To be fed up of the political manipulation on mumsnet

[ZenNudist]

It's incessant and it's wearing. It's been going on for years and I'm fed up of the massive amount of tory party generated and lobbying content blocking up mumsnet.

I appreciate mumsnet is seen as a key voter demographic but a lot of the threads being posted are so transparently fiction.

The billion VAT on school fees threads must have been a mix of real people and tory HQ.

Fake outrage started immediately and now well into saying that with less than 4 Months of government and before enacting their first budget the Labour Party are apparently making a mess of everything and reversing the great gains made during tory rule. What great gains? I don't know. I saw one post trying to take tory credit for reducing inflation like that was Rishi's doing, laughable.

I also have seen a few fake scenarios for adverse impact of the budget on inheritance and small business taxation. Speaking as someone who will be adversely affects by increasing employer NI and the reduction in business property relief I still support these changes. My friends who are small business owners feel the same way.

Labour promised not to put up the main rates of income tax and employee NI. They were clear that measures would need to be taken to increase the tax take. They still are trying to drive growth because at the end if the day increasing the tax base is the best way of increasing revenue to the exchequer.

I know a lot of mumsnetters say they can't spot trolls or AI threads. I also think a lot of people will not spot the blatant manipulation by lobbyists and tory campaigners.

Tory party now playing a long game.

The Tory party is funded by the rich for the benefit of the rich. The rest of the middle, the poor, the marginalised have almost no voice and no one funding a political machine to work in our favour.

They are grown up take a look around the country is broken there is no services they need money to sort it a massive black hole left by the tories who b6 the way didn’t even budget to give money to them poor victims of the blood scandal which the budget has just done . So they know you have to pay for services all this tax cut bull shit isn’t gonna work neither

And your post looks exactly like what you are complaining about.

It isnt full of bots Labour and Tories are both shite and neither deserve power

You can’t be serious?

This is a ridiculously left wing pro Labour forum. The current US election thread is all pro Kamala.

Agreed. We should be calling out any attempts of cronyism - whether you vote for that party or not. So if suddenly his mates start getting lucrative multi million pound contracts within sectors they aren't in - i'll be right there with you against it.

But to even try and pretend KS has even 1% of the scandals in 4 months as PM as the previous 14years of Tory Leadership is ridiculous. The fact that him accepting stuff like a ticket for a TS concert got so much online buzz vs the silence of many of the previous scandals of the last 14 years is almost laughable.

We should be holding all of them to the same standard. But it doesn't seem to be the case in practice.

I do not generally support any party. I think the Tories were awful and Labour misled us all on no rises on working people. Rising NI for employers is a tax and it impacts working people. It will as everyone agrees, impact wages. Mumsnet is a debate forum. So people can write what they think. Some I agree with some I do not... kinda the point?

That’s because majority of British people don’t rate trump the polls show us that because we don’t like liars and felons

@Tattletwat I'm aware of that but it's pretty easy to see that I am a real person. Search me!

Listen to the Newsagents podcast today. They give Rachel Reeves a pretty hard time about her budget in their interview with her. I don't think that Emily Maitliss is a Tory bot?

This despite Labour never having had a non white or female PM.

It really isn't the case. I'd say it's a pretty even split but there are also a large amount of posts hidden behind anonymous profiles talking about very 'niche' issues that seem to affect the MN community much much higher than it would across the whole population.

Considering the vast majority of posts i've seen about the US elections threads are hardly 'pro kamala' when in reality, they're just anti trump. They are not the same thing. Similar to how many people voted Labour this year who didn't WANT to but felt they had to in order to GTTO.

@ZenNudist. I totally agree with you and I'm in same position. There is a lot of underhand lobbying going on- designed by Tory's to play a long game. Yes I appreciate some mumsnetters will have those views too but many many don't. Don't forget however there are many agitators too on the far left who are determined to get a Corbyn type leader in - even if it means negative campaigning for Labour- despite the fact it lost them an election twice. Personally I would means test the WFA too and given the record of the previous bunch then those baying for blood likely come from those with plenty of cash and assets who may be hit slightly and are Tory or Reform voters anyway or those to the far left who will never be satisfied until anyone with a bit of cash or good fortune has left the country . I'm a centreist, voted Lib Dem, and am quite happy if the government is a bit bland and actually governing and looking at areas for investment- I would be even happier if they said bollox to Brexit and announced a Norway type deal but as that's not happening it seems I will take what my son ( who has lots of friends in politics) says is the case- They are concerned that the country has been allowed to run down so much that a lot of middle level taxpayers would actually leave if easy to do so and they need that tax take at the moment. - the right wing press/media don't like it and are determined to agitate because it's not providing them daily juicy scandals or corruption or Rich pickings for digital clicks. A lot of people are very naive how media works these days- they don't make money reporting on news without really big issues /disasters- they make money by 'creating' news/clicks /gossip etc.

