Mumsnet is now backing Reform UK - survey

[IwantToRetire]

The ladies are for turning after all – as a new survey reveals that one in five of the politically engaged mothers on the social networking site are ready to pledge allegiance to Nigel Farage

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/mumsnet-labour-reform-school-gates-keir-starmer-b2894524.html

Also in full at https://archive.is/V5P6n

Plasterer and yes.

There's a photo doing the rounds of the latest "man of the people" candidate outside his very nice house with a similarly expensive sports car. Grifter copying his boss to a tee...

Everything in politics is fake. Goodwin is no man of the people, Hannah may appear to be one (woman, if that doesn't offend her Genderwang ways) as a plumber, however her support of Polanski's Modern Monetary Theory would bankrupt this country quicker than a Scargill/Hatton one from the 80s.
The last thing anyone needs, least of all the put upon working class, is Hannah and the Greens.

Of course, Sir Keir Starmer KCB KC has a pension so enormous that it's got its own special piece of legislation to protect it, thanks to all his work on behalf of the Blairite administrative state.

If Reform put up a candidate who was a manual worker, what would happen? Lee Anderson was a miner, and just listen to how he gets mocked by Labour's gap yah MPs.

It's based on the idea that politics on the right is by definition a grift, and politics on the left is by definition a righteous moral crusade. I'm afraid I'm unable to see left wing politics that way. I've got just too much up-close experience with left wing activists pilfering the funds, covering up rapes in their groups, indulging in antisemitic conspiracy theorising etc etc.

People who have a Red Team jersey often forget that it doesn't come with a complimentary halo.

The left display their virtuous hypocrisy everyday.
Where are the infinity London demos outside the Iranian embassy?
Gaza PLUS Iran too much for one lifetime?
Where are the unions supporting Nurses Peggie, Mellie and the Darlington crew?
And that's just with the mainstream Labour left. Less said about the ultras of YP and the batshit crazies of the Greens.

Just read in The Critic that the British state is bending over backwards to the let the Isis Brides and associated low lives back into the UK.
Each and every one will be a clear and present danger.
And that Zia Yousuf of Reform is vowing that a Farage led govt will deal with this and pass laws to make every civil servant responsible for signing off on these psychopaths liable in law for worst case outcomes.
As we get closer to the GE, stuff like this will become more and more important in the political argument for which way we go as a country.
And Reform will offer a very stark choice about whether the state is allowed to continue to suffocate and culturally crush us, or instead becomes a servant of the British people.

Lord knows the Blue Team has its own pathologies, but it seems to have a more realistic view of human nature. It's much less prone to the Red Team's view that being on the right team makes you a better person.

I do see demos supporting the oppressed people of Iran, often near Parliament or opposite Downing Street, sometimes at the Iranian embassy. I've never seen any left wing politicos anywhere near them. Nor many on the right to be fair, though Farage has spoken at one or two. Overwhelmingly they're just Persian exiles.

Labour MPs opposing the ayatollahs should be pretty low risk, just as Labour MPs saying "I don't like Tommy Robinson, but the SWP is rapey as fuck and I won't endorse any 'anti-fascist' rally that they organise" should be low risk. For some reason, Labour MPs, or union officials, or even lefties on FWR, are remarkably reluctant to say either low-risk thing.

With the grooming gangs issue, I think it says an awful lot about the way Labour politicians even now see the grooming gangs survivors that they thought they could control them, control their voices, control the process and that these women wouldn't be intelligent or brave enough to speak up for themselves and other victims and demand true accountability and justice.

Of course I'm aware of demos from Iranians themselves, but cannot match the last 2 years plus.
Everything is a badge of honour with the left. Even the cult of trans. You can see in the words even of true believers like Chakrabarti that they're aware of the inconsistency and illogicality of this belief, but fealty to it burnishes the badge of honour (or is that lanyard of virtue?).
What used to be hugely predictable left v right positions on economics grounds, with a side order of pro-CND and anti-Israel, in the pre-fall of Berlin Wall age, before the End Of History, that one could tack to genuinely and with a lot of internal consistency, is now a post-modern, post-liberal battle of ideas, where if you don't ascribe to trans or critical race theory or sing From The River To The Sea, you are a Literal Nazi.
The right are always blamed for the culture war.
When you realize it's actually the opposite, the culture war is a war to control the language, and it's the left who have become the shrill censors, then you see it's the left who will never stop until they've won that war.
Farage can in the meantime say, if you've been called a bigot by the left for simply wanting to return to the civ-nat attitudes and policies we mainly supported just three decades ago, we're the people to try and make a change, you're welcome here.

