I think it’s you who doesn’t get it!
The right in our country is a minority. As is the left. The majority are in the centre. They swing towards the right, or the left, depending on circumstances. The primary circumstance being who has last been in power and actually had to do unpopular things compared to those who have only had to make promises.
You confirm this with your “Reform deserve their chance”. A typically naive statement!
People have swung to Reform because they are making completely undeliverable promises about issues that have confounded the serious politicians for many years. Our country has been bombarded by many problems in the last decade that no government, of any type, would have been able to deal with and remain popular.
The last thing the Tories need to do is attempt to go further to the right than Reform. Competing for the fringe voter of a minority group is suicidal.
The only secure place is to occupy the middle ground, tell the truth, propose sensible policies that people can understand and believe in, destroy the rhetoric, ambiguity, implausibly and unaffordable nature of Reform whilst hammering their total lack of experience.
The Tories need to recapture the votes they lost to Labour and ignore the right. To do this they must first cleanse themselves of those elements within the party who are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Those who think like Farage but can’t bring themselves to leave. They must help them out the door.
The result would almost certainly be that no party would hold sufficient seats in 2029 to form a government on their own. Better that than a Reform government. Better a coalition of the centre than a period of chaos from the right.
We must see whether the Tories have both the nous and sufficient desire to serve the national interest to do this. Getting rid of Badenoch and sidelining those on the right has to be the first step. Regrettably I am not convinced they do. Unlike you it seems.
The Tories must think long term or they will paint themselves into a corner from which there is no escape.
The centre ground is where all the political parties are currently trying to stand. Everyone is offering soundbites, everyone is terrified of saying the wrong thing, and as a result nobody actually achieves anything. It’s politics by focus group rather than leadership. When everyone crowds into the same space, there’s no choice on offer, just noise.
What we actually have is a left-leaning government that fundamentally doesn’t understand how economies and growth work, doesn’t understand incentives, and treats the economy as a moral abstraction rather than a functioning system. That said, the uncomfortable truth is that the last run of Conservative governments didn’t really understand it either. They talked about enterprise while quietly strangling growth and congratulating themselves for doing so.
A country, whether people like the analogy or not, operates like a machine. It needs inputs, productivity, and balance. The state itself produces no financial output. Business does. People do. Capitalism may be deeply unfashionable to admit to liking, but it remains the only system that has ever worked at scale because it aligns with basic human motivation. People want to improve their lives.
At the moment, I’m facing an effective marginal tax rate of around 62%. So why exactly should I bother growing my business? There’s no incentive to expand, no reward for taking on more risk, and no upside that isn’t immediately clawed back. And yet, if I point this out, I’m told I must be some sort of villainous employer, or that I’m “not pulling my weight”.
Let’s be clear about what my weight actually is. I’m an unpaid tax collector for PAYE and VAT. I administer it, fund the systems, carry the compliance risk, and if I get it wrong, HMRC doesn’t pat me on the back. They slap me. I also do this for my clients, because I work in accountancy. None of this is optional. None of it is simple. None of it is free. I also pay Corporation Tax and tax on my dividends.
The political narrative has become infantile. Question benefits policy and you’re “demonising the vulnerable”. Point out overstretched services and you’re accused of being cruel. At some point, rational, sane people in the middle start thinking, “Hang on… why is Nigel Farage the only person acknowledging reality?” That should worry politicians. Instead, they sneer.
I don’t particularly like the flag-on-flagpoles politics. I don’t agree with turning patriotism into theatre. But once you start telling everyone who expresses national identity that they’re a racist Neanderthal, you’ve already lost the argument. People don’t respond well to being talked down to. History is fairly clear on that.
I’ve spent time recently in Germany and there’s a noticeable sense of national cohesion there, alongside a genuine anxiety about cultural and economic pressures. Politicians at least pretend to take that seriously. In the UK, we oscillate between denial and moral grandstanding.
Politics has shifted. Immigration in 2025 is not the same issue it was in 1995. The old playbook doesn’t work. My father was a staunch Labour voter. I voted Labour myself in 2001. I then voted Conservative consistently, largely because I had a very good local MP. Now I look around and ask a simple question: who exactly am I meant to vote for?
Labour doesn’t represent me in any meaningful way. The Conservatives are an absolute shower. The Liberal Democrats are bonkers. The Greens appear to be operating on a different planet. Reform? I don’t particularly want to vote for them, and their candidate vetting looks like it was done on the back of a beer mat.
But their existence isn’t inherently a bad thing. Farage works because he says out loud what many people are already thinking, and he does it without flinching. You don’t have to agree with everything he says to recognise that he can walk into a hostile room and hold his ground. That’s a rare skill in modern politics.
What’s missing entirely is a party that genuinely prioritises working people. And by “working people”, I mean people who work. Employees. Small business owners. Medium-sized employers. People who create jobs, pay tax, and keep the whole thing upright.
Benefits should exist as a safety net, not a lifestyle choice. Incentives should reward work, not penalise it. At the moment, we manage to do the opposite. Someone who works a full career and qualifies for a state pension can end up worse off than someone who falls just short of the threshold. That isn’t compassionate. It’s just stupid.
