Sampson

I think it’s more that, as has been the case over the past decade, that political crisis and events take over. I think Farage has got his base now and I don’t see those voters changing their mind regardless of what Labour do with the immigration and economy (and tbh I think a big problem is I think a lot of the issues people care about are opposed to how you grow an economy - I don’t see how you can fix an ageing population’s economy where the labour supply is buckling under those who need care and state support without immigration and/or making politically unpopular opinions like the cutting fuel allowance or raising the retirement age - but we saw the backlash Labour got for cutting winter fuel allowance on pensioners). In that way I think Farage is on course to win the election regardless of what Labour do because it’s a catch 22. However, the mitigation here is that the world over the past decade has swung violently from one political crisis to another and these end up taking control of the narrative so things like escalations/ending of the war in Ukraine, a natural disaster, another pandemic or war or such like can completely swing the public’s view. The world feels a very different place to me than it did 4 years ago and will no doubt do in another 4 years. But a lot of that is really out of the government’s control.

No one should ever consider themselves too cool for Queen or ABBA, not even should they be ever even be called a guilty pleasure. Both genuinely wrote so many amazing and catchy songs,

Nah let’s be fair, most people outside the British Isles know England, Scotland and Ireland (as in the island of Ireland) and think they are either 3 independent nations or just one big nation coving the entire British Isles. Most people outside of UK & Ireland couldn’t tell you what Wales, Northern Ireland or the Isle of Man are. It’s understandable though. Most Brits couldn’t tell you where Catalonia or Bavaria are either, most people just aren’t that interested in these things.

Tbh many British and Irish people can’t tell you the difference between the UK, Great Britain and England, let alone where stuff like the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands fit into it all. I don’t know why we expect people not from the British Isles to know.

Yeah there’s plenty of great things about British culture im proud of - modern parliamentary liberal democracy, the separation of powers and institutions that we modernised: industrialisation and engineering of the railway systems and bridges etc. we gave to the world, self-effacing humour, that we have a certain tongue-in-cheek attitude I don’t see from many other countries, and I’ve definitely become a fan of the monarchy and constitutional monarchy as I’ve got older in a way I would’ve scoffed at when I was younger. My issue isn’t the displaying of flags or being proud of your country. It’s when it spillls over into hiding behind patriotism and waving the flag and signing the national songs to actually attack your country and others to get what you want which is what Farage has spent the past 15 years doing, in that claims he is a patriot by flying the flag and signing Rule Britannia at the top of his voice, but he never has a good word to say about Britain and all he ever does is talk the country down and go on about what a shithole it is in order to argue only *he* can make it great by leaving x institution. This isn’t a uniquely British problem btw. It’s happening all over the west.

I’m not convinced at all that those things will stop people voting Farage tbh. Farage will always move the goalposts and always finds one more reason to talk Britain down or one more institution to go after.

The short and perhaps scariest answer (at least according to Rory Stewart) is much of our military equipment, our defence, including supposedly even our nuclear deterrent. That’s why Europe is having to be careful whilst it weens itself out the US bubble

May be confusing you with another user but haven’t you spent like 2 years saying sending our troops in would be a disaster? Feels a bit hindsighty to say it’s overdue, common thread of most has been we want to avoid direct conflict between NATO and Russia, as much as most of us have sympathy for Ukraine.

Sorry to hear that. It’s always a surreal experience when a close friend or family member dies. You never truly get over it but hope you can at least get to a place of living with the loss.

No you’re not the only one by a long stretch, most of us feel the same, but that’s also half the point. The flooding of information until people get ground down by it and switch off is a big part of the political strategy. Disenfranchising voters by flooding them with endless information about how the country and world is broken to get people feeling emotionally exhausted is kind of how populism ends up winning, and how the traditional parties are seen as not being able to fix every single minute problem with the world. The internet and social media has allowed that. It’s only a generation ago most of us just tuned in for 5 minutes a day to see the headlines on the 6 o’clock news and that was it, nowadays you can’t avoid it. I empathise with those who want to and can switch off to it, but I also feel that’s kind of the point, to make everyone feel fearful and exhausted. Truth is, it’s summer - you can go out in any town or city in the uk and see millions people drinking and eating and having a great time enjoying time with friends and family, which is ultimately what life’s about. The country isn’t anywhere near broken or as much of a shithole as Farage or Corbyn would like us to believe and neither immigrants nor the wealthy elite are really destroying it in a way that really affects most of our actual day to day lives.

I get people want to reduce immigration, but this is why you shouldn’t vote for protest parties who aren’t established enough so just scramble around trying to get whoever they can to fill numbers in council elections where they can’t do anything about the things at national and international level you’re protest voting against. Inexperienced teenagers have been put in control of 70% of Leicestershire County Council’s budget. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/05/nigel-farage-reform-uk-teenage-councillors-vital-public-services At Leicestershire county council, the Reform councillor Charles Pugsley, 19, has been made the cabinet member for children and family services. Pugsley’s elevation has caused particular concern, as has that of Joseph Boam, a 22-year-old who has been made the deputy council leader and handed the adult social care portfolio, despite having previously expressed the view that “depression isn’t real”. Their relative lack of experience has caused unease across the political divide. Deborah Taylor, a Conservative councillor and leader of the opposition who was the previous cabinet member for children and families in Leicestershire, questioned their qualifications to hold roles overseeing services that account for more than 70% of the council’s £616m budget.

