Will people actually listen to Farage?
The right wing bigoted leader of the Reform company seems to be bloody popular at the moment.
Why???? What he says is stupid.
He said replace the NHS with US insurance methods. We are supposed to love our NHS but he seems to get away with it. He has no real policies and doesn’t seem to be too bothered about his constituents. Please stop listening to him. He crumbled under pressure from any journalist who actually does their job properly. Tell him to shut up. The company (it is not a party yet) he is in charge of has 5 MPs. He cried like a baby when he lost his Coutts account. Don’t give him the oxygen of publicity. Tell him to shut up.
Why???? What he says is stupid.
He said replace the NHS with US insurance methods. We are supposed to love our NHS but he seems to get away with it. He has no real policies and doesn’t seem to be too bothered about his constituents. Please stop listening to him. He crumbled under pressure from any journalist who actually does their job properly. Tell him to shut up. The company (it is not a party yet) he is in charge of has 5 MPs. He cried like a baby when he lost his Coutts account. Don’t give him the oxygen of publicity. Tell him to shut up.
Comments
Your remarks on the brouhaha about his bank account are unfair: it became clear very quickly that Coutts, and the parent company, were pursuing a political agenda, breaking their own rules about qualifications for an account, and broke data protection law.
You say "Tell him to shut up": - tell who? A campaign of generalised personal attacks on Mr Farage only plays into his hands.
Which leaves us with the difficult task of countering each individual lie he spouts with truth. To somehow convince those inclined to support him that he's a liar and crook and not believe what he says. We also need to provide people with an alternative to his hatred. It's not an easy task, and impossible if we're seen as treating those who have been deceived by the likes of Farage and Trump as idiots, even very smart people can be victims of a con.
people have voted for the other leading parties and been shafted by them so they desperately want an alternative- which he bills himself as. Many of the people who voted for him had little idea of what his policies were for them and they get a shock when they find out - as you can see on this video on Bluesky which vox pops people in Clacton.
https://bsky.app/profile/implausibleblog.bsky.social/post/3lht4ewgidc23
Those who voted for him to be beastly to minorities often didn't realise that he's actually their enemy too and yes the leopards will eat their faces as well - not only those of the Black and the trans people and the 'uppity' women - and that far from being patriots, right-wing Putinists are traitors too who sell out their country.
Basically there is a significant chunk of us who get our wallets regularly inspected by right-wing billionaire owned and led media and social media. They sell people an idea of elites where anyone with an education who isn't a white supremacist, sexist or bigot is 'the elite' while the actual elite, who would like to eat their faces, are chummy men of the people because they talk like low- information racists and sexists and/or gamer or influencer edgelords. People mistake this for being on their side when actually it's a decoy duck that lures them into the trap where their faces will soon be leopard fodder.
The extreme rich didn't get that way by being charitable - they grudge every penny spent on public goods and services for less well off people that isnt going into their pockets. They see themselves as far more deserving than anyone else. Some people think they can have a form of solidarity with them through shared racism, misogyny and other prejudices. They often think ( because these ultimate selfish shysters wrap themselves in the flag and often brandish a bible when it suits) that there are shared values of patriotism and faith. But really there aren't. They will eat those faces as happily as any other face if there's money or advantage in it for them.
For the leadership, claims of faith and patriotism are only means to an end and the end is more money in billionaires' pockets and that money comes from us and they don't care if how they get it kills us or our family or immiserates us. Not filthy rich? Then tough! You didn't deserve that money like them the deserving elite! It's much better off in their pockets.
Well, hopefully...
As for Little Tommy Two-Names, Fascists get a martyr's halo in prison.
Comments 2-4 in ascending order.
If what you say if true, you don't need to worry about him.
I somehow doubt they discuss his health policy on GBNews.
The way to deal with Farage isn't to 'tell him to shut up' - who is going to do that, there isn't some kind of ombudsman out there who is going to intervene. And as has been said, trying to curb his rants would only play into his hands. 'Help! Help! I'm being repressed ... come and see the violence inherent in the system!'
