Reform UK discussion

[Krokodil]

It's very wrong to say that 30% would make a majority unlikely in the current climate.

It is unlikely. Not impossible, but still unlikely.

There was one very big change that had little to do with Poilievre.
It had much more to do with Trudeau stepping down and with the Trump vs. Canada climate at the time.

Being a Maple MAGA was very relevant to that.

 

[Bald Rick]

We need for instance to be training our own builders, sparkies and plumbers on German style apprenticeship schemes, not importing them. That sort of job gives a proper future to those who don't work well in office type roles - and young people in dead end low-wage jobs are a big societal problem that this could help solve. A good way to start this would be vocational sixth forms where the output is a qualification in a trade - we sort of have them in the form of colleges of further education but I would like to see more proper structure behind them.

I agree entirely…. but …. in my experience there aren‘t enough young people who want to do ’trade’ jobs. Whether that is because they are perceived as being hard work, or manual, or working outdoors, or whatever, it just seems that people aren’t willing to do it despite the relatively high rewards.

Anecdote being the worst form of evidence, but I have a young relative, with a first class degree, who has been working in an M&S cafe since he left uni (4 years ago!) - I’ve suggested he retrain as a plumber or Spark where he could easily double his money within a year or so, and he’s just not interested. He has friends in similar positions.

 

[Krokodil]

I agree entirely…. but …. in my experience there aren‘t enough young people who want to do ’trade’ jobs. Whether that is because they are perceived as being hard work, or manual, or working outdoors, or whatever, it just seems that people aren’t willing to do it despite the relatively high rewards.

Anecdote being the worst form of evidence, but I have a young relative, with a first class degree, who has been working in an M&S cafe since he left uni (4 years ago!) - I’ve suggested he retrain as a plumber or Spark where he could easily double his money within a year or so, and he’s just not interested. He has friends in similar positions.

Could that be down to class prejudice? Not just by him, but fed in by teachers. At my school, those who stayed on after 16 were pretty much told that the path (the only path) to a good career was via university. Which turned out not to be a good idea in my case, and we were the first cohort to be stung with £9k fees. At no point was there any real encouragement (even before we were 16) towards trades or apprenticeships, and the one person who (through his own initiative) went to Rolls-Royce at 16 ended up buying a house far younger than we did, and getting a degree (and possibly more) with no student debt at all.

Now I'm a guard on the railway and comfortably out-earning my former teachers.

 

[AlterEgo]

The history of how the National Socialists came to power in Germany in 1932 has lessons here (and I am not saying that people who vote Reform are Nazis). The clue is in the name. They managed to persuade 32% of the electorate that they were both ultra-nationalist and socialist, so they attracted votes from both far right and middle left, reinforced by people who blamed the democratic arrangement and the chosen racial scapegoats for everything from losing WWI to the price of bread.

No - the Nazis performed well in 1932 (and got 37% of the vote, not 32%) thanks to significant external factors. The Depression, political collapse of the government, and the visible weakening of the Weimar Republic as a functioning state did far more for them than any of their policies. In fact, the Nazis did not even have a political manifesto for this election, instead relying on a "mostly vibes" 25 Point Plan which by then was over a decade old. Almost none of it was new, and it was mostly derivative of other anti-semitic and nationalist programmes put forward by predecessor nationalists in Austria and Germany.

The Nazis were not, and did not really claim to be beyond lip service, socialists. Their anti-capitalist stance was chiefly anti-Semitic in origin - and quite overtly so - and they abandoned any semblance of socialism early on. "The clue is in the name" isn't a good argument, because few historians writing about the British government of 2025 would think the Labour Party was a party mostly representative of the interests of labour.

A few years before the 1932 election the Nazis had enlisted the help of wealthy industrial barons who were reeling from the Depression and wanted to cut back sharply on any socialism or any expansion of workers' interests. The Nazis learned lessons from the 1928 election where they performed badly; they decided to stop trying hard to appeal to the working classes and stopped nearly all socialist-themed messaging. The Nazis then appealed to many of the lower middle classes and workers in rural areas who were sceptical or fearful of communism. In industrialised areas, working class people in 1932 voted mostly for leftist or socialist parties, mostly because they saw them as better representative of their interests, but also because they would have witnessed the extreme political violence of the SA by this time, who ramped up their activities after the government collapsed in 1930.

