The General Politics Thread v2.0 (AKA the "Labour are Cunts" thread)

[SuperBacon]

9 minutes ago, Tim Healys Chutney Spoon said:

Lawrence Fox cant even reclaim his deposit let alone the UK!

[JNLister]

Shocking news as it turns out Reform UK are a bit dodgy:
 

 

tl;dw: They got some  foreign donors to pay for and commission opinion polls, deliberate hiding both the fact that they got funding from abroad and that the polls were being done on Reform's behalf, both of which legally have to be declared. Reform's head of policy told the donors they need foreign money because nobody in the UK will donate to them, that they would cover it all up, and they'd get away with it because the Electoral Commission was useless. He suggested the donors give them more money, with one of the foreign donors routing it through their British son to make it look legit.  Farage is on film saying how great the polls were and it was well worth the money. They didn't know the "donors" were actually undercover reporters.

 

(edit/corrections: it's actually flat out illegal to take donations from outside the UK.)

Edited September 3 by JNLister

[deathrey]

And yet very few of their voters will give a shit

[Carbomb]

Yeh. Those cunts are Teflon at the moment - until I see out-and-out proof otherwise, I'm just going to assume nothing will happen, and their army of thralls will continue not only to vote for them, but defend them too.

[westlondonmist]

While he will still have his defenders I think at this point he's basically reached the largest vote share he can get. If you haven't voted for Reform already, you probably won't now. That's the plus I'm trying to get from this. 

[JNLister]

In the past year, during which the various funding scandals have come to light, Reform have dropped in the polls from 30%/10 point lead/on course for majority to 23%/level with Labour/on course for about 100-150 seats.

There's probably about 15% of the country who will always go for a right wing populist/"anti-establishment"/anti-immigration/anti-Europe party associated with Farage, but it's the next 10-15% of people who make the difference between them getting a handful of seats and them running the country. 

[BomberPat]

As well as being lower in the polls, Reform's success at the last local elections was, in terms of percentage share, Michael Foot numbers. The problem was one of upward trajectory rather than the actual numbers, and my feeling is that it's their high watermark. Scandals like this won't make a dent in the people who still see Farage as a good egg who the establishment is out to get, but it will chip away at his broader support, and I think crucially it will make the right-wing press less inclined to get fully behind him - I've long felt that, come an actual general election, most of the right-wing 'papers will revert to form and try and rally behind the Tories again because even at their current nadir they are a safer bet than Reform. 

Throw in what I assume will be an uptick in Labour support under Burnham compared to Starmer, the number of far-right supporters who likely won't vote in the first place or will split from Reform to Restore or something worse, more people having to face up to how useless the Reform politicians they've elected have actually been in office, and (presumably) a fair few more rounds of scandal between now and the next election, and I honestly don't think Reform will be a significant threat to the status quo by election time. I'm certainly not in the pessimistic mood a lot of people I know are of assuming Farage is essentially the anointed next PM already; though the ideal is that the electoral commission actually do their job and seriously sanction him and Reform, because if there's any possibility of getting him out of the picture then I don't think Reform stand a chance. They're nothing without him.

[lanky316]

16 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

 I think crucially it will make the right-wing press less inclined to get fully behind him - I've long felt that, come an actual general election, most of the right-wing 'papers will revert to form and try and rally behind the Tories again because even at their current nadir they are a safer bet than Reform. 

Elements of this are starting to show already, my bored scrolling through the bottom half of the internet at work has seen a lot more responses about "raging leftie rags trying to destroy Reform"... In articles from the Mail and Telegraph. A lot of people from the right or left of the spectrum have long had issues with Farage for pretty understandable reasons. The way he's getting himself involved in scandals constantly there's no way he can keep getting through them all and that it's better to revert to supporting "Kemi and her all new Conservative party".

[Jazzy G]

13 hours ago, deathrey said:

And yet very few of their voters will give a shit

They'll still assume it's a stitch up by "the establishment" because they're running scared of the party of merchant bankers, crypto billionaires and tax avoiders. 