The way to deal with him and those behind him is for everyone else to stick to their guns and come up with a credible alternative - and yes, I agree he gets far more air-time than he deserves.
The US right does appear to have ditched Farage in favour of Tommy Robinson whom they are portraying as a victim of the UK's apparently authoritarian lurch away from 'free speech.'
I don't hear them saying anything about the arrest or silencing of journalists in Orban's Hungary, for instance.
There is no magic wand. Cool heads required.
I could be wrong but I doubt Farage is on The Ship. He is taking a lot of space in other threads so I thought he deserved a rant of his own.
I understood that Farage is more than just the frontman for Reform, he is effectively the owner.
Yes there were some shenanigans with the Coutts account. He did however over react and sulked hard instead of just challenging.
He needs someone to stand up to him. Sensible ways have failed.
Let's go back one step here; the "Blue Labour renaissance" owes it's existence to the same mechanism used by Farage. It's entirely a creature of the press. It's a choice to follow-up a soft-soap piece in The Times on Dan Carden, with various gushing articles quoting Glasman.
Which isn't going to come from this - the Bluest of Blue Labour governments possible. Something largely predictable four years ago.
I don't know what the chances of either are.
Failing that, people need to find non-Labour alternatives to coalesce behind. I don't think Ed Davey cuts through though, so I'm not sure of the best way to approach that in England.
In Scotland, there have started to be moves to push anti- Reform campaigns
https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2025/02/09/how-to-respond-to-reform-uk/
But they can't rely on Scottish Labour whose leader Anas Sarwar has said he is 'open to' working with Reform.
Labour at the moment are useless in the struggle against Farage - we've four years to get our act together about what we're going to do about it.
Is there any indication their core support is working class rather than comprised of elderly lower middle class pub bores?
If Reform health policies were worthy of criticism I would expect the left wing guests on GB News to comment on it. I don't recall them doing so. The majority of those on GB News do not give clear support for Reform but they do not criticise it either.
I wish that were true, @Arethosemyfeet and also @chrisstiles's hand-waving and dismissal of The New Statesman's stance.
I keep meeting working class Reform supporters.
I'm sorry but that it is. You guys can deny it as much as you like but the raw reality is that the right is garnering working class support. It's happening. I'm watching it unfold in front of my eyes.
I'm not saying any of this to be anti-Labour or to support 'Blue Labour' whether it exists or is a media fiction as @chrisstiles blithely seems to believe.
No.
I'm issuing it as a warning.
They are cannibalising core traditional Labour territory. You may not like it, but that's what's happening.
The tragic irony is that the whole thing is certainly led by pub bores and establishment figures like Farage who puts on an act and pretends to be anti-establishment and an outlier.
I don't want to see people falling for it but falling for it they are.
Don't believe me?
Visit Stoke-on-Trent. Visit parts of the South Wales Valleys even.
Maybe you should try responding to the post I made rather than the one you wish I made.
They also found their support was not homogeneous and that one of the groups was people who were just disaffected with the other parties but who could be reached on issues like climate change and public ownership.
You can explore their research here
https://hopenothate.org.uk/stop-reform/
Eh? I just wish you'd take a look around you and see what's happening rather than pretending that it isn't.
You can go back several years to find me predicting that the chances were that this Labour government were going to be bereft of economic solutions, that they'd then pivot right on social issues, and as a result give strength to parties of the right (albeit on much reduced turn out).
So what exactly am I pretending isn't happening?
The 'Blue Labour renaissance' isn't real; people like Carden are opportunists who are trying to get ahead of the curve (you can tell he's a fucking opportunist because he joined the SCG during the previous era, and has now pivoted to soto vocco concerns on 'grooming gangs') and Glasman is a rent-a-quote. This is just the Labour Right, it's how they always intended to govern, they'd assumed a reversion to mean on growth once they were in charge (because the Blairites among them are convinced of their own brilliance) and haven't got it.
Welcome to the centrist government you wanted.
