That our media landscape is complicit in the rise of Farage is beyond doubt. But to dismiss Reform's popularity as born only of this is mistaken. He pushes people's buttons - but let's be clear here, there has always been a skein of neo-fascism in the British/English make up. When you've been at the top of a worldwide empire whose colonial states you've run as authoritarian dictatorships for at least decades if not centuries there can't be any other outcome. Across all parts of society. That manifests now as Exceptionalism; "we're the special ones". So there are plenty of buttons to push.
If Labour, or any political opponents, are to actually fight Reform they must stop aping them where they live and attack them everywhere else. Even though their immigration policies are ridiculous and illegal, they're also economically naive and ignorant, weak on foreign policy (inevitable if you hate everyone else except America), NHS and public services and in local governance likely incompetent - it's an incompetence already apparently in their candidate vetting processes.
Populism is attractive to the politically disengaged. Which is now a very high proportion of the populace. Mostly because everything is now centralised. That's Labour's real job. To re-engage people by being moderately successful and above all delegating authority AWAY from Westminster to bring more and more of the population back into the political tent thus driving their understanding of just how dreadful Reform UK really are.
How would you know if the Greens disappointed their supporters? Speaking as one of them, they have not. What is disappointing is how much the media has concentrated on Reform - I am talking about prior to the local elections - and giving countless hours of airtime and vast wordcounts to Farage and his cronies. How much coverage do the Greens get in comparison? 1% as much, at best. So, its not that much of a surprise if Reform are polling so well given all the free publicity, and the ineptitude of the current government in giving them credibility by trying to move into their space. Labour keep affirming Reform's view of the world and plagiarising their policies. Surely even an idiot can see that this is only going to make Reform more popular and more plausible.
Why vote for Reform-lite when you can have Full-Strength Farage?
The Greens don't fit into the media frame of controversy, clicks and reactions. They take politics seriously as being about representing people, having principles, sticking to promises, listening to their supporters, and focusing on what they believe is best for the country amd the planet in the long term, while trying to ensure good outcomes in the here and now. In short, intelligent, compassionate, caring, open, responsible and genuine politics, as opposed to the manipulative, point-scoring, advantage seeking, funder pleasing, rentier favouring, say whatever we think people want to hear, blame game, punch downward, short termist approach of principle-free egotists like Farage, or shape-shifters like Starmer, who believe only in themselves and their sponsors, and will do or say whatever they feel is to their advantage. Although, TBH, Starmer doesn't even seem to believe in himself. He appears to only think what he thinks people want him to think at the time they are thinking it. A perpetually self cleaning tabula rasa.
Anti science? Curious when the Green MPs include a scientist, an engineer and a sustainable development PhD. And the fourth one worked in renewable energy technology. So probably more actual science knowledge proportionally than any other party.
As for the rest, gender and biological sex are highly complex in most species, including humans, so people can have the characteristics of one sex while having the genetic code of another depending on which genes are activated, whether they respond to certain hormones, their exact chromosomal makeup etc. Do some research and you'll find that its much more variable and complex than you imagine.
One sign of non-scientific thinking is to imagine everything fits neatly into simple categories, and that all questions have simple answers. The appeal of populists is that they offer simple solutions to complex problems - but these either fail, or require extreme coercion and violence.
Thanks for making my point for me. Good luck convincing anyone that sex is on a spectrum, and men can become women. And supporting puberty blockers for children.
As I say, anti science in the extreme.
The Scottish Greens tell you all you need to know about what the Greens in power would amount to.
“What happens if there are problems with the SRY gene” (The Sex Determining Region Y - found on the Y chromosome - and what needs to be there and working correctly to turn an embryo into a male)
The answer might just shatter your preconceptions.
Science isn’t about opinion or what you’d like to believe, it’s about evidence. Evidence based on research through observation, experimentation and analysis. Since you clearly haven’t done any actual research on the issue, try this little experiment.
Type this question (or similar, you can make up your own phrasing if you are capable) into an AI engine such as ChatGPT: “is gender in humans a simple case of XX or XY, or is it more complicated?”.
A shame Labour can't see the problem. Being elected to a landslide majority on 33% of the vote and then being so timid, just creates more Reform voters. Why are they persisting as pale imitation Tories?
Thanks Nick, interesting article and video. I gave you a (lengthy) hard time about PR in response to your last one, so won't repeat all of that here. I enjoy your journalism even when I have some criticisms of it!
I wouldn't count the Tories out just yet... There is still a tribal Tory vote that may not be large enough to put the Tories in power, or even prevent electoral disaster even greater than 2024... but their base is still substantial, even if it's not very active.
