Thank you.
The problem has been that there is no coherent plan and no joined-up thinking at all for decades, just endless tinkering around the edges of a broken system which is never going to fix anything. Spineless and cowardly, pointless and actually has made things worse than if we’d had no active legislative change at all because it has led to people losing belief that things can be improved. They can, but it would require competent people without vested interests to lead a genuine programme of change based on evidence, not ideologies.
Wholesale change is needed, with a coherent plan that is rational and economically credible. Treat voters like adults. So many are continually voting for the “least awful” option now and politically homeless and I believe would welcome any reasonable, moderate politician with evidence-based policies who entered the totally unoccupied centre ground and stated these harsh facts but also articulated a logically coherent vision of the steps out of the mess to give people some realistic hope.
People are turning to extremes in desperation: I don’t believe the average member of the UK public is generally extreme by nature. That’s never been our national culture. People just want stability, capable and rational economic management of the country so that they know that their living standards aren’t going to continue declining in perpetuity, and that there is a plan that has a prospect of working: that competent people are managing this for them - as they are paid to do! - so they don’t need to worry about it too much between elections and can get on with their lives. Mass interest in the minitiae of politics, frankly, shows that something has gone horribly wrong!
Is this really too much to ask?? That we could have competent Government even for a decade of so, to sort out this mess?
I think the vast majority of the UK public would breathe a sigh of relief if such a party existed that they could vote for and they could largely forget about politics until the next general election.
The only people who the polarisation and division serves are the politicians who’ve built a career upon it. Unsurprisingly, these people (like Farage) stoke it more because without it they have nothing at all: it is their route to power and, if in power, stoking it further is their only way to maintain this. Such an approach certainly won’t improve anything in the UK economy - at either extreme - or living standards and opportunity for UK citizens. Look at the periods of prosperity in any country. Did these occur when there was huge social division? Did exacerbating that social division make things any better? Again, it isn’t rocket science and history tells us everything we need to know.
I do find it hard to understand why anybody thinks it will improve matters to go even further towards extremes and shout at each other - largely about what might be significant issues to specific people based on their particular personal principles/ views but are trivialities and rounding errors economically - when all evidence from this country and all others who have gone through a similar process throughout history shows very clearly that it absolutely will not improve things for anybody to cause further division.
Only a few people will benefit from that, see the Blood on the Streets book co-authored by Sir William Rees-Mogg - the father of our “eminent” ex-MP - (subtitle on the front cover: “How to make money during an age of economic crisis”). Many such predators are funding various influences in our politics. It might be a good idea for anybody considering voting for Reform to take a look at who is funding that party and why, and indeed who funded Mr Farage’s previous political escapade to ensure the UK left the EU and why. Hint: they certainly have no care whatsoever for the living standards of the average UK family, or those who are doing rather well for themselves, or the poorest in our society who are largely who they have hoodwinked into supporting them by harnessing their distress and promising a plaster that will not be forthcoming, cruelly, to those who will suffer the most from their objectives.
It seems that unfortunately too many of the UK electorate are now so angry that their capacity has vanished to assess things based on evidence or identify the issues that actually matter economically for them, their children and their children’s children (even a grasp of basic numeracy and understanding the proportion of public spending used for each department, which is all publicly available information and at everyone’s fingertips on the internet, which show very clearly what needs to be addressed to change things and increase productivity and living standards. Yet time and time again on these threads there are endless discussions of trivialities and very little engagement at all with the actual economic issues that would change things).
I hope we might get a politician at some point who has a backbone and integrity and articulates a coherent, evidence-based policy programme and I think a sufficient proportion of the electorate would get behind it if they did. However, not a single MP in the House of Commons currently seems capable of doing so, and I think the system is set up in such a way as to prevent such a person from ever getting to a position to be able to do so. All we get to choose from are spineless and self-serving or so incompetent that they are incapable of their role that they are oblivious to what they are meant to be doing.