Chance of a general election next year and Reform winning?

[Confused78]

They are winning in the polls it seems. I've been watching Nigel Farage's Instagram, he really just talks common sense. I find myself agreeing with a lot of what he says.
I'm definitely not far right and I'm not a leftie,
I think I'm somewhere in the middle.
But I am sick of Conservative and Labour and think it's time to give a new party a chance, especially if they are going to properly tackle illegal immigrants coming over and the ones that are already here.
I don't necessarily agree with his call to deport those with Indefinite leave to remain however.

Plus debt servicing costs a huge amount, jobs are down, growth down. How does this help Labour ‘invest’? They have lower spend and look to welfare cuts which they can’t get through.

I disagree on the NI cuts. They could and probably should have reversed it. They would still have won the election. I don't agree that our public services are running on peanuts. The state is far too big and expensive to be sustainable. We certainly can't keep borrowing to inflate it further.

They should have said openly that they were going to raise tax, that it was necessary and right. And then we would still have had the Tories in because that is how people vote here.

But that's democracy isn't it? You shouldn't make excuses for them lying to the public about their intentions to gain power. That's the reason people are so angry with Labour as we can see in polling.

And yet other parties can lie again and again and not raise this same level of anger. It's hypocrisy. If lying to the electorate is bad, it should be seen as equally bad regardless of who is doing it.

As for the size of the state - I have worked in the NHS for over 25 years and have seen the change. It's on its knees. No government of any colour has taken seriously the demographic timebomb that has been ticking away. We have more older people, so we have more ill people. That costs money.

I'm not ideologically wedded to the NHS, by the way. The country I'm from has an insurance based system which while it is not perfect works quite well. However, I don't believe that Reform would pivot to a European style insurance system - they'd go straight to a US style system so that their mates could rake it in.

Because other parties don't hold themselves up as being "transparent" or morally superior. Labour ran an election on ending Tory "chaos" and being the "adults" yet they have delivered nothing but chaos. They are mired in controversy, sleeze etc.
It's their hypocrisy that people are angry at plus the constant gaslighting. What do you not understand about that?

So many manifesto promises broken and now we have yet another policy which wasn't in the manifesto ie digital ID cards.

Got to pull you up here - which manifesto promises have they broken?

Not raise NI. They never specified in manifesto the type of NI, they just said they wouldn't raise it

6500 teachers

3000 nursery places

400000 more appointments each week

And a big one "tread lightly on people's lives".....digital ID does the opposite of that

I’d like to know too. They’re actually doing better at keeping their promises than I’d like.

And that list above doesn't even include the promises of economic growth, lower energy bills etc.
Remember this one: "That is why it is Labour’s first mission for government. It means being pro-business and pro-worker. We are the party of wealth creation" so the first thing they do is tax business by raising NI which has predictable consequences.

Just re-reading their manifesto they constantly refer to Labour "ending the Tory chaos" ...... great job on that one 👏 👍

The "taking back our streets" is a particularly humorous one

Not raise NI. They never specified in manifesto the type of NI, they just said they wouldn't raise it

They said they wouldn’t raise it for working people. They haven’t.

Strange because C4 Fact check article refutes that.

I don’t care what it says. No working person is paying a higher percentage of NI now than they were in June 2024.

Like I said, the manifesto didn't specifically mention working people, it just said "we won't raise NI".
"the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) – say that the promise in the manifesto was simply to “not increase National Insurance”, with no caveat around which type of NICs they had in mind, and that this has been violated"

Of course you don't care though because God forbid you publicly criticise Labour. I'm sure if Tories had done this you would be all over them though.

Surprised we need all that, what with all our Brexit benefits. That £350m per week has really saved the NHS.

The manifesto quite specifically said taxes on working people. It’s right here on page 21.

https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Labour-Party-manifesto-2024.pdf

Aw bless the IFS they are wrong. Not unusual to be fair, they've been wrong about so much

Semantics are funny aren't they because BBC states:

Yet economists who have carefully studied the indirect impact of employer NI judge that most of the impact, in the end, falls not on the employer company and its shareholders, but on workers in the form of:
Lower wages than would otherwise have been paid
Less hiring than would otherwise have happened
Fewer hours of work than would otherwise have been offered.
That’s why many have described employer NI as a “tax on jobs”.

So in that sense this is a tax change that would, arguably, still fall on working people.

There’s no point in debating with someone who won’t accept simple facts. The government’s manifesto stated quite clearly that there would be no increase in NI for working people. There has been no increase in NI for working people. Channelling Vicky Pollard doesn’t make your made up “facts” true.

Vicky Pollard 🤣🤣🤣
Bless you, are still claiming that Labour are doing a good job with the economy?

I’m merely correcting misinformation. 🤷‍♀️

Why do you keep hong on about borrowing when I’m talking about taxes? You said Labour keep raising taxes. They haven’t. The Tories did.
I’ll help ypu out with those figures I suggested you look up when you said Labour always borrow more as well, shall I?
National debt 2010 - 1.17 trillion
National debt 2024 - 2.69 trillion
Under the Tories.
I have at no point said debt hasn’t increased under this Labour government, incidentally. I’m just challenging your assertion that it’s always and only Labour who do it.
And again. No taxes have risen under this government except employer NI and farm IHT.

That and what sleaze? A couple of totally fine and normal fully declared gifts and an issue with CGT smaller than several similar issues for the Tories.

Common sense? 😂😂😂 If Farage is speaking your definition of common sense then maybe the Almighty can help you 🙏 They're Eating The Swans!!!! Help

I know it wasn’t actually true anyway but am I alone in not really caring if people eat swans anyway? I assume they are quite like geese in taste. I’d try one!

They haven't broken those manifesto pledges though - they just haven't achieved them yet. After a whole 14 months in power. Why were the previous government allowed years, but this still very new one has to do everything now? That's a bit toddler, isn't it?

The NI rise - we could debate that, as I've said I didn't think it was a good idea. But if they had undone the previous government's NI reduction, people on the right would also have been howling - they are in a no win situation.

I'm on the fence about digital ID. People want cash in hand and black market working stopped, but they don't want anything done that might aid that effort. Having ID is pretty much the norm in most of Europe so why is it such an issue here? On the other hand I would want ID to be basic and simple, holding only the barest data necessary, and I don't trust any government in the UK to deliver that.

I don’t really have an issue with ID cards. So much of our data is already held and most other countries have one - they save all the stress over needing to pay for a passport if you don’t have a driving licence and should be a weapon against identify fraud if they are biometric.

Reform are very, very good at making it sound like there are simple and quick ways to sort out the UK’s problems that will be win/win for everyone. No wonder they are popular. Labour did need more small quick wins than they’ve delivered but realistically it is going to take a long time to sort out the big things and the instant gratification culture we now have was never going to take that well - we are nowhere near seeing whether the current government is going to really improve services.