I do find the focus on ZP over the past few days interesting. When there's the story going on about Farage pocketing £5 million claiming it was ok because he wasn't a politician at the time and earning £2 million since becoming an MP.
Why people think he's some kind of saviour of the working class I have no idea.
Thing is though that working class, traditional Labour voters have, to a degree, been left by Labour. What a lot of left wingers don't really like is the fact these voters might be fiscally liberal but socially conservative. The Greens are fiscally liberal and socially liberal. Reform are fiscally conservative and socially very conservative. Labour have lost their way, becoming fiscally a bit conservative and socially a bit of a mish mash.
But do I think either ZP or NF give a crap about anybody but their own fame? Nope.
Problem is that it's a bit like the 1929 crash what happened in 2008 and we've never really recovered. We are getting echoes of that kind of shift in politics which happened in the 1930s where the hard right and hard left rose across Europe and beyond. We escaped the worst of the politics of that period but not the fall out from it.
Fact is, in my mind, it's so easy to be a popularist. You can just blame someone else all the time rather than point out some hard truths. That the world was made poorer in 2008 due to events in the US. Due to how financial institutions were poorly managed and regulated. And much as we want to put blame on X or Y, there is no fixing that in a way which isn't going to be kind of painful. With repeated governments all that has been done is QE and kicking the can down the road. The other major problem we have is the correction after 2008 was austerity. I'd draw a straight line from that to our levels of sickness in our population with a diversion via Covid measures as well. Then add to that our aging population due to the baby boomers and low birth rates (in part influenced by austerity) and we have a huge problem in the UK, low tax payer numbers, high tax recipient numbers with high levels of expensive to service debt from the bank bail outs (probably necessary but helped the richest the most), a history of austerity (which failed) and Covid support (some of it fraud). We shouldn't need to have had to fix that problem but we do and fixing it will not be pleasant.
So what do you do? That's what's up for grabs but trying to pretend we don't currently need immigration is bollocks. We do until we can get more people back in work (that's what pisses me off about Labour back benchers blocking some of that, it needs to be done but that's another story). We also need to cut in work benefits subsidising companies, which is why increasing minimum wage isn't an awful idea.
But also that's why being a member of the EU actually worked well because we had a lot of circular migration (people came to work in the UK as adults and a lot returned or didn't bring family) now we're out of the EU, more people move from further away but for good and with their families who tend to be more recipients than generators of tax revenue. That's why Brexit increased migration.
I'm not saying I have the fixes but what I am saying is both ZP and NF piss me off because their solutions are facile. They do not admit the realities of where we are and they do not admit fixing any of this will be hard.