I'm conscious of the 'better the devil you know' argument re: the Tories and Reform and agree that the centre right needs somewhere to go - and better for it to go to a sensible centre right party than a chaotic, extremist, Putin-friendly one... However, if the Tories don't want to be that receptacle then I don't feel any sympathy for them and will wish them good riddance. I think it would be a service for politics to demonstrate that if a party is incompetent, extreme, contradictory and complacent enough that there eventually will be a price to pay - that no party has or should have a divine right to exist.
While I don't personally want the Lib Dems to become a Conservative Party under a different name, I do hope that we can continue to evolve and become a party that will mop up much of the moderate right vote.
Just to expand upon that last point, which I know has been covered by you in the past, as well as by David Gauke and probably others...
When it was doing well the Conservatives managed to be a party in which economic conservatives, social liberals, social conservatives and 'patriotic' supporters of state power all managed to rub along.
I don't want the Lib Dems to be or to become a party that abandons its left wing to appeal to moderate conservatives. I do want the Lib Dems to be the party that many of those who historically would have felt at home in the Conservative Party (despite not agreeing with all of their colleagues) will feel at home in, despite not agreeing with all of their new colleagues.
I'd like the Lib Dems to be a party that is broad tent and large enough to incorporate the moderate right and moderate left, than regularly commands 30%+ support in the country. I'm not predicting that will happen, but I don't think it's impossible.
Careful what you wish for. As mendacious, incompetent, greedy and corrupt as they are, they pale into insignificance when next to ReFUK, who are all of those on steroids. The funning thing is that ReFUK don't even try to thoroughly hide it or their obvious laziness. They just lie and lie and bullshit.
With ReFUK containing a lot of ex Tory councillors and activists, they are not in a sense so very different and yet in another sense they are. A hybrid of dodery old right wing Toryism and neofascism ( without the salutes and uniforms).
Neofascism is an attempt to keep a damaged economy going by violent and ruthless means while biasing the people they consider good sorts and against "the other". People will need to be able to run with the pack or fall and fail. In Farage's Fasch world, there is no room for the damaged and disadvantaged people. He has criticised council spend on the disabled or on benefits to people with mental health issues. The NHS will become insurance based, first government insurance to ease the opposition, then a sell off/privatisation.
Expect a Farragist world to ape America, with people vanishing off the street, expulsions out of the UK, camps, demos banned, civilians in barracks with cold showers, workfare ( "are there no workhouses" - there will be!) with ruthless business getting indentured cheap, cowed labour and Labour unions effectively banned. Then as the measures do not make the country prosperous, as they won't, the measures will get more extreme. Elections will be fiddled but possibly not by enough to prevent them to fail and the LibDems become increasingly the mainstream opponent, after Labour has become the sickly kid siding with bully Faragists ( "me too please")
I am not trying to get elected to anything. I see things how I see them and a lot of people agree. The left and centre votes in the UK always add up to more than on the right, with the exception being the GE of 2015
I know that's how you see it. You crystallise exactly how so many on the left see Reform and a Farage govt.
I'm thinking you'll be horrified when Reform get a landslide. Gen X women have doubled their support for Reform to 33%, and this is just the start. Zoomer males are very much on the right. People bang on about the Red Wall, but the Teal Wall will be the big news next GE.
Just like Gen X soccer moms and the very online right Zoomers helped Trump his famous victory, this could be easily replicated here.
People are angry as Hell about the Boriswave, asylum hotels (now morphing into Serco HMOs), the immiseration of Net Zero Now!, and a benefits system sprawling out of control.
Labour and the Tories have nothing to offer the public here, one party entrenched these, the other is accelerating them further.
live in Oxfordshire and the LibDems are still hoovering up most of the council seats and those into Vale of and Cotswolds to the west, plus most of the MPs and most of the rest to Labour. I can tell you right now that ReFUK are nowhere to be seen and there's plenty more like this. I recall UKIP then the Brexits were going to sweep the country and look where that got. The SDP with well known political stars were getting far higher polls and by elections and got nowhere in 1983. Labour have 4 years to improve the NHS and push up incomes a bit.
I'm not a Reform voter for lots of reasons, just replying to your take of the return of Oswald Mosely. Sounds like you don't really fear Reform in any way, the LDs will do just fine.