A big part of the Nazis' electoral success in 1932 was in mobilising women, who tended to vote more conservatively, or not at all (the Centre party, a Catholic centre right party, were fearful of the Nazis and denounced them as pagans during this campaign!). They were an anti-establishment party; Hitler remained cynical about the Prussian middle classes until the end, and grew increasingly embittered during the war; most of the German military officer class were Prussian.

It isn't true that the Nazis stood on any sort of socialist platform at all in 1932. They did not take many votes from the middle left. The SDP's vote share only decreased by a couple of percentage points in 1932, and most of their lost votes likely went to the communists, who performed reasonably well.

Reform aren't anything like the Nazi Party and there is not a huge amount to learn from the Nazis, who flourished in a totally different political system which had undergone huge constitutional flux and then been hastily and ill-advisedly remade in the ashes of WWI. Fascism is an ideology which no longer exists in a meaningful way; it was born of early 20th Century industrialism and petered out as a political force in the second half of the century. We live in completely different times now; there is the potential for something to arrive which is as bad as fascism, but it will not actually be fascism, and it will not look like it either. There is something new and bad coming - but we just don't have a name for it yet.

 

[Krokodil]

The Depression

A depression largely caused by the US government of the day throwing protectionist tariffs around like confetti.

A few years before the 1932 election the Nazis had enlisted the help of wealthy industrial barons who were reeling from the Depression and wanted to cut back sharply on any socialism or any expansion of workers' interests.

This also sounds rather familiar.

 

[AlterEgo]

A depression largely caused by the US government of the day throwing protectionist tariffs around like confetti.

Well, quite.

This also sounds rather familiar.

They've been like this since the start - and before that, the Brexit Party (remember them? haha)

 

[Bald Rick]

Could that be down to class prejudice?

Definitely not in his case. I can’t speak for the many other examples though.

 

[Krokodil]

Definitely not in his case. I can’t speak for the many othe rexamlles though.

I wasn't even thinking concious prejudice, more the sort of thing where having no peers who did the same thing means that the path isn't something he's properly considered.

 

[JGurney]

Reform aren't anything like the Nazi Party and there is not a huge amount to learn from the Nazis, who flourished in a totally different political system which had undergone huge constitutional flux and then been hastily and ill-advisedly remade in the ashes of WWI. Fascism is an ideology which no longer exists in a meaningful way; it was born of early 20th Century industrialism and petered out as a political force in the second half of the century. We live in completely different times now;

I agree much has changed but there are some features of pre-WW2 fascism which, while never directly voiced by Reform, seem to be popular among some of their supporters. A key one is distrust of the rule of law and of ordinary processes of government (such as the committee system) and instead a preference for power being held by an individual with a lot of freedom to use it as they choose. This relates to a preference for taking about individuals rather than parties or policies e.g. those people who turn up at polling stations away from Clacton wanting to 'vote for Farage' or who focus upon personal abuse of Kier Starmer with no mention of Labour or any policies.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I agree much has changed but there are some features of pre-WW2 fascism which, while never directly voiced by Reform, seem to be popular among some of their supporters. A key one is distrust of the rule of law and of ordinary processes of government (such as the committee system) and instead a preference for power being held by an individual with a lot of freedom to use it as they choose. This relates to a preference for taking about individuals rather than parties or policies e.g. those people who turn up at polling stations away from Clacton wanting to 'vote for Farage' or who focus upon personal abuse of Kier Starmer with no mention of Labour or any policies.

Ironically that's supposed to be how voting for your MP works - you are voting for an individual to represent you, not a party. The parties weren't even on the ballot paper at all until the 90s.

 

[TravelDream]

It is unlikely. Not impossible, but still unlikely.

