Voters deserting Labour and Tories for Reform, top pollster says
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/reform-farage-local-elections-john-curtice-b2738113.html
Posted by tylerthe-theatre
Voters deserting Labour and Tories for Reform, top pollster says
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/reform-farage-local-elections-john-curtice-b2738113.html
Posted by tylerthe-theatre
31 Comments
People are moving away from mainstream parties at an unprecedented level due to distrust.
Well yeah that was always going to happen with incompetent government. When you dont do what people want you to, they go to someone who says they will do what they want them to.
Time to start getting in them dinghies and going the other way…
Well the Great British public are fuckwits after all. Of course they are going to fall for populist bullshit.
most people who like reform really have no idea about who or what they are about
I do think at the end of the 5 years people will think they did a much better job than The Tories. They may scrape through but I don’t think they’ll get another landslide and there’s a chance they might lose.
You can’t say you’re angry with how the government is managing things when you vote for the same parties all the time. People say they’ll never Labour or Tories, Blair, Cameron, Boris, Rishi yet still vote for their parties.
It’s almost been a decade since the Brexit referendum. The great British electorate want another opportunity to express frustration with status quo by jumping at a poorly defined disruptive option.
Why wouldn’t they? Tories & Labour obviously don’t care about the people of the UK.
God, the media are so desperate to manifest this. It’s so depressingly obvious.
There’s a hell of a lot of misinformation on platforms like X. There have been since before the election. It’s nothing unique, stuff like accusing Labour of covering up grooming gangs (been public knowledge for a decade, not much of a cover up) and all sorts.
It’s not like I don’t understand some people turning, they’re angry over certain issues and think nothings being done. But I don’t see how voting for a single issue party that has released no plans on dealing with that single issue helps things.
What are Reform going to do, break international law resulting in all our trading partners putting sanctions on us and cripple the economy? That sounds exactly like something they’d do actually.
I don’t like Reform but placing the burden on the public’s intelligence and not the incompetence of the main parties is crazy.
The responsibility is on the governing parties and, to a lesser extent, dishonest influencers and Russian propaganda. But to say “an informed public would flock to the Tories and Labour” in 2025 is insane.
This isn’t about reform it’s about people being exceptionally unhappy about immigration and not seeing any genuine attempt to address it.
What I find hard to understand is how, even after 12 years of Tory governance, people still hold more resentment towards Labour. Keir Starmer is endlessly criticised, often for not being radical enough or for perceived failures that pale in comparison to the Tories’ record. Yet figures like Nigel Farage, who built his entire career on stoking division and exploiting public anger, are treated with reverence by the same people.
It’s even more baffling when you consider that Farage himself has repeatedly benefited from the very systems he claims to despise. As an MEP, he drew a hefty salary and allowances, often contributing little of substance and attending the bare minimum of sessions. As a MP he been Ignoring his constituency for American style politics. He played the role of the ‘outsider’ while happily pocketing the benefits of the political establishment he railed against.
People are quick to vilify ordinary individuals claiming welfare, branding them ‘scroungers’ or ‘lazy,’ yet when a privileged politician exploits public funds with minimal accountability, they look the other way. It reveals a deep, ingrained hypocrisy in the UK citizen: it’s not really about fairness or responsibility. it’s about who their tribal loyalties tell them to blame.
The level of cognitive dissonance is staggering. Many would rather cling to caricatures of Labour ‘ruining the country’ than confront the uncomfortable truth that those they cheer for have exploited them, misled them, and left them worse off. At this point i’m rly disheartened towards the UK population.
I’m honestly not that surprised voters are abandoning Labour. The party has spent decades abandoning its social democratic roots, turning instead towards a neoliberal vision where the market, not the state, is seen as the solution to every social problem. Mandelson’s return is just a reminder of how thoroughly Labour embraced this shift, helping to cement the post-Thatcher consensus in which privatisation and shareholder profits replaced public service and collective welfare. Politics was no longer about serving the public good, but about trusting the market to take care of everything. The state reimagined not as a provider, but as a broker.
Reform are no doubt worse, but the Labour right only have themselves to blame for their poor polling. They hold a huge majority and could easily pursue transformative policies if they chose to. They could, for example, build 300,000 council houses a year, just as previous Labour governments did in the 1960s and 70s. It would tackle the housing crisis, drive down rents and house prices, create thousands of jobs, and leave the state with valuable assets worth more than the cost of construction.
