Musk donating £80m to Reform

[glowinggg]

Is anyone else a mix of depressed and scared about this scenario playing out? In a nutshell:

• Musk reportedly donating £80m to Farage
• Musk seeking UK citizenship via his grandmother's nationality in order to do ate and influence UK politics
• Will use his skewed algorithm to boost his own X lists svc those of right wing mouthpieces - Tommy Robinson etc to destabilise UK electorate and undermine the government and Conservatives, resulting in a Reform win.

Link to article here:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/07/money-lawyers-or-boosting-farage-on-x-how-elon-musk-could-affect-uk-politics?CMP=ShareiOSAppp_Other

It’s terrifying

Musk has shut down these claims for now: https://www.politico.eu/article/elon-musk-denies-plotting-huge-donation-uk-nigel-farage-reform-donald-trump/

That's meaningless

Given Reform are a business Farage will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Given that Farage has said we should be looking at abortion rights in this country, the prospect of all of this happening is a disaster for all of us.

It's awful. I can't believe people haven't worked out what he has done to our country.

I agree

Yes, it's deeply disturbing/frightening.
It would be bad enough with any intrusive greedy billionaire, but especially disturbing with one as wacko as Musk is.

Reform don't stand a chance ....... unless they enter an electoral pact with the Tories.

So will Badenoch be able to get the Tories pulling together rather than having endless squabbling and periodically turning on their leader? If not, then pact is likely

Labour are making such a balls up that I wouldn’t be surprised if Reform and the Conservatives merge in someway.

I can't see Farage getting voted back in. I don't think Reform have a chance at the next election.

I object to foreign people influencing our elections. This needs to stop. Money from British nationals only. Musk is trouble. Farage is trouble. We actually need the Cons to regroup and appeal to the centre right. We, like much of Europe, will lurch to the right if don’t.

I agree.

The problem is that the only charismatic conviction politicians are extremists.

So you get the ultra woke left wing where all immigration is good and the more ‘protected characteristics’ you have, the more society owes you vs the xenophobic right wing where no immigration is good and platitutidinous easy (but unworkable) solutions are put forward (Trump and Farage).

In between you have people like Starmer and Sunak who are technocrats with little conviction about anything but basically decent people who want to make society work better but have little idea how to do it except on the margins, so they flip flop from ‘big idea’ to ‘big idea’ (which are really small tweaks anyway).

And we have a society with entrenched interests who can easily block the technocrats, so we have an inability to build houses, control our borders, produce power at a sensible price and have a working transport system.

It is a a global problem but we have it particularly egregiously.

Musk’s putative £80 million is a pittance in the scheme of things and can only influence politics if it is pushing on an open door, which I think it is.

@Newbutoldfather And controlling our borders; building homes (especially social housing that won’t be sold); investing in affordable public transport; ensuring heating our homes is not a luxury; are at the top of nearly everyone's agenda!

As an older person in the UK, I’ve lived through lots of governments, but I’ve never seen such negativity before within such a short space of time after a GE.

The Twitter files unveiled the extreme manipulation and shadow banning that was taking place on the site before Musk bought it (saying a transgender woman was a man led to a lifetime ban in some cases for example). Since buying Twitter Musk has allowed Free Speech on every subject.

Musk's continues his lies about the UK

Elon Musk's curious fixation with Britain www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7kpvndyyxo

Yes it's worrying and depressing. It seems there are enough people who like loudmouths and self promoters with a lot of cash who appeal to their worst instincts and scream 'freedom of speech' if anyone tries to prevent them dominating a route into public life. And the routes in have become much narrower for individuals but the change in the media landscape has made the previous restrictions we used to have to prevent things like this fairly meaningless. Number of minutes allowed on the telly for a party political broadcast was heavily regulated for a reason, but that seems like a long tome ago. Now people can and do watch hours of obsessively skewed pro-Reform media without any restriction, paid for by any old scumbag.with an eye on cracking open our economy and extracting what they can get from it.

I'm seeing a lot of council seats in a variety of areas turning Reform. I'm not seeing a big Tory revival.

Have there been local council elections or people defecting? Haven’t seen either where I live.

These are just individual Council ward by-elections.

this site provides a regular summary https://www.markpack.org.uk/174092/20-swing-from-labour-to-lib-dems-in-council-by-election/

We don’t have that number of by-elections between the main election dates. Pretty rare here. I’ve no idea what would happen. Hopefully not Reform though. We are bit leafy lane for that.

Why is Musk constantly sticking his nose into British politics? It certainly won't be for any altruistic reason.

He's also sticking his nose into Germany's elections and promoting far right parties everywhere else as well.

He's trying to bring down Starmer by linking him to the Rochdale gangs and is scraping the swamp of social media to retweet stuff and boost posts that are far right conspiracy theories designed to undermine Starmer.

Regardless of how well or not you think Starmer is doing this is not good for our democracy.

I do hope he’s written the cheque….

Reform and the tories will never merge. I'm not tory but there are too many sensible tories. And too many sensible tory voters who would be horrified.
Reform do not have wide public support.. they do have loud public support but it's not the same.