... to think that Nigel Farage will be our next PM?

[ohime]

Or, more accurately: AIBU to be afraid that truly nasty piece of work Nigel Farage who has, by all accounts, always been utterly useless at (or at least completely uninterested in) the actual business end of governing will be our next PM because everyone is so fed up with all the other parties being, variously or all at once, so corrupt, incompetent and useless that we've collectively abandoned all hope? I will never vote for Farage, who is a horrible man, or any of his party which keeps having to fire people for being just a teensy bit too overtly racist - but it seems from the polls that for many people the choice against the status quo outweighs what we may be choosing. (For an example, I can't believe that Farage's stated position that DOGE in the US didn't go far enough with its swinging cuts to the social safety net would be popular with UK voters who recently elected a government on the basis that it would reverse years of Tory austerity... not that that's worked out so well...)

Love your source 🤣

@Kitte321

Immigration wasn't a hot political issue when I was growing up and what we had seemed low and manageable to a degree.
Unfortunately it all kicked off under tony Blair the the horribly stupid lifting of rights meaning a great deal of people came here very quickly
But famously no one was counted in

Instead we were gaslit as as a country , communities under horrific strain ,the NHS , doctors ,schools, the police.

That's when it became the no 1 issue.

On my own small sample size ive never heard anyone saying they don't want immigration but what's happened to us a country is extreme and we have suffered.

Yep and as others in the EU are still struggling with the same it’s not the relevant factor.

That's true but the previous arguments on here were about small boats and the fact that numbers were up this year. The small boats from France is connected to Brexit. Asylum claims from people from Pakistan who arrived here legally/through conventional channels aren't down to that. One thing that would help that is clearing the asylum backlog and processing claims faster. Otherwise people can arrive from Pakistan or anywhere, falsely claim it's too dangerous to return and then sit out the slow moving asylum process, not legally allowed to work but possibly doing cash in hand jobs. But when I said that it wasn't just the numbers arriving by boat but how fast the UK government processed asylum claims and returned rejected claims the other posters got very cross for not centring the small boats.
And there has also been an increase in legal economic migration from Pakistan and other places outside the EU. Which happened because a lot of EU migrants stopped coming/went home post Brexit and people were needed to fill their jobs (and also because of Hong Kong and China political stuff).

And once again Farage knew all this would happen.

Because all sorts of agreements linked to our membership fell away and data sharing etc got much more complicated. Essentially, as far as I understand, we're having to rebuild a system with France bilaterally and it's not as easy as continuing with what we had before because we lost access to a whole bunch of stuff. So yes, Brexit is a massive setback regarding illegal migration from outside the EU.

I live in a small town, we were a Tory stronghold until the last election. I have always been a bit of a swing voter. Our Tory MP was actually really good! He was often seen, easy to get hold of and did was was asked of him by his constituence. We now have a lib dem and he's absolutely awful, impossible to track down and does zero. Most people I know ( and I know it's only a small bubble) will definitely vote reform next time, this goes across ages and normal voting intentions. Most that I have spoken to about it didn't vote at all last time, due to a dislike of the conservatives behaviour over the last few years and a concern for stamers government. They now feel justified in their opinion of labour and that the Tories aren't challenging or pushing back enough. Many of them don't actually like farage but do agree with many of reforms policies. Racist as someone said up thread has lost any meaning to many people and they really don't care if that's a word bandied about. I don't think farage will be pm but I do think there is a very big possibility that reform will be or part of the next government. Just my little opinion!

How much is it helping those within the EU? They have similar migration issues and political pressures.

What a pathetic nonsense all this is, prior to Blair's massive blow to our country when he flooded it unwittingly with low cheap labour filling these jobs was never an issue
Post blairs atrocity it's been falsely framed as an issue

I would honestly like to get political asylum somewhere else if he gets in. Can't stand the man and I think people who vote Reform are so, so stupid to believe his false promises. They are also so racist.

Oh and the party members leave, come back, leave again. It's a bloody shambles. How can anyone think they're a credible political party?

But that was migration for economic purposes from other EU countries. Which another poster (@squishedmallow) specifically said was not a problem or at least not for Switzerland who are apparently much better at migration than us.

