Worried about Reform Electoral Victory

[RolandH]

Hello everyone,

I'm worried about a possible Reform electoral victory. I do disagree with alot of their policies, but the main thing which concerns me is, if they get in, I have doubts about whether they will preserve the integrity of our electoral system.

Looking at far right governments around the world just now, many of them seem to be happy to attempt to undermine the electoral process. Trump tried to after he lost to Biden, and I doubt that the next election in the US will be free and fair, as the republicans will be trying to replace the electoral officials with their people. In Hungary, the free press has been repressed. Things can obviously get worse than this.

I would like to hear if other people are worried about this, for people who are thinking about voting Reform or have done have thought about it, and also how people who are committed Reform voters would respond to this. Will you be ready to fight against this party if it looks like they are taking the country in an anti-democratic direction?

PIP claims are completely out of control and there will need to be massive cutbacks. The country simply can't afford the benefits bill due to the debt mountain.

Taxes are so high that people are reducing hours to avoid paying taxes. There are Mumsnet threads all the time with people avoiding earning over £100k so that they don't lose childcare while also paying the 60% marginal rate. It's simply incompatible with human nature for people to take home so little of what they earn.

There is no more tax to be had. Increasing taxes further, will push more people to retire, reduce hours, give up or emigrate.

The only way out of this hole is to reduce spending and increase growth, so that the debt to GDP ratio shrinks. If the debt keeps going up, the cuts will need to be even deeper.

How do you propose we increase growth? Growth depends on people having money to spend. People who have more money than they need to be comfortable aren't going to significantly change their spending habits based on small tweaks to their tax rate but the vast majority of people have just enough to meet their needs or not really enough at all and they are the people who will spend more if tax and benefits are in their favour, without even being extravagant.

You want to give immigrants a £15k payment! Good job you aren't running any political party, all your candidates would lose their deposit! No one would vote for that!!!

How is farage workshy?

That's the broken window fallacy. The people earning the money are best placed deciding where it is spent. That is what will deliver growth. Taxing those people and spraying benefits around doesn't produce growth, it reduces it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

@1SillySossij
Farage’s record of attendance as an MEP and an MP is pretty poor, and he’s not really done the real work of a constituency MP in Clacton. As an example, he was recently on holiday in the South of France and missed an important debate in parliament on Brexit - something he was an architect of. This week, he’s been in Vegas. He’s quick to jump on a bandwagon, milk the publicity and then there’s no substance - no real follow-up, accountability, etc. It’s just empty, performative politics.

He does work hard at the self-serving grift though - media appearances, paid speeches and the like.

He may be taxed the same, but he is entitled to more benefits because he has children. The important thing is that someone receives more resources if they have kids - provided they aren't fabulously wealthy. Now we might reorganise things so the tax paid is lower, but it could come to the same amount of money in someone's pocket. It's a matter of what is easier to administer, what people generally see as fair, and various other considerations.

Now what level those benefits or tax breaks should be is another issue. I'd say pretty high - we do not want any children in poverty. It doesn't matter their parent's situation.

You seem to be comparing a situation where both parents can work, verses one where only one can work. But I thought we were debating about whether things should be made easier for households where only one person works, whether both can or not. The problem with that is that it is an incentive for women to stay at home, or for their husbands or partners to pressure them to stay at home.

I don't understand this first point you made. If the two people working get free child care, then family where only one person works is entitled to free child care as well. They would be in the same situation. Do you mean that the family with only one person working are disadvantaged because the other adult cannot work because they can'y afford the childcare. But then they would be like the family with both people working, who can afford the childcare. Now if only one parent can work, that's a different situation, but then they have additional problems and hopefully they would receive additional benefits to compensate for the fact that one of them is unable to work.

It's certainly not the easy life!

I just think the most important thing is that the children are well looked after and provisioned. However families will do this will change over time, and the government should support whatever it is.

They didn't label you as odd, they said you had an odd view on one topic.

What I think people are asking for is evidence that Starmer isn't patriotic.

I haven't really heard about what you are talking about here. What is the 60% marginal rate on? I thought the top rate of income tax was 45% in England. Is that what you mean, or something else?

It's completely unclear whether there is no more tax to be had, though you might be right about middle income earners, given the countries attitudes about public services just now. But the very rich pay practically nothing, and the government hasn't even got round to exploring how much you could get out of them. Wealth taxes are difficult to do - you basically need the tax to apply to all assets, and then balance it so not too many of them leave the country and undermine the aim of the policy. But this surely isn't impossible.

I agree - much as I detest him, he doesn't seem workshy.

This is a good example of why getting irate when debating people is counter-productive - you just end up given them something to nitpick.

