Farage is leader of the opposition

[Aladdinzane]

https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/general-election-live-updates-reform-labour-tories-3110227

Farage is claiming he is the de facto leader of the opposition and that he should get a head to head debate with Starmer. His party currently holds no seats.

What do you think?

Is someone positioning himself for something after the election?

Here’s a theory. Farage is trying to reverse engineer a takeover of the Tory party. By splitting the vote, he making sure that the Troy wets lose their seats. The likes of Jeremy Hunt, Morduant, the one nation group etc. Which means that the only Tories who will remain in parliament are the right of centre ones.

The right of centre ones will either defect or bring Farage into their party. Or will become too insignificant to fight an emerging Reform vote, eventually merging with Reform ahead of 2029. It’s the labour/SDP scene but on the right.

The Tories are toast anyway. Now is the time for someone capture the party. Lib Dem’s could have done the same from the other direction, but unfortunately they’re too busy pretending to outdo the batshit greens. So Farage it is.

Yeah there was Brexit. Just Brexit. That little old thing, Brexit.

I think you are forgetting two essential ingredients of the Brexit campaign. Johnson and Cummings.

Would Leave have won without them?

Is he really? Tell me more. I'm all ears.

Never said it was a little thing! It was the biggest act of self harm England and Wales ever made!

Maybe not, but why were they supporting it in the first place?

it all comes back to ukip success around 10 years ago which made the conservatives panic, and embrace / appease the right.

Spectacularly missing the point due to being too blinded by bias against his personality.

I think you are confusing the idea of missing the point, with you just not agreeing with someone recognising farage for the loser he is. Easy done.

How many times has he failed to become an MP? How utterly ineffective was he as an MEP?

If people started ignoring the little dipshit, he'd just go away. The media vastly overegg his influence.

Farage has stood for election seven times and failed. There were Eurosceptics in the Tory party long before UKIP and Farage, and it was Johnson's decision to back Leave in a power grab that was all about his own ambition and nothing else that swung it. I despise Boris Johnson but I'll acknowledge he's had a huge influence on politics and is a much better communicator than Farage. Both men are only interested in money and power, both would burn the world (and have set this country on fire) leaving us all in the ashes to further themselves. They are despicable, and stand for nothing. I'm not saying we should ignore either one of them, or the divisions and hatred that they stoke in others, but please let's not elevate Farage and pretend he's greater than he is. He's vile, greedy and a moral vacuum and he couldn't care less about the 'little people' if he tried.

Leave certainly wouldn’t have won if the electorate weren’t getting increasingly jaded by current politics and wanting something different.

Brexit was a nasty shock to plenty of us, but not enough apparently to reflect on how treating people as imbecilic racists went.

If we keep up this cycle of political instability yet scoffing at a different approach we’re in for more shocks along the way.

I have no time for Reform, but their manifesto does cut to real life issues that have been left to rot for years.

The left never learns. Ideological purity and shouting in an echo chamber is more important to them.

The saying goes, Britain is a conservative country, which occasionally votes labour. As proven in elections throughout the last 100 years.

The direction of the Tory party largely shapes which ways labour goes, because that’s the only way labour can win power. Therefore it matters to everyone what direction the Tory party goes in.

If you are left wing, or even a centrist, the last thing you should do is to belittle right wing voters concerns, because the Tories will only go further to the right, pulled by the likes of Farage and therefore Labour will get pulled further to the centre or even the right.

But hey, if the left was that smart, they would have learned from Brexit and MAGA.

If nothing else, it shows that the FPTP system needs reform.

There should never be a case where a large percent of the population can cast a vote and it effectively be ignored because of the way that the system works in the UK.

It's very likely that this is part of what gave rise to the popularity of Reform in the first place - people feel ignored; there are too many "safe" seats due to boundaries (which I remember were messed with for this purpose).

Farage also needs a big stage. You keep ignoring him, keep trying to shut him up and belittling him, and the voices around him will grow louder because people are sick and tired of not feeling heard. If, instead, you give him a stage, the other leaders have a fair chance to take his arguments apart and expose his words for what is behind them. You cannot hide away the dissent of the public and people would do well to read up on political history for plenty of examples.

What has being an MP got to do the price of fish? Name one single MP who has had a bigger impact on politics in the last 30 years than Farage.

And how has ignoring him worked out for you so far?