I regularly name change because I give away personal info if I’m trying to help an OP - I don’t want it all under one user name .

People on MN have different political opinions - it’s a democracy - it’s allowed thank god . Some of it is AL and some of it isn’t . We all benefit from debating issues with those that have different opinions to us . In theory it leads to critical thinking and hopefully an improved society . If that’s working it really doesn’t matter that a thread was started by AL .

@IdleAnimations could that be because Labour have a 400 plus seat majority- and the vote is even higher amongst women than men- and particularly amongst the under 65s ( which I would think at least 2/3 of mumsnetters are) ?

Was just going to say this, it’s a few posters. I’m not saying there aren’t bots but I think some of it is that if you tend to hang round in real life with friends who we assume have similar values/political views and jobs and incomes etc and a lot of people just don’t have those kind of debates. So people are surprised when people vote conservative or aren’t anti Israel because everyone they know is staunch labour etc.

the number of people who have inferred that they think anyone who runs a business is making millions and deserves and should suck up any kind of tax hike is very odd to me.

The one-post political trolls have become very obvious, I assume MNHQ are permitting them for the site activity metrics. They follow predicable patterns, and do appear to have a right-wing/conservative bias. It's unclear whether it's ConHQ/Tufton St or the Daily Heil fishing for some outrage they can generate a story from.

1. State a Labour policy, whether factual or invented (it doesn't really matter). Complain how it's so bad for them. Complain it's a betrayal of people that work hard for their money. Favourite topics are private education, private health care, private pensions, inheritance tax, capital gains tax. And we'll probably now start to see small farms featuring.
2. Sit back and let the comments pile in, with tensions and arguments between posters getting more and more heated.
3. Never comment on that thread again.
4. Know that MNHQ will let you do it again, and again, and again.

oh, fancy you being on here Angela 👋

Love that Lib Dems think they are centrist 😄

It's not odd at all.

If something affects someone negatively they see it as a bad thing.
If something affects someone positively they see it as a good thing.
If it doesn't affect them at all they don't care.

No one is thinking about anything other than themselves or their family, they don't care about anyone else no matter how much they pretend to the contrary. It's an innate function of biological survival and we haven't evolved out of it.

Except the doctors and farmers have been commenting on their/other threads.

Don't be obtuse, you must know the type of threads I'm talking about.

Presumably the OP is a labour bot?

In all seriousness, accusing anyone who doesn’t worship at the feet of Keir Starmer of being a Tory is tedious.

It’s worth remembering that the only reason that labour are in power is because many people voted labour in order to get the Tories out. Not because they agreed with their (at the time) non existent policies.

But unless labour pull something masterful off soon they won’t be serving a second term.

Since coming to power labour have removed the winter fuel allowance, regardless of the rights and wrongs of that, the fact that Keir Starmer stood up in the commons and accused the tories of being responsible for the deaths of thousands of pentioners if they did the same speaks volumes.

Keir Starmer has been in the media because of receiving donations, clothes and football tickets again, saying Boris Johnson did x or received more is irrelevant. We know he did. Doesn’t make Keir starmer receiving fat cheques any less relevant.

He’s lost his chief of staff.

One of his MP’s has already been suspended for punching someone.

The VAT on private school fees is going to damage the state sector not the other way around, and no, I have no skin in the game there, but any idiot can see that putting VAT on private school fees is going to A, drive more parents to the state sector, and B, lead to private school closures which is going to force more children into the state sector, so the money just isn’t going to be raised.

Additionally the non dom tax loophole isn’t going to generate income either because those people are simply taking all their assets and leaving the country. So bit of an own goal there.

People want to see some change that benefits them. A rise in employer’s national insurance is the same as a wage freeze, because many employers just won’t increase pay in order to justify the raise.

I didn’t vote for either of them, and I never will. But it’s naive to think that either one is better than the other. It’s just different sides of the same coin.

I think you're right. Mumsnet is pretty left wing and ofc real people are entitled to vote for whomever they like but there's been a strange flood of anti-left posts which don't seem to have any reasoned thought behind them and have the same scent as pro-Russian or pro-MAGA artificial social media attacks.

There are some well-reasoned anti - labour posts. Fair enough. But quite a number ring false.

I think it's the barrage of threads that op is referring to. I've been on here years, since just before the tories got in, and the was never the level of constant outrage against them, even as they dismantled the country.

In real life, I only know one person who gives a shit about vat on private school. She thinks she's saving the nation, as she's not taking away a place at a local school. But we don't talk school, as I teach in a comp.

Incidentally, still waiting for the influx of private school students. Especially as the tories did such a great job with our schools. I'll take them; I've only got 27 in one of my classes.

I've never voted Tory but I still think Labour have made a shit job of things so far.

Don't be obtuse, you literally mentioned farms.