AIBU to vote reform

[MeadowL]

Anyone else sick of the Tories and Labour and will be voting reform?

@rainingsnoring Im not far off 70 and I would never ever vote for Farage. I do see and hear discussions about him “telling it like it is” but non of my friends will vote Reform. Mainly because he couldn’t deliver what he says and it totally ignores the difficulty of getting uk people to do certain jobs.Farage is a loud mouth disruptor. He’s conned people once and they are letting him do it again. It’s unbelievably ignorant and foolish. It’s shameful.

Agreed @rainingsnoring. It’s not just the racism they overlook though, it’s the fact that as Reform don’t stand a chance of actually forming a government, they don’t have to worry about any of their other manifesto pledges being implemented, so they can make up the maths and promise what they like.

I agree. Ditto Trump, who is about as privileged as anyone can be but portrays himself as anti establishment and 'down with the common man'.

Have to disagree with the milk first in tea. That’s just wrong on every level and can be called cun-tea.
Back to topic, what makes Reform a fascist party?

I disagree. Fascism is the warped lovechild of socialism and communism. It inherits the key tennets of authoritarian collectivism and ruthless crushing of decent.

The rest is just the usual flim flam of the elite justifying killing anyone who disagrees.

Left/Right is a myth. The reality is collectivist versus individualistic.

Such bullshit, there's so little 'support' of 'one another' in Britain today, and in particular since the Brexit vote. British people's tea and polite queues self-image is so at odds with how they're often seen in the rest of the world, which is often as a hotbed of xenophobes, football hooligans and nostalgists for their part in a war that ended 80 years ago, a blood-soaked lost Empire and in thrall to an unelected monarch.
Anything that suppresses the total shame of racism such as just a flirtation with voting Reform normalises fascism.

I totally agree. However, I would hazard a guess that, as well as being nearly 70, you are also in a very comfortable position financially, as are (most of) your friends. The people considering voting for Reform are generally not in extremely privileged positions and feel desperate for change.
I also totally agree with @Silviasilvertoes that the manifesto is 'pie in the sky' and that the maths clearly doesn't add up. Again though, I suspect that you and I are in the privileged position of having a high level of education compared to many.

🙄
I take it you dislike anything British?

Sounds like you've had a bad day. Are you OK? 😕

No, I admire certain things in British history - eg christian socialism, chartism, the welfare state but just as the course and effects of British colonialism tend to be studied so much more outside Britain, I find the self-image really hard to reconcile with reality.

I don't think this weird nostalgic appeal to 'Churchillian' tea and fags is useful or authentic in any way, and having spent a lot of time living in different places, it's just not how the rest of the world sees Britain a lot of the time - there are countless jokes and cartoons about it.

The post-imperial, post-industrial nostalgia-fest that was mobilised by Trump and to encourage people to vote for Brexit is utterly hollow, cheap and devised to appeal to the sentiments of people who identify as descended from 'winning' participants in that history that they've now somehow been cheated out of. Reform are pressing certain buttons and playing an utterly divisive zero sum game.

Just look at Farage's speeches - there's nothing positive in them, he just rails on and on about what he hates and tries to stir up hatred in voters. Like Trump, he really can bring out the worst in people.

Had to be asked because your vocabulary is somewhat limited.

The manifesto is one of a party who can promise anything knowing they don’t have a hope of getting in. The costings are absolute fantasy and we would be in deep financial shite (even more than now!) if they actually were to implement it.

Even if this were not the case, the tax cuts in it overwhelmingly benefit the rich. So, life would not get better unless you are one of these wealthy people and don’t ever need to use public services.

This assumes that they would get in, or even want to get in. They don’t - they would hate to actually have responsibility for delivery something rather than agitating on the sidelines.

It’s all about how he is being persecuted, sidelined etc to try and exploit hard times and harness people legitimately feeling like they are being left to rot.

The immigration over the last few years has been very high (partly due to Hong Kong and Ukraine). It’s legitimate to ask questions and have concerns about this, but this is not the answer, and reform will not make anything better.

Says more about you if everyone you know is bigging them up. He lied about Brexit, bailed on Trump as he is now a felon, I do believe Putin might be funding him & Trump. He has nothing to offer the this country he will divide this country.

Wonder what the Germans were thinking when Hitler was voted in, I thought lots of them didn’t vote. There are similarities with today .
www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/how-did-adolf-hitler-happen

That's so pathetic. I suppose the 20% intending to vote reform according to the polls are all these mythical "russian bots" are they?

Fascism isn't collectivist, it's corporate statism. Not at all the same. I'm tired of people saying all authoritarianism is a form of communism or socialism. That's factually incorrect. There is authoritarianism on both the left and the right. Fascism is right wing, nationalistic authoritarianism. Yes, left and right do exist. The far right serves corporate interests at the expense of the people. The far left serves collectivism at the expense of individual liberty. There is a continuum and fascism is as far right as it gets. Marxism is as far left as it gets, but Marxism is mostly an economic system rather than strictly political. The part of it that's political is the authoritarianism. It's literally outlined as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Fascism is political rather than economic, though the economy of a fascist society will be capitalistic.

The opposite of authoritarianism is libertarianism, but even that has a left and a right. Right wing libertarianism serves corporate interests, but, unlike fascism, doesn't subvert individual liberty to it. Left wing libertarianism serves collectivism, but unlike Marxism, it keeps individual liberties. Private ownership would remain, for example, but the governing body would not serve private interests if they came at the expense of the people as a whole.

IOW, it's really fucking complicated.

The Laffer curve is widely discredited as inapplicable for real world economics. Lowering the debt burden as a way to promote growth (austerity) has also been shown to be based on incorrect data, and thus entirely wrong. Countries with lower debt perform worse than countries with higher debt - austerity is an ideology not a sound economic practice.

Conservatives have mismanaged the public purse in a disgusting way. I can’t wait for them to be removed.

Nigel Farage has said racist things and surrounded himself by racist people. Anyone who votes for him must be happy to associate themselves with racism, whether or not they are themselves racist.

If the OP can stomach that, they are free to exercise their democratic right.

Farage is well educated. He’s also a racist.

It only just occurred to me that some of those “supporting” Reform are actually just being tongue in cheek and making fun of those who do. Well played, it’s pretty telling that even when you go to silly extremes we still believed you might be a genuine Reform supporter! Someone might be along to suggest Channel 4 paid you to make the posts though.

One word answer:YES

Where is Reform's roadmap?

I've just checked betting odds and Nigel is significantly ahead of Rishi for next PM (although both massively behind Keir). So if YABU, you're certainly not alone.

Farage is a pirate. No feasible plan. Like a pirate ship aimlessly drifting until he finds another object to plunder and destroy. There is nothing positive about Farage. Real power is in building and Farage has no proven ability to do that. Somebody else will have to come along and take Reform to a winnable position - it is certainly not Farage.

I imagine the Venn diagram of those who plan to vote reform and those who put milk in before tea is a circle.

Farage does not have the experience or inner strength to lead a nation.