I put in to a GB universal swing calculator the following based on polls surveyed in September (the range of which I put in brackets).

Reform - 30 (27-34)
Labour - 22 (19-24)
Conservative - 18 (15-19)
Lib Den - 14 (12-15)
Green - 10 (8-12)
Other (SNP/Plaid etc.) - The remainder.

That would give a Reform Majority of 66 with a very split opposition plus likely several fairly safe votes from the NI parties.

I don't think that's unreasonable on what we are seeing in the polls right now. Likely, maybe not. But unlikely?


If you out the best Lab/Con/LibDem/Green number with the worst Reform number (27%), then you get a hung parliament with Reform 243/650 so short 43. That would be unworkable and would lead to a second 2029 election IMO.

Reform aren't anything like the Nazi Party and there is not a huge amount to learn from the Nazis, who flourished in a totally different political system which had undergone huge constitutional flux and then been hastily and ill-advisedly remade in the ashes of WWI. Fascism is an ideology which no longer exists in a meaningful way; it was born of early 20th Century industrialism and petered out as a political force in the second half of the century. We live in completely different times now; there is the potential for something to arrive which is as bad as fascism, but it will not actually be fascism, and it will not look like it either. There is something new and bad coming - but we just don't have a name for it yet.

You're right to say the conditions of Wiemar Germany and the rise of the Nazi party are vastly different and incomparable to the conditions any country in the West sees today. Comparisons to the rise of Reform are simply ludicrous and show some level of mad hysteria.

However, I am not sure on fascism not existing today or not being able to exist in 2025.
I suppose it really depends on how you define the term. If defined as Nazism or if one expects it to look just like that, then perhaps you are right.
But I think fascism, like most political ideologies, actually has a very broad meaning and that meaning might be different in 2025 than it was in the 30s and 40s.

It is also not unknown to apply terms to things which are not that thing.
China would be describe as communist by most. It is after all run by the Chinese Communist Party.
Whilst China is fairly authoritarian and totalitarian, it is actually pretty free market in economic terms and the middle class is still burgeoning. It's led by an all powerful leader. It's also very nationalist and has its scapegoat (the Uyghurs) It's not outside of the realms of possibility to argue it's closer to fascism than communism.

But I am pretty certain a hypothetical Reform 2029 government would not meet the definition of of 1930s fascism or hypothetical 2020s fascism.

I agree entirely…. but …. in my experience there aren‘t enough young people who want to do ’trade’ jobs. Whether that is because they are perceived as being hard work, or manual, or working outdoors, or whatever, it just seems that people aren’t willing to do it despite the relatively high rewards.

Could that be down to class prejudice? Not just by him, but fed in by teachers. At my school, those who stayed on after 16 were pretty much told that the path (the only path) to a good career was via university. Which turned out not to be a good idea in my case, and we were the first cohort to be stung with £9k fees. At no point was there any real encouragement (even before we were 16) towards trades or apprenticeships, and the one person who (through his own initiative) went to Rolls-Royce at 16 ended up buying a house far younger than we did, and getting a degree (and possibly more) with no student debt at all.

I think I had a very similar experience.
All of us who stayed at school post-16 were essentially funneled to university.
Leaving school and going to the local college was seen as somehow a failure and the goal was to go to university.
I say this as someone who went to a pretty rubbish comprehensive school in a (as I described above) depressed part of the country.

Was this in our best interests? In the majority of cases, I would say that it wasn't. I don't know how many students in my sixth form were also studying maths and English GCSEs alongside their A-Levels, but it was a fair few. There should have been far more emphasis on trades/ apprenticeships which would have been a lot better for some students - especially in the financial sense.

One of the failures of the Blair government. Yes, young people should have opportunities and university should be open to everyone who has the aptitude and it willing to put in the work. However, it is far from the holy grail of options post-18.

I ended up with a fairly useless humanities degree which is zero use in my job today. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I'd just gone to college and done an electrician's apprenticeship at 16 instead.