That our media landscape is complicit in the rise of Farage is beyond doubt. But to dismiss Reform's popularity as born only of this is mistaken. He pushes people's buttons - but let's be clear here, there has always been a skein of neo-fascism in the British/English make up. When you've been at the top of a worldwide empire whose colonial states you've run as authoritarian dictatorships for at least decades if not centuries there can't be any other outcome. Across all parts of society. That manifests now as Exceptionalism; "we're the special ones". So there are plenty of buttons to push.
If Labour, or any political opponents, are to actually fight Reform they must stop aping them where they live and attack them everywhere else. Even though their immigration policies are ridiculous and illegal, they're also economically naive and ignorant, weak on foreign policy (inevitable if you hate everyone else except America), NHS and public services and in local governance likely incompetent - it's an incompetence already apparently in their candidate vetting processes.
Populism is attractive to the politically disengaged. Which is now a very high proportion of the populace. Mostly because everything is now centralised. That's Labour's real job. To re-engage people by being moderately successful and above all delegating authority AWAY from Westminster to bring more and more of the population back into the political tent thus driving their understanding of just how dreadful Reform UK really are.
How would you know if the Greens disappointed their supporters? Speaking as one of them, they have not. What is disappointing is how much the media has concentrated on Reform - I am talking about prior to the local elections - and giving countless hours of airtime and vast wordcounts to Farage and his cronies. How much coverage do the Greens get in comparison? 1% as much, at best. So, its not that much of a surprise if Reform are polling so well given all the free publicity, and the ineptitude of the current government in giving them credibility by trying to move into their space. Labour keep affirming Reform's view of the world and plagiarising their policies. Surely even an idiot can see that this is only going to make Reform more popular and more plausible.
Why vote for Reform-lite when you can have Full-Strength Farage?
The Greens don't fit into the media frame of controversy, clicks and reactions. They take politics seriously as being about representing people, having principles, sticking to promises, listening to their supporters, and focusing on what they believe is best for the country amd the planet in the long term, while trying to ensure good outcomes in the here and now. In short, intelligent, compassionate, caring, open, responsible and genuine politics, as opposed to the manipulative, point-scoring, advantage seeking, funder pleasing, rentier favouring, say whatever we think people want to hear, blame game, punch downward, short termist approach of principle-free egotists like Farage, or shape-shifters like Starmer, who believe only in themselves and their sponsors, and will do or say whatever they feel is to their advantage. Although, TBH, Starmer doesn't even seem to believe in himself. He appears to only think what he thinks people want him to think at the time they are thinking it. A perpetually self cleaning tabula rasa.
We have only to look at the Scottish Greens, holding the balance of power with the SNP, to see what a UK-wide Green govt would be like.
The slavish devotion to anti science and anti woman radical gender ideology on its own should bar them from any position of influence in a UK govt.
Anti science? Curious when the Green MPs include a scientist, an engineer and a sustainable development PhD. And the fourth one worked in renewable energy technology. So probably more actual science knowledge proportionally than any other party.
As for the rest, gender and biological sex are highly complex in most species, including humans, so people can have the characteristics of one sex while having the genetic code of another depending on which genes are activated, whether they respond to certain hormones, their exact chromosomal makeup etc. Do some research and you'll find that its much more variable and complex than you imagine.
One sign of non-scientific thinking is to imagine everything fits neatly into simple categories, and that all questions have simple answers. The appeal of populists is that they offer simple solutions to complex problems - but these either fail, or require extreme coercion and violence.
Thanks for making my point for me. Good luck convincing anyone that sex is on a spectrum, and men can become women. And supporting puberty blockers for children.
As I say, anti science in the extreme.
The Scottish Greens tell you all you need to know about what the Greens in power would amount to.
Here’s another fun question to put to AI.
“What happens if there are problems with the SRY gene” (The Sex Determining Region Y - found on the Y chromosome - and what needs to be there and working correctly to turn an embryo into a male)
The answer might just shatter your preconceptions.
No, thank YOU for making my point.
Science isn’t about opinion or what you’d like to believe, it’s about evidence. Evidence based on research through observation, experimentation and analysis. Since you clearly haven’t done any actual research on the issue, try this little experiment.
Type this question (or similar, you can make up your own phrasing if you are capable) into an AI engine such as ChatGPT: “is gender in humans a simple case of XX or XY, or is it more complicated?”.
Enjoy.
A shame Labour can't see the problem. Being elected to a landslide majority on 33% of the vote and then being so timid, just creates more Reform voters. Why are they persisting as pale imitation Tories?
Thanks Nick, interesting article and video. I gave you a (lengthy) hard time about PR in response to your last one, so won't repeat all of that here. I enjoy your journalism even when I have some criticisms of it!