The deeper issue is that our political class has almost no real-world experience. Too many of them have gone straight from university, to think tank, to Parliament, without ever running anything more complex than a LinkedIn profile. In Rachel Reeves’ case, not even a particularly convincing one.
Our local MP is 26 and promised to save the high street. Her retail experience amounts to one year working for ASOS, a company whose entire business model is based on not having a high street. Rachel Reeves was near my office yesterday at Wicksteed Park. I would trust Wickie Bear with the economy more than I trust her. And I was there the year Wickie Bear caught fire.
You’re also from Wisbech at some point, so I’m assuming you know Peterborough well enough. I’m also guessing you know the rowing lake there. If you want a concrete example of why people feel the way they do, take a drive over there and look at the Dragonfly Hotel.
That hotel is currently housing dozens of men in their 20s and 30s who are here illegally. They could abscond almost at will. They’re outside smoking and drinking most of the day in an area where, as far as I’m aware, neither is supposed to be happening. It’s bleak, it’s unmanaged, and it’s exactly the sort of thing politicians insist people aren’t really seeing.
This also exposes the generational blind spot in a lot of these discussions. I remember you saying on an earlier thread that people make choices, that you chose to live in Cornwall rather than Wisbech, and that others could do the same. Except they can’t. That’s a financial luxury afforded largely by when you were born, not just by virtue.
The reality is that most 80-year-olds in this country are better off than most 40-year-olds, assuming they invested even half-sensibly. I’m not criticising that. I’ve got genuine respect for people who worked hard and planned well. But what I am saying is that it fundamentally skews perspective.
If you’re financially secure, mortgage-free, asset-rich, and largely insulated from the pressures younger working people are facing, then it’s very easy to moralise about “choices” and dismiss concerns as hysteria. That doesn’t mean those concerns aren’t real. It just means you’re no longer the one bearing the consequences.
I’m looking at the next 30 years of my working life, in a world where AI may well hollow out large parts of what I do. I’m also paying into a system that increasingly gives me nothing back.
I tried to book a flu jab this week. I couldn’t get one. That’s despite paying privately, and despite being eligible for every COVID jab because I’m classed as vulnerable. So I’m left asking a very basic question: what exactly am I contributing to public services for? Because at the moment, I get nothing out of them whatsoever.
The Conservatives seem to think that reclaiming the centre will save them. They’re deluding themselves. The centre has moved. The country is polarised. Like it or not, they’re going to have to bring people back in from the right. Not by shouting louder. Not by pandering to lunacy. But by acknowledging reality and speaking like adults. That means going out to the right and bringing it back in.
Farage made a point a few years ago that rarely gets acknowledged, and he was right. He said he’d probably done more to marginalise the BNP than anyone else, simply by giving people somewhere else to go.
Before Reform existed, if you found yourself to the right of the Conservative Party, your options were basically nil. Either hold your nose and vote Tory while feeling ignored, or drift towards something genuinely toxic because there was nowhere in between. What Reform did, whatever its flaws, was create a pressure-release valve. It offered a political home to people who are not BNP-level extremists, but who look at the country they grew up in and feel like it’s been hollowed out or unrecognisable.
That sense of loss isn’t new. I remember my dad lamenting what had happened to Croydon. He moved in 1975. I don’t have rose-tinted nostalgia about it as I grew up in the Midlands. . The last time I drove through, I watched two people casually urinating in the street in broad daylight.
We’ve been here before. Telling people they are stupid and racist for thinking of voting for something. This didn’t work with Brexit. Being told you’re stupid is not a political strategy. It’s a recruitment tool for protest movements.
The problem is that nobody is going to believe any of this unless it confronts the one issue sitting underneath everything else, which is immigration. You can talk about tax, growth, public services and cohesion until you’re blue in the face, but unless immigration is addressed seriously, none of it lands. People have heard too many promises already.
And this is where every party falls over. None of them are genuinely serious about it. Not really.
They all say the right words. They all talk about control, fairness, compassion, balance. Then nothing materially changes. Numbers stay high. Enforcement stays weak. The system remains porous, slow, and visibly unmanaged. People aren’t stupid. They notice.
That’s why trust has collapsed. It’s not that voters suddenly became extreme. It’s that they’ve watched successive governments acknowledge a problem, promise action, and then quietly do the opposite. Eventually, people stop listening to anything else you say.
If a party wants to be believed again, it has to start by being honest. Immigration needs limits. It needs enforcement. It needs consequences. Not because migrants are the problem, but because a system without control isn’t compassionate, it’s negligent. It overwhelms housing, healthcare, policing and local services, then pretends those pressures came from nowhere.
Until one of the major parties is prepared to say, clearly and without hedging, that immigration will be reduced, enforced, and aligned with capacity, nothing else they propose will be trusted. Every tax cut, every NHS reform, every crime policy will be dismissed as noise.
What Nigel Farage is doing brilliantly is tapping into that. The Tories can make as much noise in the centre as they like. Outside the Bowling Clubs of Cornwall, or the leafy suburbs - there is a genuine undercurrent amongst rational people.
Ignore this. Keep sneering. Keep moralising. Keep pretending the public are the problem and that the centre just needs to be reclaimed - then Reform won’t just be a protest vote. It’ll be history repeating itself, while the political class stands around wondering how nobody saw it coming.
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