 

[DerekC]

Reform aren't anything like the Nazi Party and there is not a huge amount to learn from the Nazis, who flourished in a totally different political system which had undergone huge constitutional flux and then been hastily and ill-advisedly remade in the ashes of WWI. Fascism is an ideology which no longer exists in a meaningful way; it was born of early 20th Century industrialism and petered out as a political force in the second half of the century. We live in completely different times now; there is the potential for something to arrive which is as bad as fascism, but it will not actually be fascism, and it will not look like it either. There is something new and bad coming - but we just don't have a name for it yet.

With respect, I think you have missed the point I was making, which was not about the detailed background history or about whether you call it fascism or not (I didn't use the word), but about who Reform appeals to and what they will do. Farage is quite consciously courting both the extreme right and traditional Labour voters, and in the same way as the National Socialists did, he will dump any pretence of improving things for what used to be called the working classes when (or I hope if) he gets to power. The unwinding of democracy will be a lot more subtle than it was in Germany in 1932, when Hitler just smashed it through violence and intimidation, but the risk is very much there - you can see it more clearly in the USA.

You're right to say the conditions of Wiemar Germany and the rise of the Nazi party are vastly different and incomparable to the conditions any country in the West sees today. Comparisons to the rise of Reform are simply ludicrous and show some level of mad hysteria.

The conditions are different, but there are parallels which should be learned from - however it seems that it's politically unacceptable to draw them. I am not in the least bit hysterical - just depressed, particularly having just read Richard J Evans' "The Coming of the Third Reich".

 

[Purple Train]

It's the complete lack of any pushback against quite thinly-disguised racism that gets me. Someone I know has just posted a video on social media of himself at Tommy Ten-names's day-release outing. Said acquaintance is originally from Germany. I haven't yet reminded him that he is an immigrant... but of course this isn't about immigration in and of itself, is it?

And somehow, in government, we're blessed with the likes of the hapless McSweeney pulling the strings and letting this odious discourse call the tune. Where's Zohran Mamdani when you need him?

A week is a long enough time in politics that I'm not entirely concerned about Reform just yet. But, as I'm of the generation that will be picking up the pieces, I am starting to get more and more twitchy.

 

[Chuffing Heck]

Well, quite.


They've been like this since the start - and before that, the Brexit Party (remember them? haha)

No the state of the country goes back to Blair/brown they fast tracked printing money, the consequences we are now paying for, each government since has increased the budget deficit and sold off the family silver.

 

[AlterEgo]

No the state of the country goes back to Blair/brown they fast tracked printing money, the consequences we are now paying for, each government since has increased the budget deficit and sold off the family silver.

I wasn't talking about the state of the country there.

 

[KevinBrum12]

They also need to win across the country rather than being concentrated in a few strongholds such as the Midlands, the Red Wall, and the East. I can see the Conservatives retaining many rural seats and the Lib Dems retaining seats in the liberal South. There's no way Reform are going to win big cities and university towns.

Labour might collapse in the big cities but their place will be taken by the Greens, Lib Dems, or Left independents. Some "lucky" Labour wins in the London commuter belt might revert to Tory, given the likely professional and socially-liberal but perhaps economically-conservative electorate.

Sadly, I think Reform are going to do very well in Birmingham in the local elections next year, gaining enough seats to take control. The ongoing bin strike and the general uselessness of the Labour run Birmingham City Council will be factors. Traditionally Birmingham has voted in a more socially conservative direction when the Westminster Government has been a Labour one - in 2004 a Tory/Lib Dem coalition took control of the council; the Inner City wards going to Independents on an Irag/Kashmir ticket (yes even though Birmingham City Council has about as much influence in Baghdad as Baghdad City Council has in Birmingham), with the outer suburbs full of the estates like Weoley Castle, Acocks Green, Quinton and Erdington going to Conservative/Lib Dem candidates. The Birmingham Lib Dems at that time were more Conservative in some respect than the Tories and were well away from the soft left progressive image of the late Charlie Kennedy, more like Thatcherites! The result was that progressives voting Lib-Dem as a protest against the Blair Government...ended up with a Conservative Councillor with a yellow tie and rosette.