Instead, Reeves latest big idea is more banking deregulation:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/rachel-reeves-banking-regulations-growth-us-b2739154.html
Here’s an idea: stop lying to and repeatedly shafting the British populace with more cuts, stagnation and neoliberal bullshit, and maybe they won’t begin to turn to radical parties.
If you don’t understand why people are falling for reforms tactics, you are part of the issue we face.
Well I voted labour just to be stabbed in the back by the benefit changes. I don’t know who I want anymore
People get completely obsessed with Reform’s influence on here but it seems to be all about sectarian style politics across the board from now on in this country. Labour or Conservative pandering to either side doesn’t seem like it will be able to hold.
Whats wild is that we had a centre-right tory government then a right wing tory government and then people wanted something different and labour got in and now people want a right wing government again. Reform isnt going to deliver with what they want they’ll heavily get lobbied by their friends and keep allowing the huge amount of migration to happen, while at the same time Farage plans to ban abortion because hes now friends with the likes of heritage foundation and is quite fond of Putin. Not to mention the current manipulation from the media and social media which are all owned by like 5 billionaires who definitely do not have an agenda. Reform is going to completely bankrupt the country and make it genuinely hostile for everyone.
Unfortunately the country is fucked and theres no way out of it with our current political parties which are generally becoming more or less the same.
Good. The Uniparty has had more than enough chances. Time for something different.
Farage has literally one thing on his CV and that’s Brexit. Which was supposed to fix immigration, which is pretty much the only thing Reform is now standing on, and failed miserably.
Anyone that votes for Reform in the expectation that they fix anything is going to be disappointed. They are Russian funded grifters entirely in it for themselves.
Sure, move away from Labour and Tories. I wouldn’t blame anyone for that. But for fucks sake don’t drift towards another bunch of arse holes trying to sell the lie that immigrants are to blame for everything that’s wrong in the country.
There is one group of people to blame, however. If you really want to get angry at something. They own all the MSM, and are in the process of hoovering up all of the money.
They’re called billionaires. And they come into the country in yachts, not inflatables.
We’ve just seen a case study of a neoliberal establishment party being completely outflanked by a faux-populist right wing one in America and yet people still don’t seem to understand anything about how the public thinks.
These rightward swings are a function of a “democracy” where wealth is continually siphoned away from the public. The less well off people are the more susceptible they will become to xenophobic right wing rhetoric, the neoliberal consensus that we’ve had in this country for the last 50 odd years has inevitably pushed us towards this outcome.
I look forward to no one having any introspection about why this might have happened, and to instead just smugly hand wave it all as “oh they’re all just dumb/racist”
Once again, this is just a middle finger to the establishment. It’s not necessary that people agree with Reform. It’s more a scream towards Labour and the Tories to do better. The fact that the two parties are basically the same beast at this point. The public are yelling “wake up”. It’s now up to the establishment to finally listen and act, not just spout platitudes.
The two main parties have only themselves to blame for ignoring the electorate, no matter how distasteful their opinions about major issues such as immigration may be.
The electorate though must have collective amnesia. Despite the shit show that was Brexit they will still vote for a bunch of backward looking, no policy fuckwits. It will do them good if Reform do win some council seats or even control. They will be on a steep learning curve about the real world. The rest of us can expect a shed load of scandals and skeletons to make hay over.
Immigration is a major issue right now. Whoever convinces people they can fix it is going to win by a landslide
The data shows Labour are losing large proportions to Lib Dems and Greens, so I’m assuming this is a “*voters are deserting Labour and Tories, and Tory deserters are going to Reform – but we want you think Reform will win*” kind of headline, as our ever misleading news seems to go.
And then the article states Curtace saying “*highly uncertain*”, so yeah… Intentionally misleading, as usual. We need media reform now to stop this BS.
“We’ve tried right wing policies for decades and they aren’t working, so obviously we should go even more right wing”
-The British public
Remember people. Reddit is an echo chamber. If you followed Reddit just for news during the US election you would of thought Trump was going to be obliterated at the ballat box then blasted off into space.
Look how that turned out.
The left in the US called people stupid racist bigots and Trump got elected. Now the UK are calling people stupid racist bigots for even entertaining reform while the other two parties do precisely fuck all except continuing the destruction of the country. It doesn’t take a genius to see whats going to happen. Its just a matter of how big a majority it’ll be. If labour don’t make some difficult fucking decisions soon then reform will make some wild ones.
Good. Both have betrayed the British in so many ways. To hell with them both. Time for something new.