benefits (not needed, can't feed your kids, they'll take them away). They're so consumed with anger regards immigration and previous governments not really knowing what they can do to change it, they will vote for whoever promises an end to it.

It's got worse since Trump came back in.
What's more concerning is it's not just the older voter, we've had lads, and it is mostly men, aged 20-35 backing Reform and we've actually put signs up saying racism of any kind will not be tolerated.

It's disinformation, same as the riots last summer. When times are hard people want someone or something to blame. Enter immigration.

"Greens and lib Dems are a joke
Conservatives were useless
Labour are truly awful, hell bent on destroying everything. It really is something to be even worse than the tories!

This leaves Reform which become very attractive based on the above."

I keep reading posts like this one. I don't get them at all. WHY do you think "Lib Dems and Greens are a joke" but that Reform is attractive?
Is it the "woke" argument? I genuinely can't see why anyone would see Reform as more appealing than LD or Greens.
I DO understand why people feel let down with the 2 main parties, I just don't get why if they want an alternative THIS is what they're going for. I genuinely think it's because for the most part they see Farage as "one of them"
He isn't. He's a rich posh twat that went to Dulwich College. He doesn't give a shit about normal people. He wants to rip up the NHS and have us all live in an everyman for himself society, which would suit HIM well because he's got a massive bank account and he can afford it and he'd like to pay less tax. Remember the fuss he made when Coutts (yes that's the millionaire's bank) closed his account?
But yeah he smokes fags and drinks pints. So let's bite for him.

What have labour done that they set out in their manifesto they’d not?

So please explain how Farage could enact the policies he wanted after the Brexit vote?

The problem is that politically we haven't had a strong rather than popularist leader for a long time, but in some ways what is worse we haven't had a strong opposition.
A good opposition keeps the leaders in check and means they have to justify what they do.

In our area, Lib Dems won on the theory that if they put a popular lie out on social media, then everyone remembered that rather than any correction, combined with "look what the Tories would do". Even one of their party walked away from them publicly saying that was what they were doing - and one of their manifesto leaflets started with a huge lie about what the candidate had done. I know. I was there.

They're still going for that method.
There's a big issue locally that they'd like everyone to believe is being done by Labour/Tories entirely for their own benefit. I have absolutely no idea whether why they think the idea is bad, because they have not put any argument about it out except "The others are supporting this because it benefits them for the next year."
And it's a bigger issue than who it benefits for the next year - it's something that will effect the area for potentially decades, and it should be discussed on that basis.
This has left me fairly politically homeless because I had been supporting them, but now I would have no idea what they are planning to do. I'm not sure locally they've even bothered with anything except jeering at the other parties. At least nothing is shown.

I think this is the problem with politics all over now. We're not seeing elections contested over what they will do and how good their policies are; they're fighting about how bad the other policies are. And they don't really care whether it is for the good of the people or not as long as they get their political points in.

But the one thing is that Reform does put policies out there, and they do appeal to some. I don't think I could even vote for him if he was the only candidate, but others will. And he appeals to people who like the fact that their thoughts, that they in their hearts are nasty, are then justified by him.

I'd like to see political parties all stopped. Then the MPs have to get elected (and vote) entirely on their own morals.
But failing that, we should at least take off the political parties off the voting sheet, and replace it with a tag line (which cannot be chosen centrally) of the most important agenda they intend to be acting upon.
I know what the Lib Dems tag line would be here. "The Tories will do it worse than us..."

"So please explain how Farage could enact the policies he wanted after the Brexit vote?"

With difficulty as he has never set out what he expected of Brexit despite proclaiming people "didn't get the Brexit they voted for"

@ExpensiveBiscuits you've lumped together a lot of things in a very simplistic fashion without any kind of nuance. Whinging about net zero for instance is just plain stupid - I mean, I'd quite like there to be a habitable world for any grandchildren I might have. On the other hand it's the kind of list a lot of people who haven't looked at politics in any kind of depth would think is great, and you aren't encouraging people to think about why. Housing is a really obvious one, for instance.

Your point re children is ridiculous, by the way. It's just a way of saying 'waaaah we aren't allowed to hit our kids any more'. No, we aren't. Because there are better ways - it's just that there are too many shit parents who can't be bothered to read up and put the effort in. We absolutely are allowed to discipline our children, but too many don't do it.

Lastly, the moment you use 'woke' as a pejorative, you've shown yourself up for who you are.

This 100%.

Maybe you would like to read my post with a little nuance and reading intelligence.

By the way, "plain stupid" is hardly an example of shining nuance. However, I do accept that my post may be difficult for any who possess little nuance with which to decipher it.

To be fair, I wasn't really writing for that audience, rather for those with more sophisticated reading skills.

Interesting to see Reform win Trevethin and Penygarn council seat win with a 47% vote share, Labour coming second with 26% (representing an almost having of support since the previous council election). It's fair to say that voters seem increasingly willing to take a punt on an unknown entity when the alternative is simply more of the same.