We should remember despite being a diverse city with a relatively young population with a lot of university graduates, Birmingham still voted by a majority for Brexit in 2016. This may well have been down to the younger generation in the city being lazy and not bothering to turn out and vote like their peers did in Liverpool, Belfast and London.

Taking the Midlands, East and the so called "Red Wall" in our rotten FTTP system, like Johnson did in 2019, is enough for a party to start planning for Government, or being the senior partner in a coalition. The DUP in Northern Ireland may also be a factor. If they have a good night in the next Westminster General Election they'll do a deal with Reform like they did with the Tories in 2017.

 

[brad465]

Reform aren't anything like the Nazi Party and there is not a huge amount to learn from the Nazis, who flourished in a totally different political system which had undergone huge constitutional flux and then been hastily and ill-advisedly remade in the ashes of WWI. Fascism is an ideology which no longer exists in a meaningful way; it was born of early 20th Century industrialism and petered out as a political force in the second half of the century. We live in completely different times now; there is the potential for something to arrive which is as bad as fascism, but it will not actually be fascism, and it will not look like it either. There is something new and bad coming - but we just don't have a name for it yet.

Another thing about Reform that's different, at least for now, is they are full of absolute idiots. Only around 3 or 4 members of the party (inc. Farage and Tice) know what they are doing. The rest are either infighting and getting kicked out (Lowe and McMurdock), and/or poor vetting is leading to several councillors standing down due to scandal/criminal behaviour that wasn't discovered beforehand. If they managed a majority at the next election, if they've not sorted these things out, the government collapse will make Liz Truss' premiership look like the Roaring Twenties.

No the state of the country goes back to Blair/brown they fast tracked printing money, the consequences we are now paying for, each government since has increased the budget deficit and sold off the family silver.

Money printing was not really a big thing before 2008, then every major economy did it during the banking crash as part of their drive to keep neoliberalism on life support. The money printing fast tracking was done under covid, which fanned the post-covid inflation and property bubble.

 

[KevinBrum12]

I think I had a very similar experience.
All of us who stayed at school post-16 were essentially funneled to university.
Leaving school and going to the local college was seen as somehow a failure and the goal was to go to university.
I say this as someone who went to a pretty rubbish comprehensive school in a (as I described above) depressed part of the country.

Was this in our best interests? In the majority of cases, I would say that it wasn't. I don't know how many students in my sixth form were also studying maths and English GCSEs alongside their A-Levels, but it was a fair few. There should have been far more emphasis on trades/ apprenticeships which would have been a lot better for some students - especially in the financial sense.

One of the failures of the Blair government. Yes, young people should have opportunities and university should be open to everyone who has the aptitude and it willing to put in the work. However, it is far from the holy grail of options post-18.

I ended up with a fairly useless humanities degree which is zero use in my job today. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I'd just gone to college and done an electrician's apprenticeship at 16 instead.

As someone who undertook their secondary education in the Major era, I'd say the failures started then. STEM education had been dumbed down at GCSE level. Computing is the obvious example - the curriculum was not based on programming a computer to do tasks or manage and interrogate data in the way you wanted it to; but on using word processors and spreadsheets based on Microsoft Windows. Plus you weren't taught about using disks to open the likes of Microsoft Word and Excel or save files; it was all done from the schools ethernet.

Blair and Brown could have shook up the secondary curriculum from the get-go, but did not. It did not help they appointed the most useless Education Secretary they could find in Estelle Morris (who even admitted when she resigned she wasn't up to the job) and focused on quantity (maximising the number of students who had GCSE's at Grade C or above, A Levels and undergraduate degrees) rather than quality (gaining qualifications you could use for a professional career). Which is why the country does not have enough experienced nurses, doctors, scientists or computer programmers so we now have to import them...