I wouldn't count the Tories out just yet... There is still a tribal Tory vote that may not be large enough to put the Tories in power, or even prevent electoral disaster even greater than 2024... but their base is still substantial, even if it's not very active.
I'm conscious of the 'better the devil you know' argument re: the Tories and Reform and agree that the centre right needs somewhere to go - and better for it to go to a sensible centre right party than a chaotic, extremist, Putin-friendly one... However, if the Tories don't want to be that receptacle then I don't feel any sympathy for them and will wish them good riddance. I think it would be a service for politics to demonstrate that if a party is incompetent, extreme, contradictory and complacent enough that there eventually will be a price to pay - that no party has or should have a divine right to exist.
While I don't personally want the Lib Dems to become a Conservative Party under a different name, I do hope that we can continue to evolve and become a party that will mop up much of the moderate right vote.
Just to expand upon that last point, which I know has been covered by you in the past, as well as by David Gauke and probably others...
When it was doing well the Conservatives managed to be a party in which economic conservatives, social liberals, social conservatives and 'patriotic' supporters of state power all managed to rub along.
I don't want the Lib Dems to be or to become a party that abandons its left wing to appeal to moderate conservatives. I do want the Lib Dems to be the party that many of those who historically would have felt at home in the Conservative Party (despite not agreeing with all of their colleagues) will feel at home in, despite not agreeing with all of their new colleagues.
I'd like the Lib Dems to be a party that is broad tent and large enough to incorporate the moderate right and moderate left, than regularly commands 30%+ support in the country. I'm not predicting that will happen, but I don't think it's impossible.
Careful what you wish for. As mendacious, incompetent, greedy and corrupt as they are, they pale into insignificance when next to ReFUK, who are all of those on steroids. The funning thing is that ReFUK don't even try to thoroughly hide it or their obvious laziness. They just lie and lie and bullshit.
With ReFUK containing a lot of ex Tory councillors and activists, they are not in a sense so very different and yet in another sense they are. A hybrid of dodery old right wing Toryism and neofascism ( without the salutes and uniforms).
Neofascism is an attempt to keep a damaged economy going by violent and ruthless means while biasing the people they consider good sorts and against "the other". People will need to be able to run with the pack or fall and fail. In Farage's Fasch world, there is no room for the damaged and disadvantaged people. He has criticised council spend on the disabled or on benefits to people with mental health issues. The NHS will become insurance based, first government insurance to ease the opposition, then a sell off/privatisation.
Expect a Farragist world to ape America, with people vanishing off the street, expulsions out of the UK, camps, demos banned, civilians in barracks with cold showers, workfare ( "are there no workhouses" - there will be!) with ruthless business getting indentured cheap, cowed labour and Labour unions effectively banned. Then as the measures do not make the country prosperous, as they won't, the measures will get more extreme. Elections will be fiddled but possibly not by enough to prevent them to fail and the LibDems become increasingly the mainstream opponent, after Labour has become the sickly kid siding with bully Faragists ( "me too please")
You sound as fanciful as those on the right you decry.
Your type of tirade worked for Harris and the Dems.
I am not trying to get elected to anything. I see things how I see them and a lot of people agree. The left and centre votes in the UK always add up to more than on the right, with the exception being the GE of 2015
I know that's how you see it. You crystallise exactly how so many on the left see Reform and a Farage govt.
I'm thinking you'll be horrified when Reform get a landslide. Gen X women have doubled their support for Reform to 33%, and this is just the start. Zoomer males are very much on the right. People bang on about the Red Wall, but the Teal Wall will be the big news next GE.
Just like Gen X soccer moms and the very online right Zoomers helped Trump his famous victory, this could be easily replicated here.
People are angry as Hell about the Boriswave, asylum hotels (now morphing into Serco HMOs), the immiseration of Net Zero Now!, and a benefits system sprawling out of control.
Labour and the Tories have nothing to offer the public here, one party entrenched these, the other is accelerating them further.
live in Oxfordshire and the LibDems are still hoovering up most of the council seats and those into Vale of and Cotswolds to the west, plus most of the MPs and most of the rest to Labour. I can tell you right now that ReFUK are nowhere to be seen and there's plenty more like this. I recall UKIP then the Brexits were going to sweep the country and look where that got. The SDP with well known political stars were getting far higher polls and by elections and got nowhere in 1983. Labour have 4 years to improve the NHS and push up incomes a bit.
I'm not a Reform voter for lots of reasons, just replying to your take of the return of Oswald Mosely. Sounds like you don't really fear Reform in any way, the LDs will do just fine.
Maybe you're right.