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Our voting system isn’t really fixed for it though. Most European countries have PR. We have FPTP which was kind of kept because it kept the 2 party system up. Now we’ve become a 5 party system it means a party can get 100% of the power on less than 30% of the vote.

Christ, I’d forgotten about Kilroy-Silk and Veritas. In many ways, he was a foreshadowing of today’s social media, reality TV, always-go-one-step-more-outrageous populist politics. But back then it was still treated as a bit of a fringe joke.

Amazing how they all have the same AI generated faces either the same facial expressions with the same cropping on the same background

I have mostly lost interest. Great I got to see Leicester win the league and FA Cup and see Leicester’s greatest ever team and players between 2014-21 but I can’t be arsed with the charade anymore, too much about money, as you said, women’s football was starting to make a breakthrough when England won the Euros and felt a bit more grassroots and refreshing for a while but that’s being lost to a mixture of money or lack of it and culture wars nonsense of too many grown men moaning like babies about the coverage it was getting like too. I go out and play board and card games with friends and family most Saturday afternoons instead now and found that has replaced the communal, social and competitive neuron hits that football used to give me

Is it one guy then? I lost track of popular music 20 years ago so admit I’m out of touch here.

I have no idea who Kneecap is so if they were allegedly cheering on Hezbolla than that’s fair enough to condemn, but I just kinda think in general trying to come in with anti-liberal rhetoric in the age of populism to hold the liberal centre is what Macron tried to do and all it ended up doing was giving credence to the populists’ beliefs. If you ask me, I think the populist right are currently a far bigger threat to British democracy than Islamists are but I accept the latter is certainly also a big problem. I don’t know what the answer is, no one does, that’s why most of the west feels like it’s scrambling around like rabbit in the headlights right now trying and struggling to find solutions. But I’d hope we wouldn’t just throw out liberal democratic ideals because they might fall anyway, I’d hope we at least try to fight for them first.

Not disagreeing but I don’t know how much longer democracy itself will survive the age of ai and the internet either. I still think it’s worth fighting for though.

The alternative sounds like the route to authoritarianism that the US is currently looking like it may well go down though where criticism of the country, its allies or government are met with state intervention or enforcement. Not a path I particularly want to go down and hope the UK very much keeps its tolerant and liberal culture towards criticism of itself, its allies and its government. With any system there will always be those that exploit it, it doesn’t mean you have to throw out or change the whole system though.

Not to mention “feck off with your political shit” and trying to tell people where, when and how they want to hear “political” statements is in itself an extremely political statement - just as much a political statement as any statement by a musician.

Btw as an aside, I watched the Britain and the Blitz documentary on Netflix the other day and it’s a good documentary and I recommend it - but it did get me thinking if the world feeling like it’s spinning out of control and populism going through the roof is at least partly due the lack of catharsis at the end of Covid. I remember under the first lockdown in March 2020 all the talk and announcements from the Queen and Prime Minister and talk that “this was the current generation’s WW2”. And I remember people specifically saying - can you imagine in a couple of years when this is all over it’ll be the biggest party you’ve ever seen - but it never was, it just seemed to get pushed out the news a couple years later by Russia invading Ukraine and that was that. When I see the celebrations of like VE Day and the baby boomer and “post-war consensus” era that followed afterwards until the 1970s - also the catharsis/celebration of the fall of communism/the Berlin Wall and the “end of history”/globalisation that followed afterwards until 2008 - I wonder if the fact we never had that period of catharsis afterwards led to a lot of people going down the populist path? I definitely think more than a small number of people got led down it by Covid (not just regular people but even celebrities like Russell Brand, Matt Le Tissier, Kanye West etc. ) I do wonder how much the mental health struggles and isolation a lot of us had with never getting a payoff of catharsis to feel like it was “worth it” had led to the world’s shift to populism increasing rapidly the last 4 or 5 years (I’m of course aware it existed beforehand but has definitely noticeably increased post-pandemic). Anyway, just a pet theory after watching the documentary.

I’m with you, I thought it was the right thing to do but it became politically impossible. I struggle with these debates more and more though because I feel like there’s no real solution that isn’t just too (understandably) politically unpopular that it’s a complete non-starter. I guess I’d consider myself a wet centrist liberal but I do have some sympathy with social democratic policies and certainly agree with the theory behind having a really high social safety net and welfare system is clearly a good thing in an ideal world. I just think it’s something that was great in the decades following the post-war relieve with a young working population in the 1940s-1960s but is probably for the birds in 2020s-onwards where the population is much older and so the average person objectively and understandably needs more social benefits as they get older and the working population who support them is a smaller proportion of them - (this isn’t just economically but in terms of pure number of labourers in terms of care workers, administrators, support workers etc.). One look at UK government spending shows social benefits (most of which is the pension system and healthcare costs) are the huge albatross around government spending which they ideally want to put into housing, building new hospitals etc. Of course I don’t know what the solution is, because it’s a perfectly understandable argument that it’s hard to argue with emotionally that older more vulnerable people need more support, but how you distribute that when more and more of the population is older and requires more healthcare and social benefits through pension, and disability benefits I’m not sure. It’s also a problem that’s only going to get worse as the fertility rate remains under replacement ratio as it does for pretty much everywhere outside of Africa and the Middle East.

Sadly this isn’t far off how Kemi Badenoch conducts herself.