Reform UK’s two biggest donors have each handed the party a record-breaking £36m.
The figure is more than the total received by all UK political parties last year.
British cryptocurrency billionaire Ben Delo said he was making his £36m donation to create “a level playing field” with other parties - and ensure that Reform is given a “fair fight” at the polls in the next general election. Fellow crypto entrepreneur Christopher Harborne swiftly followed suit on Saturday, netting Reform UK £72m in the space of two days.
I think this is a dangerous view to hold. It feels nice to tarnish them like this but it leaves open the risk of never actually allowing us to understand their motives.
A large swathe of the media did this with Brexit, and those dragons were never put back into their cage.
I think your view is the dangerous one.
It has been proved over and over, UK and overseas, that the non-millionaires/not wealthy people voting for right wing populists (MAGA, Reform, AfD, RN) are doing so for emotional not logical reasons. You can’t argue people out of a position they didnt use logic to get to.
So, are they real reasons underpinning their support, of course, in broad brush strokes it’s a combination of fear, a feeling they’ve been treated poorly, a certain amount of entitlement.
The problem with that is that a group of people are promising to fix all their problems at no cost to them (a patently false promise).
So yes, being realistic isn’t “tarnishing them” - if you don’t correctly diagnose the disease you can’t cure it.
The big problem is those who should pay the price for fixing the problems they caused (the Epstein class) have the wealth to divert attention away from them having caused the problem and its fixes
This implies that everyone else used logic to arrive at their points of view. I don’t believe this is true for the most part. I think it is almost impossible to make a logical political choice given the complexity of the world we inhabit.
To argue that your position is grounded in logic whilst the ‘other’ group is ground in emotion is an ego-inflating fantasy. People most often make decisions based on emotional reasons and then use logic to post-hoc justify them.
We are all closer to reform voters than we would like to believe.
LOL, only if you have reading comprehension issues.
It explicitly STATES (not implies) that they (“not wealthy right wing populist voters”) are a member of the set of those who arrived at the position emotionally. It makes zero statement about who else might be in that same set.
The good news however is that we have academic studies that have actually answered that question. In short the right is heavily supported by those who select emotionally, predominantly from an underlying fear basis. And that the left predominantly operates from an analytical basis. This is the source of the (very poignant) quote about “facts having a left wing bias”
Yeah, well, facts are uncomfortable, I get that.
Oh now, that is absolutely true. Academically well supported too. You know what the next sentence is going to be though, don’t you ? It’s the right, particularly the populist right, that heavily do so.
Keep telling yourself that if it helps you sleep at night, meanwhile the polling shows that voting “anyone but reform” to keep reform out makes up about half of UK voters, and only 25% are willing to vote for them.
EDIT a couple of missing words and punctuation
It must be nice to have such wild self-belief.
I am fearful about the extreme ignorance, simple mindedness and gullibility of some of the electorate. They are completely blind to the effects of neoliberalism, which is the main guiding force behind the bumptious and odious Farage, and fascist/racist Reform party who believe that competition is the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning. Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised; public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance, and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.
I don’t necessarily disagree with what you’re saying. I believe that Reform represents a cancer on society; but you don’t build a better future by writing a huge chunk of people off as beyond understanding.