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 18 Sep 2025 ==

Another thing about Reform that's different, at least for now, is they are full of absolute idiots. Only around 3 or 4 members of the party (inc. Farage and Tice) know what they are doing. The rest are either infighting and getting kicked out (Lowe and McMurdock), and/or poor vetting is leading to several councillors standing down due to scandal/criminal behaviour that wasn't discovered beforehand. If they managed a majority at the next election, if they've not sorted these things out, the government collapse will make Liz Truss' premiership look like the Roaring Twenties.

The egos of Farage and Tice may well be what saves us from a Reform Government. If they do get defectors who are remotely competent and have been ministers in big government departments like the Home Office, DWP or MoJ, or who've been the leaders of large councils under a blue rosette they are most definitely not going to be happy playing second fiddle to Farage and Tice, they'll want to be first strings or the conductor.

 

[Krokodil]

I put in to a GB universal swing calculator the following based on polls surveyed in September (the range of which I put in brackets).

I tried the same figures in another one and got a hung parliament, 25 seats short. And that's using figures two points higher than the 28 I had earlier.

I repeat, a party forming a majority on 28% of the vote is unlikely.

 

[nw1]

Sadly, I think Reform are going to do very well in Birmingham in the local elections next year, gaining enough seats to take control. The ongoing bin strike and the general uselessness of the Labour run Birmingham City Council will be factors. Traditionally Birmingham has voted in a more socially conservative direction when the Westminster Government has been a Labour one - in 2004 a Tory/Lib Dem coalition took control of the council; the Inner City wards going to Independents on an Irag/Kashmir ticket (yes even though Birmingham City Council has about as much influence in Baghdad as Baghdad City Council has in Birmingham), with the outer suburbs full of the estates like Weoley Castle, Acocks Green, Quinton and Erdington going to Conservative/Lib Dem candidates. The Birmingham Lib Dems at that time were more Conservative in some respect than the Tories and were well away from the soft left progressive image of the late Charlie Kennedy, more like Thatcherites! The result was that progressives voting Lib-Dem as a protest against the Blair Government...ended up with a Conservative Councillor with a yellow tie and rosette.

We should remember despite being a diverse city with a relatively young population with a lot of university graduates, Birmingham still voted by a majority for Brexit in 2016. This may well have been down to the younger generation in the city being lazy and not bothering to turn out and vote like their peers did in Liverpool, Belfast and London.

Presumably all your seats are up for election rather than just one third?

My council generally elects 1/3 of the councillors, so at absolute worst, 1/3 could go to Reform - but that's not going to happen.

I have to admit that I would be surprised if they take control of Birmingham. Granted it appears to be more socially conservative than other big cities, but even still they would presumably have to gain half the seats, assuming they don't have any already.

There must surely be enough "studenty" seats, "liberal commuter" seats, and ethnically-diverse seats in Birmingham to stop them gaining control?

People should also realise, being brutally honest, that this will make Birmingham look bad on the national stage compared to other large cities; it will seem, rightly or wrongly, like a less tolerant city than some of our others. It could potentially result in investment being diverted to, let's say, Manchester.

On the positive side, if they get in and enact DOGE-style cuts (which seems to be their plan) they might put off the population of Birmingham and indeed other parts of the Midlands from voting for them in the general election!

 

[35B]

Presumably all your seats are up for election rather than just one third?

My council generally elects 1/3 of the councillors, so at absolute worst, 1/3 could go to Reform - but that's not going to happen.

I have to admit that I would be surprised if they take control of Birmingham. Granted it appears to be more socially conservative than other big cities, but even still they would presumably have to gain half the seats, assuming they don't have any already.

There must surely be enough "studenty" seats, "liberal commuter" seats, and ethnically-diverse seats in Birmingham to stop them gaining control?

People should also realise, being brutally honest, that this will make Birmingham look bad on the national stage compared to other large cities; it will seem, rightly or wrongly, like a less tolerant city than some of our others. It could potentially result in investment being diverted to, let's say, Manchester.

On the positive side, if they get in and enact DOGE-style cuts (which seems to be their plan) they might put the population of Birmingham and indeed other parts of the Midlands from voting for them in the general election!