I think the UK could have done better in the Brexit negotiations.

People in the UK perhaps still don't realise what overbearing bastards the EU have always been when it comes to trade negotiations etc. The British thought they would play nice for the sake of old acquaintance but they just played their usual game.

The issue with Farage is not that he wasn't involved but that he said Brexit would be great and it would be easy. He didn't have to be involved to be proved wrong about it.

He's still out there peddling easy answers.

No, I got your point. It's the same as the point I've made several times on this thread, which is that people want simple solutions for complex problems.

But Reform saying they want to abandon/tax net zero and revert to fossil fuels (when one of their own has embraced renewables with great enthusiasm) absolutely is plain stupid. And hypocritical.

It would be interesting to see how they perform at running a council which has been decimated by Tory cuts. But since they have won only 8 out of 140 by elections we might have a long wait.

Not very impressive in Parliament. There was a debate on the N Ireland border recently. Right up their street - but they didn't speak on it. But then Farage only attended one meeting on EU fishery policy in his 20 years in Brussels. Perhaps you need to attend at least one to collect the expenses 💷 ?
Yet , despite being absent from Clacton / Westminster he is never off the telly. Must be annoying for Ed Davey. The Libdems have 72 MPs ffs. But he never gets on Question Time unless Nigel has a particularly bad hangover.

@Shwish No. Nothing to do with thinking Farage is 'one of them'. Regardless of his background he is voicing genuine concerns that people have about the state of the country and that's going to be incredibly attractive to those who have seen the horrific decline of the past 20 years.

Labour et al are practically throwing voters in Farage's direction.

I really wanted to see Labour do well. I didn't vote for them but thought they deserved a chance. But my goodness, what a shitshow.

@Marmiteenthusiast Farage is making immigrants a scapegoat for the failure of neoliberalism. His answer to everything is close the borders.The Reform manifesto is uncosted gibberish.

He hasn't done anything for his constituents, who live in one of the most deprived areas in the UK. He's been orbiting around Trump who's currently running rampant through the Whitehouse.

Farage doesn't represent a change; he represents chaos. He's tells lies and he's lazy. Even his own MPs don't like him because his leadership is so dire. If he can't lead four people, how is he going to run a country?

He's the pied piper.

@username299 Don't make the assumption I want to vote for them. I simply said I understand why they're so attractive right now, and why they are likely to grow in popularity - rapidly.

It's an issue entirely of Labour's (and of course the Tories) own making.

They're 'attractive' right now because of Musk and Twitter. Labour are being pilloried in the right wing press and people still remember the Tories. Therefore they think Farage represents an alternative.

People have forgotten that Farage told a stream of lies over Brexit which was a disaster. People also don't seem to realise that it was the Tories who allowed so much immigration and the Tories who are responsible for selling off social housing.

I'm not particularly impressed with the Labour party but they've been in for five minutes and are expected to wave a magic wand. Now Farage is expected to wave a magic wand.

I'm not psychic but I can tell you how it will work out.

@username299 We all can. People will start shifting from the left to the right. It's happening all over Europe.

Labour will have to do something really impressive to stop the momentum now.

I keep reading posts like this one. I don't get them at all. WHY do you think "Lib Dems and Greens are a joke" but that Reform is attractive?

Personally, I find all three repellent. All parties, including the Lib Dems and Greens are economically deluded, because they ignore the requirement to make a profit on trading to make doing the work worthwhile.

Profit is the element that pays people: we are a small business, in niche engineering, and the profit we turn on each and every tiny project pays for the rent on our premises, the machinery we need to replace every few years, the rent,rates and rubbish collection, and it pays the wages bill. Most of 2024 was desperately quiet for us workwise. No business wanted to spend money before seeing how the politics were trending.

We paid out nine months of full wages to seven people, and all the NICs and pension contributions due, and DH and I who own the business took nothing, zip, nada in earnings for 5 months so we could preserve some cash flow. It took our business bank balance from £250,000 in credit down to about £10,000. If we had not seen an upturn in the last couple of months, we would have been bankrupt. Fingers crossed, we are just seeing a turnaround.

I do recognise that the politicians needs to appeal to "their" constituencies. Labour offers hope to the helpless, sick and poorly educated who want something for their vote. Not so much for the rest of us.

A generation ago politicians didn't give voters options that weren't feasible. That's changed. Unfortunately, voters still believe that all senior politicians are being honest like this.

In consequence, Labour are getting it in the neck because they're still being old-fashioned responsible.

If you don't understand perhaps you're living a protected and privileged life. If you no longer recognise or feel safe in the town where you or your parents were born you might feel differently.

@TomPinch Labour have not been responsible, at all. The straightforward way to solve the budget crisis is to tell everyone that UC is down by 5p in the pound and income tax has gone up from 20p to 22p in the pound, after £12,570 zero rate.

That's a very Labour take

If they fail it's because their policies do