In the end while I suppose wc people might like to see themselves represented in politics, I suspect that what really matters is the policies, and whether they think they will be helpful or harmful to them.

No-one's voting Farage because he's some sort of guru that working class people are bamboozled by, or worship, or look up to. They're voting for him because he champions what they think is right for the country (and by extension, themselves).
After the crash and burn of Johnson, where he craftily tailored his cheeky chappy politics outsider schtick to get people to ally to, no-one will ever be fooled again by a larger than life politician.
Now it's all about the policies, direction of travel, philosophical rigor.
Farage and Reform are purely transactional. He has best vocalized what a growing number of people have been moving to support for a couple of decades, and voters will support him if they genuinely think he'll be serious in power in addressing their concerns.
Reform voters are not swept up by Farage. The opposite, they're extremely sober about the Reform offer, and will lend support on totally rational grounds.
And continued pillorying by Starmer, Polanski, the left establishment, will only strengthen that.

Farage is extremely clever at how he has, at least, curated an image that will appeal to wc voters with all those photo tops of him downing a pint at a pub.

Reform policies, however, are a mishmash crafted for voter appeal and mixes up regressive taxation with other policies designed to entice average voter’s support. If the wc vote for Reform, they’re turkey’s voting for Christmas IMO.

Most of Reform policies point to a libertarian state and already appeal to a financial elite with many financial opportunities to be found. Last summer’s manifesto included:

• Reduce corporation tax
• Reduce Government spending
• Abolish IR35 rules
• Scrap business rates for small and medium firms
• Raise VAT threshold
• Adopt French-style healthcare insurance system (so no longer free at the point of use)
• Withdraw jobseekers’ benefits after four months of unemployment
• Reducing welfare spending

Yes, there are many areas that are designed to appeal in how they speak to understandable voter concerns, but despite later abandoning plans for tax cuts, Farage would be an economic disaster. Embracing cryptocurrency is not the answer.

On Brexit itself, there has been a new estimate of the economic damage it has wrought re a new report by the National Bureau of Economic Research and it is even worse than previous estimates suggested. Yet, the man who did so much to bring about Brexit is lauded as our economic saviour? I do not get it.

You have a problem with scrapping business rates and raising the VAT threshold?
You don't want to stop the whole hospitality industry going under?
You don't want sole trader self employed not being wiped out?
Who do you think is paying for our expanding welfare system?

What do we want?

• increase corporation tax
• increase Government spending
• tighten IR35 rules
• increase business rates for small and medium firms
• lower VAT threshold
• allow everyone to get any healthcare they want for free, no gatekeeping
• increase jobseekers’ benefits after four months of unemployment
• increase welfare spending

When do we want it? NOW

Brilliant! Of course, Polanski thinks he can con young and naive voters by saying everything can be paid for from rinsing the rich. Maybe he can.

The left sometimes find it difficult to grasp that a large part of the working class dont want a big welfare state, they dont want to working for low wages and high taxes seeing their neighbours get lots of benefit for doing nothing, or seeing their neighbour not being able to find work. They want fair paid work and see improvements in their lives.

Saying they are turkeys voting for Christmas is saying that the working class want to be reliant on the state, or its inevitable that they will be reliant on the state. Its writing them off and patronising at the same time.

Rather than insult people for considering to give reform a try, Labour and Conservatives need to understand how they have failed the country, what is appealing about reform, and try winning people back. But to do that, they have to understand those people.

Every time I listen to Laila Cunningham, she comes across as intelligent, informed and passionate about everything. She is absolutely brilliant and if she was standing for MP in my constituency, I would vote for her.

I will say, Reform dont seem to be doing much to attract younger voters. Maybe they dont think they are going to vote?

The problem political parties have is that they need to have policy that work for everyone. My children might not bother voting, but my vote will be based on how my family will benefit and that does include by children.