Turnout matters, and those inclined to support the sort of policies that Reform espouse may regard seeming less tolerant as a good thing.

 

[DarloRich]

What sort of future these voters think they'll have if we got rid of foreigners I do not know. I guess that's when they'll find out, as many are finding out in the USA right now as their farms and other industries go bust because they've lost their workers.

The question I ask is:

When the forigns is gone then what?

 

[jon0844]

The question I ask is:

When the forigns is gone then what?

The USA seems like the place to watch as MAGA voters are now regretting voting for someone to do the exact thing they said they'd do, and now they're seeing that immigrants helped keep the country working.

Farage has copied Trump every step of the way and even imported the DOGE idea and terminology like DEI. So we can be pretty certain the same would happen here.

 

[KevinBrum12]

I tried the same figures in another one and got a hung parliament, 25 seats short. And that's using figures two points higher than the 28 I had earlier.

I repeat, a party forming a majority on 28% of the vote is unlikely.

Its not (thank goodness) but 25 or 28 seats short in FPTP is not a lot. I'd think the Tories and DUP combined would have rather more than 25 or 28 seats. That, coupled with making a Tory leader Deputy Prime Minister could lead to a Reform led coalition of chaos Government.

 

[alex397]

The question I ask is:

When the forigns is gone then what?

Then it will probably be the people on benefits, the disabled, people with strong left-wing views, people who refuse to fly a flag on their property, and so on….

 

[Krokodil]

On the positive side, if they get in and enact DOGE-style cuts (which seems to be their plan)

Isn't Birmingham now down to statutory services only anyway?

 

[35B]

The question I ask is:

When the forigns is gone then what?

There is a long tradition of radical politics descending into a spiral as the vision shows itself to be undeliverable, and those promoting the vision can't accommodate the possibility that the vision is flawed. The pattern is, too often, to blame "treachery" and look for "traitors" who've caused it to fail. After a certain point, it becomes not just unpleasant, but starts to see real people getting hurt - and some of the events in the US in recent months demonstrate this radicalisation at work.

It's a dynamic that has been visible since 2016 (and especially 2019), and it's one that NF has done nothing to discourage.

 

[DarloRich]

Farage has copied Trump every step of the way and even imported the DOGE idea and terminology like DEI. So we can be pretty certain the same would happen here.

correct - what is happening now in America is coming here under Farage.

 

[KevinBrum12]

Presumably all your seats are up for election rather than just one third?

My council generally elects 1/3 of the councillors, so at absolute worst, 1/3 could go to Reform - but that's not going to happen.

I have to admit that I would be surprised if they take control of Birmingham. Granted it appears to be more socially conservative than other big cities, but even still they would presumably have to gain half the seats, assuming they don't have any already.

There must surely be enough "studenty" seats, "liberal commuter" seats, and ethnically-diverse seats in Birmingham to stop them gaining control?

People should also realise, being brutally honest, that this will make Birmingham look bad on the national stage compared to other large cities; it will seem, rightly or wrongly, like a less tolerant city than some of our others. It could potentially result in investment being diverted to, let's say, Manchester.

On the positive side, if they get in and enact DOGE-style cuts (which seems to be their plan) they might put the population of Birmingham and indeed other parts of the Midlands from voting for them in the general election!

We have the late Sir Bob Kerslake, the Whitehall mandarin and one of many who've been sent on the train to New Street to "sort Birmingham out", but have left the city in more of a mess when they've got the return to Euston to thank for this. 2004 was all out as the ward boundaries had changed. The 2017 locals I think was when Birmingham moved to the "all up" model. The seat distribution was uneven with some wards having one Councillor and some two and owing to the size that is a lot of residents!

It is the outer seats which have seen the Tommeh Ten Names flag hanging/roundabout painting nonsense like Weoley Castle. The wards with the students like Selly Oak with the University a stop up the Cross City have the worst turnouts in Local Elections. The outer suburbs with the older voters and unskilled workers have the higher turnouts but Local Election turnout in Brum is bad with some wards having as little as 10-15% of the register turning out.