With whom Louise? We . don't . count.
That they have some working class supporters is not in question, it's who their core supporters are. Take a look at photos of supporters' meetings.
The demographic mix of those who vote Reform could be significantly different, and who of that group are "core support" for getting people elected? Studies, such as the Love not Hate survey @Louise linked to show that current voters are a mix - including working class and former Conservative voters (who we'd expect to have very little political common ground). Which of those voters are now in the camp of "core voters" who will vote Reform without direct appeal for those votes? Which groups do Reform need to direct their message at to keep them on board, and therefore could be targets of other parties to win those votes back? I don't know ... but I'm not going to rule out the working class people who vote Reform at the moment being within the core group.
I'm disappointed at you Louise. Very. Saddened. Over angry.
Videos of people who are fans of Reform (and Trump) finding out what it actually means for them (as in a previous post) are on YouTube. Are they actually changing many minds? We shall see.
I meant to mention in my OP when Farage found out that Boris was as invited to the main do for Trump’s inauguration and he wasn’t he was upset.
No. They're not. The only thing that will change many minds is fear. We may have to go to a government of national unity to get a European army on the frontier and in depth behind. By the time of the next general election when Russia has fully rearmed. That would exclude Reform for a start. Taiwan will have gone by then incidentally. The fear would include of appeasement being a crime.
Miaow!
No, to give credit where it's due, you did predict all this, @chrisstiles and that's not what I'm griping about.
What I am saying is that many Labourites seem to be in denial about the inroads Reform are making in territories that would once have been theirs.
I think non-voting is a bigger issue but not an unrelated one as that means that many of those who do vote will vote for whacky candidates such as Reform or the loopy end of the Independent spectrum.
The New Statesman isn't Gospel of course, and may well be peddling tired tropes about 'Blue Labour' - it doesn't necessarily approve, it's commenting, accurately or otherwise on what it sees as a trend.
But it isn't The Times, nor even The Grauniad but neither is it GB News.
The New Statesman - especially under Cowley - want Labour to be less like the Left, so are constantly looking for ideas on the right that they can recycle.
Insofar a Blue Labour government would look like anything in particular it would approximately the same as the current government, as McSweeney is very much onboard.
The journalists who are decrying the current state of politics were on the ground floor of the attempt by McSweeney to re-engineer the Labour Party in this image, as two recent books make very clear ("Taken As Red" and "Get In").
To the extent anything has changed since then; it's in the realisation by Streeting et al that they have a limited amount of time in which to make their mark in high(er/est) office.
If their definition of “former Conservative voter” is “voted for them in 2019” then those might not be incompatible definitions. Even Bolsover went Blue, for crying out loud!
I just suspect that there are far more floating voters than ever before and less party loyalty.
As I'm sure you're aware, sealioning is a form of online harassment that involves killing a discussion by an endless series of tangential minor comments, questions or requests for more evidence. The effect is similar to a denial of service attack, making any form of serious discussion impossible. Someone sealioning is being a jerk (in the Commandment 1 sense).
Your posting style is often similar to sealioning. You often post short, usually obscure, comments that are only loosely related to the post you've chosen to respond to. You also regularly fire off a series of posts in very quick succession, including this morning with 3 in 5 minutes, that don't indicate spending a lot of time reading and thinking about what others have posted. We remind you of Commandment 2 ("Engage brain before posting message – Read the words you’ve written before you post them. Once they’re out there, you can’t take them back."), we know you are able to post clearly well thought through responses to the posts of others, but far too often all we get are short and obscure posts that seem to do very little to further serious discussion. Threads where you post very frequently rapidly become very difficult to follow, and even harder to contribute to.
We're a long way from being convinced that the damage you do to serious discussion outweighs the benefits of the occasional insight that's clearly expressed and contributes a different perspective to discussions.
It's been just over a week since you were put back on a three strikes warning. Since then you have had a further warning about editing the content of quotes. And, now we've had a flood of posts on a narrow range of your pet topics that come across as a combination of sealioning, crusading and simply treating the views of others as something not worth you spending time reading and thinking about. That's issues with Commandments 1, 2 and 8.