Ignore people whose political opinion you don’t like is the weirdest, most elitist viewpoint. It’s the exact thing that Farage voters rage against. Because they feel insulted. Like their opinion is not valid, like it doesn’t count.

Trying to win people over by insulting them is the strangest, most odd way of going about things.

It's not ignoring Farage to say he can't debate as leader of the opposition - he isn't leader of the opposition.

The problem of people "not being listened to" which Farage claims he does, is that in a lot of cases what is not being listened to is an opinion which is formed on perceptions, based on what a persons prejudices are anyway. People seek news and information sources that confirm their bias.

Prior to the referendum huge amounts of paper and online time was dedicated to how EU migrants were a burden on public finances, they lowered wages, they drove up housing prices/rents.

Then the Migration Advisory Commission, set up by the Conservatives, reported back on the impact of migration on all these things and found it to be minimal in most, or non existent in some, and very much based on region where any impacts were found.

But what regions are the ones that have the highest concerns about migration?

The thing is that to take on Farage, you don’t have to rubbish everything he says. Even the valid facts. Just because he said it and you don’t like him. That’s the most odd way of going about things.

Both Labour and the Tories could acknowledge facts and deal with them. Low skilled mass immigration is bad for the economy. That’s just a fact. It is a fact that GDP per capita has declined due to low skilled mass immigration. It is a fact that you have to earn around £40k to be a beg contributor, and the vast majority of immigrants are earning far less than that or nothing at all because they come in as dependents. You don’t have to hate immigrants to acknowledge these facts.

But acknowledging them would mean that the main parties would have to acknowledge that they have utterly mismanaged the economy in the last 25 years. And profited personally by giving their cronies and lobbyists cheap labour subsidised by the taxpayer. The fault here lies with Labour and the Tories.

@Honourspren

If nothing else, it shows that the FPTP system needs reform.

There should never be a case where a large percent of the population can cast a vote and it effectively be ignored because of the way that the system works in the UK.

In the 2010 election the BNP got more votes than the SNP. SNP got 6 MPs, BNP none.

In the 2015 election UKIP got more than twice as many votes as SNP (3.8m vs 1.5m) yet SNP were able to fill a coach with new MPs, whereas UKIP got 1.

Be careful what you wish for.

Yeah, thank god we don't have it! They'd get more seats.

I understood some one from yougov who was involved with the poll said within that 18/17% (was it?) That there was a +/- 10% error rate.

The error rate, in most polls are 3/4% error rate. So ten is pretty enormous. To me it says, don't trust that one poll.

But it also tells me that we, as a country, should be quite scared. And this is what the Tory party has brought us. 14 years of dog whistle politics that demonized immigrants and those who don't quite look like "people like us" has had it's inevitable consequence.

But the Torys might have been bitten by karma. Some (deluded supporter? People who.heard the dog whistle? Who knows) have turned to reform/ukip/fascist parties. Not the Torries. You reap only what you sow. Torries sowed division, that's exactly what they are reaping.

Since the first debate Nigel has been squirming his way in via Angela and she needs to be a lot more careful about talking to him directly or even engaging with him. That comment alone to flatter her that she has a personality etc vs boring Keir then she mistakenly spoke to him directly. Angela herself is unelectable just like Corbyn, people won’t go for her and if she puts herself out there too much, it will harm Labour.

As a country we really need to avoid a left/right divide. What we need is Labour under Starmer/Reeves vs a Lib Dem/Green coalition. That would be the best outcome. The Tory votes are split 3 ways Conservative/Reform/Lib Dem.

@user1471453601 - yep, we've been brought her by 12 years of shockingly bad government, leaders without morals and policies to further enrich the wealthy.
Karma indeed.

But ignoring him just adds grist to the mill.

Far better to accept that lots of people have varying opinions that should be openly discussed.

If immigration has been found to not affect the country in the way that some people feel it is then be open to talk about it. Every time it’s shut down because “thick racists” it adds more momentum to that movement.
We need daylight to clear up these issues. Sweeping them under the rug is creating a bigger problem.

The thing is Reform could get as many votes as the Tories in England and they'd still only get a fraction of the seats next month.

Kind of hope it does happen as it would show the voting system up.

The left are also a big voting block and are completely unrepresented by Labour now but they still expect their votes. Even some of them might vote Reform if they were Lexit/want more immigration control. The left need their own Reform party and we need PR

@MeanGreen I agree, we've got to allow debate and not shut down concerns because it's a gift to these people. Just look at what's happening in Europe.