I also think a lot of the students do not have roots or want to stay in Birmingham. Compare with Manchester where a lot of the student population are from the region and those who aren't settle because Manchester is cool. Birmingham is not and a lot of the UoB/BCU students will be at New Street getting singles to Euston once they graduate.

 

[nw1]

people who refuse to fly a flag on their property,

and even worse, those people who fly a Pride, Palestine or even Ukraine flag on their property.

Non-approved flags! Traitors! Lock 'em up!



== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 18 Sep 2025 ==

We have the late Sir Bob Kerslake, the Whitehall mandarin and one of many who've been sent on the train to New Street to "sort Birmingham out" to thank for this, 2004 was all out as the ward boundaries had changed. The 2017 locals I think was when Birmingham moved to the "all up" model. The seat distribution was uneven with some wards having one Councillor and some two and owing to the size that is a lot of residents!
It is the outer seats which have seen the Tommeh Ten Names flag hanging/roundabout painting nonsense like Weoley Castle. The wards with the students like Selly Oak with the University a stop up the Cross City have the worst turnouts in Local Elections. The outer suburbs with the older voters and unskilled workers have the higher turnouts but Local Election turnout in Brum is bad with some wards having as little as 10-15% of the register turning out.

It sounds like Birmingham urgently needs an anti-Reform campaign right now to get the complacent out to vote in May.

As for flag-hanging, I was quite shocked to see a particularly gratuitous display in a street in quite a liberal area not far from where I live. Lots of students, lots of younger people, quite ethnically diverse, close to the centre.
There's a pub on the street and I noted it was decked with Pride flags. Whether that was a deliberate response to the other display or not, I don't know. Or perhaps the reverse was true: the pub put up the Pride flags first, then some right-winger on the same street got offended, and countered by joining the Yaxley-Lennon campaign.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 18 Sep 2025 ==

correct - what is happening now in America is coming here under Farage.

I'm still hopeful a) we will learn from the US experience and not make the same mistake here and b) if they do indeed take control of councils, the savage cuts will impact many casual voters' lives and put them off for good.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 18 Sep 2025 ==

Isn't Birmingham now down to statutory services only anyway?

Not sure to be honest - so they're already offering only the bare minimum of what they have to legally?

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 18 Sep 2025 ==

As someone who undertook their secondary education in the Major era, I'd say the failures started then. STEM education had been dumbed down at GCSE level. Computing is the obvious example - the curriculum was not based on programming a computer to do tasks or manage and interrogate data in the way you wanted it to; but on using word processors and spreadsheets based on Microsoft Windows. Plus you weren't taught about using disks to open the likes of Microsoft Word and Excel or save files; it was all done from the schools ethernet.

For the Major era this is quite surprising. This was basically the dawn of the mass internet and I'd have expected a vibrant school computing curriculum.

Granted I was out of school by then but I would certainly have expected the use of disks in this era and at least some programming. Python wasn't mainstream then and perhaps C would be difficult for school children but something like Pascal could have been used?

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 18 Sep 2025 ==

I also think a lot of the students do not have roots or want to stay in Birmingham. Compare with Manchester where a lot of the student population are from the region and those who aren't settle because Manchester is cool. Birmingham is not and a lot of the UoB/BCU students will be at New Street getting singles to Euston once they graduate.

Interesting - I don't know Birmingham that well - basically only the city centre plus what I see from the railway or from the motorways - but I get the impression that the Bournville / Northfield rail corridor would be the kind of "liberal commuter" place where ex-students might want to settle. Likewise the Solihull area and that rail corridor too, though I understand Solihull is not Birmingham proper.

Similarly I'd perceive the areas immediately round the city centre as ethnically diverse and thus presumably anti-Reform.

I may be completely wrong about my understanding of Birmingham demographics, though - as I said I've only seen many of these places from the railway or the motorways. And presumably there are large parts of Birmingham nowhere near any railways or motorways which I'd have simply never have seen.