As this is now the third time a Crew member has formally intervened in a little over a week, we're going to give you an extended shore-leave of 3 months. After that you're entitled to get in touch and try to convince us that you're worth having back on board.
Alan
Ship of Fools Admin
Anecdotally from my time involved in local politics I think this is the case.
For a start, Farage & Co are very quick to grab hold of Churchill as their hero - which is ironic since it was WSC who first mooted the idea of a European federation. Similarly, those who would have us leave Ukraine and "the Putin problem" in the too difficult tray are going to have to admit that this is a very unBritish way of looking at things.
Above all, Farage and his supporters at GBN must be told repeatedly that their admiration for the current POTUS is not only reckless but anti-British.
The good news is that maybe, just maybe, if a decent campaign is put together to counter Reform and Farage it will have the useful side effect of killing off the nonsense about the UK-USA special relationship - a fiction invented by Churchill to ingratiate himself and the country with Roosevelt and to which the US has only ever paid grudging lip-service.
Or in some cases improving the underlying material conditions that make them susceptible to the scapegoating rhetoric of the far right.
If things go on as they are at the moment, Labour will basically have two options when campaigning in 2029. They can either say "look how much better we've made your life, vote for us to keep that going" or "we've done fuck all for you in the last five years and there's no reason to think we'll do any more in the next five, but you should still vote for us because the alternative is a bunch of fascist shitheads". In my opinion, only one of those options is a vote-winner. Hell, only one of those options even deserves to be a vote-winner.
Strongly disagree!
I disagree with you even if I don't entirely agree with Marvin.
What does it say to the electorate if you essentially run on 'That other crew are terrible fascists and a threat to democracy ... but we refuse to make any changes to see them off, because ultimately we'll run to protect the current economic order' ?
If you demonstrate that you don't take the threat seriously by your actions, why should the electorate?
Some years ago the largest cause of car insurance fraud was so called 'slam-on scams', essentially a motorist would deliberately slam on their brakes causing drivers behind to crash into them. When considering cases of that kind it's usually wise to consider the degree of agency each party has in the moment.
It's a very cynical game that parties of the centre are playing throughout the developed world. Essentially they can govern for the extremely wealthy and do nothing about rising inequality and deteriorating services, safe in the knowledge that come election time they can rally the electorate with fears of the fascist opposition. That this also guarantees very lucrative post-political careers may perhaps explain their behaviour.
Of course the issue is that there's always a credibility gap; I felt things were likely to go south when Jan 6th didn't end with the perpetrators dangling (figuratively speaking). In the case of the UK people are going to ask; if Farage is a fascist why is he constantly asked onto the BBC ?
[As this is the forum for Christian unrest, if he's a fascist why is he a keynote speaker at a conference organised by the ministers of one charismatic movement and funded by someone with links to another ? ]
What is the low information voter to make of the fact that very few people in power actually treat him like a fascist ? Until it comes to an election where he might become PM, that is.
Right, and reasoning like this is very good if you want to tut at the electorate afterwards and wish you had a better electorate, but realistically the way to defeat fascism is with a popular program that gets people to turn out and vote.
Of course one of Starmer's first moves when he became leader was to make it harder for an insurgent candidate to ever win the leadership of the Labour Party.
Because someone working two or three jobs just to keep a roof above their heads and food on their table has more than enough spare time and energy to go out and start a new political party 🙄
Option one would be the best vote winner if the people thought it was true
Though, I would say that identifying the likes of Reform as fascist is of more use in getting supporters of other parties fired up to campaign against them than it is to actually convince those inclined to vote Reform to reconsider how they will vote. By far the best way to get people to change how they vote is convince them that your policies are the best for them, their community, their nation. Convincing them that they shouldn't vote for a different party is as likely to turn them into non-voters ... and failing to do so is likely to just strengthen their views in favour of the other party.