Killer Lettuce🌹 !HonkUK.BIE joined in and replied with this 3 weeks ago, 41 minutes later, 3 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,433,897
Well, overwhelmingly good news for Reform.
I've basically accepted it'll be a Reform government next. It's going to be bad, it's going to be awful, but it's just another bleak period to survive through.
Meta joined in and replied with this 3 weeks ago, 11 hours later, 20 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,434,046
@1,433,897 (Killer Lettuce🌹 !HonkUK.BIE)
Genuinely curious: how did Farage and UKIP go from being a complete joke party having literally like one MP to having a serious chance of occupying Number Ten?
Thunder Balls !saAqdaazn2 (OP) replied with this 3 weeks ago, 2 hours later, 22 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,434,060
@previous (Meta)
People are sick of the old two party system and the huge Islamic immigration that past governments say they'll do something about then dp nothing.
A lot of those people are like screws, and the previous leaders were hammers. No matter how hard you hammer a screw, it's not going to work properly. Take a screwdriver to it, and see the difference.
Killer Lettuce🌹 !HonkUK.BIE replied with this 3 weeks ago, 12 hours later, 1 day after the original post[^][v]#1,434,208
@1,434,046 (Meta)
I'm not really informed or smart enough to give a full answer, but I'll give it a go. I'll try to be neutral.
Basically, after the UK joined the predecessor of the EU in 1973, there was always a lot of simmering Euroscepticism here, a lot of people never quite accepted it. So there was always room for an anti-EU party. And of course, there was always scepticism against immigration levels.
The British National Party started to gain momentum thanks to their anti-EU and anti-immigration positions. They peaked in 2008 to 2009, getting big surges in local elections and European Parliament elections. Unfortunately for them, the BNP were basically neo-Nazis, being openly racist, and would never really lose a certain social stigma around voting for them.
UKIP first came to prominence after this point, in my opinion because they were far more palatable than the BNP. Sure they wanted tighter border control, but there were no weird hang-ups about black people no problematic history involving street thugs.
So, Farage and UKIP surge by stoking anti-EU sentiment, they crush the EU Parliament elections and have the Conservatives spooked. So David Cameron does his Brexit referendum gamble in 2016, and it fails and blows up in his face.
I'll skip over a bit here, but basically UKIP rebrands into some other parties, but ultimately step aside to let the Conservative Party govern for a bit.
The Conservatives were not very good and, crucially, immigrantion continued. In many cases, without such easy access to EU workers, some UK jobs have to look further afield, so immigrants continue to come in anyway.
This brings us to the present, where Reform, the latest incarnation of UKIP, has won because Labour and the Conservatives currently have weak leaders who don't connect with people, but also because anti-immigration sentiment is higher than ever and they are hard anti-immigration.
So, yeah, they've basically been very consistently anti-immigration, and have been handed good situations where their rivals are weak and large amount of voters want somebody like them. It's not too dissimilar to your Donald Trump, really, he tapped into sentiments that were already there. UKIP were never a joke, really. Despite their poor showing in numbers of MPs, they've always grabbed a large share of the vote and have kept themselves relevant enough to be ready when Labour and the Conservatives failed.
Also, as an aside, Nigel Farage is just a very charismatic leader who's good at connecting with certain types of voters. I personally do not like him, but on an intellectual level I can see that he's very popular and has a certain charisma.
Meta replied with this 3 weeks ago, 3 hours later, 1 day after the original post[^][v]#1,434,242
@1,434,208 (Killer Lettuce🌹 !HonkUK.BIE)
From my POV the UK is just not European. I know it's allegedly on the same continent but the Channel cuts it off and makes it geographically and culturally distinct. I think the EU should have been limited to a common market/free trade of goods thing (definitely not Schengen or a single currency). To my American nationalist eyes trying to make a United States of Europe by welding together a couple dozen economically, ethnically, and linguistically disparate countries seems like a fool's errand which will just generate tension and strife. This also would have tempered Euroscepticism because there wouldn't be much of an EU to be skeptical of. Further integration with the EU doesn't seem like something I would support if I were a Briton.
The other thing (and this is worldwide, not just EU/UK/US) is the democratic deficit on immigration. It's far more unpopular among the electorate than the elite. I think if immigration had been much better controlled the past twenty or thirty years, you would not see the rise of figures like Trump and Farage who are both extremely flawed extremist candidates who would never have made it past the gate twenty years ago. Anecodotally, after Trump pissed off the Canadians I started reading r/canada to get their take on things. In between the Trump/America hate posts (they've always hated and looked down on us but now they're open about it which is progress), I've seen a LOT of statements on immigration and immigrants that, ten years prior, you would have only seen on the alt-right corner of the web. It's like there's a certain threshold where people start getting upset about it, and I think it's been crossed in a lot of Western countries.
> The British National Party started to gain momentum thanks to their anti-EU and anti-immigration positions. They peaked in 2008 to 2009, getting big surges in local elections and European Parliament elections. Unfortunately for them, the BNP were basically neo-Nazis, being openly racist, and would never really lose a certain social stigma around voting for them.
See if there was a more acceptable, non-neo-Nazi party that was also firm on immigration it would have smothered them. They wouldn't have anything to run on besides neo-Nazism, which is fringe and has polled in the low single digits the last eighty years.
> UKIP first came to prominence after this point, in my opinion because they were far more palatable than the BNP. Sure they wanted tighter border control, but there were no weird hang-ups about black people no problematic history involving street thugs.
> So, Farage and UKIP surge by stoking anti-EU sentiment, they crush the EU Parliament elections and have the Conservatives spooked. So David Cameron does his Brexit referendum gamble in 2016, and it fails and blows up in his face.
> I'll skip over a bit here, but basically UKIP rebrands into some other parties, but ultimately step aside to let the Conservative Party govern for a bit.
> The Conservatives were not very good and, crucially, immigrantion continued. In many cases, without such easy access to EU workers, some UK jobs have to look further afield, so immigrants continue to come in anyway.
Why did UK jobs have to look further afield? Is there no one in the UK who will do these jobs? How were these jobs done before large-scale immigration/outsourcing? In my view, it's more about using immigration to reduce wages and not that no one in the UK can do these jobs.
> This brings us to the present, where Reform, the latest incarnation of UKIP, has won because Labour and the Conservatives currently have weak leaders who don't connect with people, but also because anti-immigration sentiment is higher than ever and they are hard anti-immigration.
Why wont either Labour or the Conservatives stop the immigration? It's just opening the door wide for someone like Farage.
> So, yeah, they've basically been very consistently anti-immigration, and have been handed good situations where their rivals are weak and large amount of voters want somebody like them. It's not too dissimilar to your Donald Trump, really, he tapped into sentiments that were already there. UKIP were never a joke, really. Despite their poor showing in numbers of MPs, they've always grabbed a large share of the vote and have kept themselves relevant enough to be ready when Labour and the Conservatives failed.
It's just nuts to me that neither Labour nor the Tories will take immigration seriously when it's fueling Reform. Do you want Oswald Mosley? Because this is how you get Oswald Mosley. Why wont they? It can be done - just look at Mette Frederiksen in Denmark. She's very nice, definitely not a Nazi, but she is very strict on immigration and people like that and vote for her and her party.
> Also, as an aside, Nigel Farage is just a very charismatic leader who's good at connecting with certain types of voters. I personally do not like him, but on an intellectual level I can see that he's very popular and has a certain charisma.
Trump also has a lot of charisma. What I wonder is, why are there no really skilled competent politicians with any charisma? Bill Clinton was the last one in this country.