To increase growth, we will need to increase trading power- but Brexit has got in the way with its absurd red tape.

Surely in some cases it would increase growth, and others reduce it? I remember reading a number of times that people in lower incomes spend a greater proportion of their income. This would produce growth. People on high incomes save it. This can also produce growth, as those savings fund investments that come out of banks and building societies. It's about getting the balance right between these and other things - if we are concerned with growth, of course, which we may not always be.

Economics is really complex and heavily contested. It certainly won't always be the case that people earning the money are best placed to spend it. Sometimes they will and sometimes they won't. We built thousands of council houses in this country 70 years ago or so, and it was a good investment as we are still reliant on that housing stock. But those were publicly funded, not privately funded - i.e. the people who earnt the money didn't spend it.

Since Brexit we've gone from being the world's sixth largest exporter to become the 4th largest exporter. We (population 67 million) now export more than Japan (population 125 million).

Perhaps you need to get out of your echo chamber?

www.export.org.uk/insights/trade-news/uk-becomes-world-s-fourth-largest-exporter-as-services-boom/

@RolandH Prior to Council Housing there was massive private sector housebuilding - just look at the number of homes built during Victorian times and the 1930s.

That was killed by the Town & Country Planning Act 1947 which prevented private building upon the Green Belt and simultaneously allowed the government to compulsory purchase land cheaply for building.

It's impossible to say what would have happened if the private sector had been allowed to keep building.

Telegraph trying to help them along with misleading headlines like the below

(In case any image problems it reads 'Foreigners claim £1bn a month in benefits')

First, as the article itself states, this figure is for 'households where at least one person is foreign born' which represents... quite a lot of households, certainly in cities. Second, the front page did not appear to mention anything about the working status of these households - it's relying on an assumption that benefits = not working. Probably many of these people have housing benefits or others because they work jobs that don't pay enough to live on. Seems to me like their employers are the people 'taking advantage' of benefits.

God, I think kids need to be taught in schools that 'illegal immigrants' don't get any benefits at all, and certainly don't 'go to the front of queue' for housing or even get any housing at all. And also that a large % of people on benefits are in work,so benefits does not mean not working.

Illegal immigrants might not get benefits, but they get housing ( usually in hotels) meals, NHS medical and dental care, spending money and entertainment costing the taxpayer £15bn a year which is the equivalent to 10% of the NHS budget.
Educate yourself

They get £8 a week each. Perhaps you’d like to swap places? Obviously if we did something sensible like allow asylum seekers to work the costs would decrease exponentially.

So regarding the point I made which you didn’t understand:

• 2 people work and pay for childcare vs a couple where 1 works and the other stays at home- on a more level playing field for the pre-school years, as often the cost of childcare is the equivalent of a salary anyway, so more equal in the sense you either pay to outsource it or lose the income yourself.
• Government increasing childcare that is free for more hours from a younger age- a couple where both work have more disposable income as no longer paying it out to a nursery/childminder. They may have more to spend, resulting in families where 1 would like to stay at home being even further priced out of that option. So it is discriminatory- some parents do not want to use these free hours, and the government could choose to also do other things for them, like alter the tax of the working parent. But they don’t, as they do not value parents caring for their own very young children.

I do value parents caring for their own children, and Reform are the only party I can see speaking up for them (I do thoroughly read all of their policies and have discussed in detail with all local politicians). Offering my family free hours we don’t want doesn’t match up with our values at all.

Hope this makes sense.

So the economic migrants masquerading as asylum seekers would get to circumvent the UK's visa requirements and unfettered access to the UK job market.

What could possibly go wrong?

No they don’t. They’re subject to visa requirements and offered ringfenced opportunities to earn money and ease the much begrudged financial burden on the taxpayers. Obviously some people dislike that idea because it would reduce their opportunities to whinge about asylum seekers.

I think it’s an excellent idea Blossomtoes.

Irrelevant.
They were perfectly safe in France but
They paid lots of money to get on those boats, nobody coerced them to do so!
You pays your money and you takes your choice!

How many times do people have to be reminded asylum seekers get to decide where they feel safe - their reasons generally due to language/friends/family - but whatever the reason, other people/countries don’t get to decide for them.
So no they can’t just stay in France, or what you consider a safe country.
This is actually ruled on in British case law too - R v Uxbridge - so not any ECHR or EU ruling but our very own - we have sovereignty and I guess we all want to follow our own laws! It is also internationally agreed in the 1951 Refugee Convention.

A quick Google shows that that loophole was long since closed by the Nationality and Borders Act which received Royal assent in April 2022.

' the act puts into law that those who arrive illegally in the UK who could have claimed asylum in another safe country - can be considered as inadmissible to the uk adylum system.