I've got to say that trying to start a small business is stupidly complicated and expensive in this country at the moment. DH has the potential to start a company but it's so difficult with so few incentives to actually do it, we've more or less decided we can't be arsed - if we did it we'd have to move abroad first. He knows people who work in a similar field to him who are doing start ups in the US and it seems a million times easier.

I think most if not all parties have a problem attracting young people, at least as members and activists. Young people might be passionate about particular causes, but those who are really into party politics tend to be... a bit odd. If you meet Young Conservatives these days you get the impression the YCs mostly function as a club for socially awkward young people who find it hard to make friends. Which is not a bad thing in its own right, but I don't know where the next generation of talent is coming from.

One of my best contacts in Reform is a lad in his late 20s. He says his experience is that, if you join the party and you're under 50, everyone will offer to buy you a pint, and if you're not an obvious weirdo, they'll ask you if you want to be a candidate.

I think it's a problem for all parties. Probably more so for some parties than others, and probably much less for the Greens.

I think its a big part of why trans has been pushed by both conservatives and labour, they see LGBT as a cause that appeals to the young.

The greens seem to be made up of nothing but causes. Their weak spot is assuming the omnicause will hold together, as soon as a split does happen, the young might not compromise and stay voting green.

In the end, the Reform pitch will be a Thatcherite one on a smaller state and pro-business, a clever Blue Labour tilt, where stuff like two child benefit cap scrapped by Starmer will stay scrapped, but focussed only on British families, and a comprehensive approach to the border, all in tandem with rewiring the state.
This is going to appeal to people running their own companies/want to become self employed, his "alarm clock/play by the rules" Middle England contingent, and those that ID with the civ-nat ethos we had up until 30 years ago and the era of Blair instigated mass migration.
My fear is less the pitch, or genuine intent, it's the scale of the task.
I suspect way harder than Thatcher's mountain in the 80s.
And that so many voters see the opposite solution as the one to support.
Such that Hannah Spencer may win the Manchester by election, an area that would have laughed at the Greens a couple of decades ago.

"Trans" has not been pushed at all by the Conservatives, but it has been pushed by Labour, LibDems, Greens and SNP. The LibDems and Greens were totally in thrall to Aimee Challenor, Labour was the same about Lily Madigan. Look at the way Labour hounded Rosie Duffield, it was an absolute disgrace.

The Muslim group in Manchester have just officially come out for Hannah Spencer and the Greens.
You really can't make this shit up.

Товарищ, я не робот!!!! 🤖

This is a great article I read years ago that came across my TwiX feed again this week:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/david-frum-how-much-immigration-is-too-much/583252/

"Demagogues don’t rise by talking about irrelevant issues. Demagogues rise by talking about issues that matter to people, and that more conventional leaders appear unwilling or unable to address: unemployment in the 1930s, crime in the 1960s, mass immigration now. Voters get to decide what the country’s problems are. Political elites have to devise solutions to those problems. If difficult issues go unaddressed by responsible leaders, they will be exploited by irresponsible ones...

...Across the developed world, very high levels of immigration have coincided with widening class divisions, the discrediting of political and economic elites, and the rise of extremist politics. And immigration pressures will only intensify in the decades ahead, for reasons obscured by media coverage of immigrants as poor and desperate. That coverage isn’t entirely wrong. Many immigrants are poor and desperate, especially refugees fleeing war or famine. But immigration is accelerating so rapidly in the 21st century less because of pervading misery than because life on our planet is improving for so many people. It costs money to move—and more and more families can afford the investment to send a relative northward. “Every boat person I’ve met has been ambitious, urban, educated,” says Doug Saunders, a Canadian journalist who has reported extensively on global population movements. “They are very poor by European standards, but often comfortable by African and Middle Eastern ones."...

...Too little immigration, and you freeze your country out of the modern world. Too much, or the wrong kind, and you overstress your social-insurance system—and possibly upend your democracy. Choose well, and you build a stronger, richer country for both newcomers and the long-settled. Choose badly, and you aggravate inequality and inflame intergroup hostility. How we choose will shape the future that will in its turn shape us."

Edited: Missing paragraph