Small boats: When the UK was in the EU, the UK was part of a returns agreement with the EU. This meant that anyone travelling to the UK from the EU without a right of entry could be sent back. Not just to their original country of origin. But to the place they had just come from (eg France). So in theory someone could sail their dinghy from France to Dover. But noone did because they would have been sent back. Brexit ended that agreement and we can't send people back to France without their cooperation. So the only option is to process their claim and either return them to their country of origin if it's deemed safe, or allow them to stay.

Ironically "just tow them back" is exactly what lots of people supporting Reform want but that's not possible without an agreement with France and we had that agreement before Brexit. I swear Garage could stand at Calais with a stand selling rubber dinghies and lifejackets and a map of the UK coast line and people would still say only he cared about migration.

Also, those who had actually been through the blitz when the war ended voted in the most left wing government on record, bringing the NHS into being etc.

Lots of posts here suggesting that Reform might form the next government alongside another party. I can't imagine who would or could work with them. They don't even seem able to work amongst themselves.

I'm in a Greater London suburb and the amount of tent sleepers has increased noticeably. In the town and industrial parks, car parks and nature reserves. There are hotels being used to house asylum seekers but these are now being contested as illegal. We have children arriving in my school who are living in 1 room with their entire family. Our family services do home visits and are appalled. And they continue to arrive. I can't see how anything is going to improve. The town has hundreds of men in groups sitting around with not much to do. It feels safer being in Central London.

Ironically preBrexit the UK actually had a big advantage over other EU countries partly because it was an Island so anyone rocking up at Calais had really obviously come from France. There was illegal migration in lorries etc where people were coming but not declaring themselves to the authorities. The challenge then was for UK border police to find them at our border and then they could be sent back immediately to France (usually to try again sigh. But they were sent back). UK border force got a lot better at detecting people hiding in lorries than they were originally though of course this still cost money. And small boats would be really obvious and easy to intercept at the shore so people didn't really do that
Brexit effectively removed the need to hide from immigration - on the contrary it makes more sense to immediately present yourself on arrival for processing.

We were the country that benefited the most from the return agreement. We could renegotiate it with France but politically it doesn't make much sense for France to take people back. So we would have to give them something in return whereas before it was a freebie from being in the EU. That disproportionately benefitted is.

Another Brexit bonus Whoop!

We didn’t have a mass return programme though. Our numbers were tiny and we took more than returned.

It was only a few hundred. And the criteria was tough, and the people needed to be accepted back.

A few hundred back and taking a few more than that wasn’t really a factor. It’s not really a factor elsewhere in the EU either, they still have migration issues.

The last I saw of a country hailing success was a physical barrier which is of course tricky.

This is true but leaving the EU gave us another lever to pull - the opportunity to drop the European Convention on Human Rights, which made it impossible for the UK to export small-boat arrivals to Rwanda for processing of their asylum claim, or taking the less humane route of simply imprisoning them. Either of those options would have made the UK a less attractive destination for the small boats. It's the most effective, if drastic, solution available at this time.

The problem is that Labour won't pull that lever, which is fair and understandable given their overall political position and opposition to Brexit at the time, and the Conservatives are "considering" it but only now that they find themselves in opposition, having passed up the chance to do it when they were in government.

I'm not saying it's a good idea but only Reform have actually come out and said that they will do it. So Farage can portray himself as the man with a plan.

If a Government with a huge majority isn’t doing something about this, it’s because they don’t want to. The fact that messing with farmers , pensioners and prep school kids because they don’t vote for you takes a higher priority over social fabric falling to pieces tells people everything they need to know. It’s inevitable it’ll be reform or reform/tory hybrid, Labour simply don’t care about the things most of the country do now,

Rwanda cost a ridiculous amount of money and came to nothing when the Tories tried it. And no, I don't want concentration caps which is what you are describing would need.to be if they were to serve as a deterrent rather than simply housing. That's not left wing hysteria that's just what they would be. Concentration camps are a plan. They are a bad plan. Nigel Farage is a man with a bad plan. "Less humane" is an understatement.

And it wouldn't even make life better for ordinary people which is what people say they want. Like in America which now has alligator Alcatraz but also tax cuts for millionaires and no health care for most of Trump's voters.

No worries. I thought you’d maybe posted on the wrong thread 🤣

Have you got blue hair , ripped tights, and a septum piercing per chance ?

Er no. I'm a 50 year old Cambridge graduate!

You left wing extremist you!

You see people who don't like Reform tend to be the educated ones.