[Chest Rockwell]

28 minutes ago, lanky316 said:

Elements of this are starting to show already, my bored scrolling through the bottom half of the internet at work has seen a lot more responses about "raging leftie rags trying to destroy Reform"... In articles from the Mail and Telegraph. A lot of people from the right or left of the spectrum have long had issues with Farage for pretty understandable reasons. The way he's getting himself involved in scandals constantly there's no way he can keep getting through them all and that it's better to revert to supporting "Kemi and her all new Conservative party".

Yep and as ever the damage will be the fact that Kemi's Tories become the new normal, because they're fucking mental even compared to Boris and his cronies. 

[Carbomb]

What gives me cause for pessimism isn't just the fact they keep getting away with it, though. It's the broader picture of the rise of the far right across the world, which isn't a static situation. We all know why: there has been a concerted, orchestrated organisation of various countries disparate extreme right elements, people who were historically ignored as the cranks and loons they are, and funding them to increase their reach to ordinary, undecided people, particularly those of the working class, whose anger and resentment they can exploit, monetise, and weaponise. It's long past cliché to say it, but these sinister interests all have become past masters at optimising their approach of tapping into the negative feeling, offering victimhood and solution in one go, and solidifying the closing of ranks through those old injuries and the new ones that come from being rejected in wider society. Basically, a cult.

Like I say, where I'm sceptical is that, as I say, it's not a static situation. The likes of the Heritage Foundation, Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, the remaining Koch brothers, Adelson, Bannon, Farage, and all those other abject cunts are sneaky as fuck, and they're not simply going to sit still. They're going to pivot and manipulate every bit of influence they have with the media, the political establishment, the commercial world, and every other entrenched interest that stands to benefit from blunting any ire against their projects.

I'd like to believe that these conniving pieces of shit have finally come to the end of their political rope, and that there will finally be a backlash against them pushing the system too far beyond breaking, but I've seen very little evidence that will happen. The opposition to them has been weak, both in terms of counter-measures to the propaganda, and in terms of institutional mechanisms - whether it's because the respective governments of the UK and the US didn't know what to do to deal with such a coalesced and organised assault on their countries' political spheres, or did but simply didn't want to do it because of their historic, paranoiac terror of enabling the left, the material impact is that it's created large sections of the population in these societies that have become solid power-bases for these bastards, and will take years to whittle down, if it ever happens at all.

[BomberPat]

oh for sure, I'm not optimistic about any chance of the far-right in general being taken down a peg, I just don't think Reform will win the next general election. In many ways, with how mainstreamed the politics of the far-right have become both here and globally, they won't have to.

[RedTwoster]

If this was Labour, this would be leading the tabloids - and therefore the broadcast news which still has a tendency to follow suit - for weeks. What's so frustrating about this is that almost every national paper has avoided reporting on it in any significant way, if at all. They're going to ignore it, and that in itself might make it disappear. I hope broadcasters do their job here and give it the kind of airing it really should have, but I'm not optimistic. It feels almost impossible to hold these people to account for anything, even brazen corruption.

[westlondonmist]

1 hour ago, RedTwoster said:

If this was Labour, this would be leading the tabloids - and therefore the broadcast news which still has a tendency to follow suit - for weeks. What's so frustrating about this is that almost every national paper has avoided reporting on it in any significant way, if at all. They're going to ignore it, and that in itself might make it disappear. I hope broadcasters do their job here and give it the kind of airing it really should have, but I'm not optimistic. It feels almost impossible to hold these people to account for anything, even brazen corruption.

The tabloids don't want to upset a large amount of their readership. I think at this point you're kind of reliant on the TV channels as the papers that do cover it, probably don't have much sway with the Reform target audience. 

Edited September 4 by westlondonmist

[RedTwoster]

4 hours ago, westlondonmist said:

The tabloids don't want to upset a large amount of their readership. I think at this point you're kind of reliant on the TV channels as the papers that do cover it, probably don't have much sway with the Reform target audience. 

In this case, it’s more likely because the Murdoch stable is directly implicated through The Times. The Telegraph is too. If they weren’t part of the story, I suspect they’d go bigger on it. I’m not sure they’re quite as enamoured with Farage as they were, and would quite happily switch to Badenoch’s band of idiots.