If the Tories completely collapse, then next time the FPTP nonsense might favour Reform. If they get in, they’ll do everything they can to undermine democracy, and ensure they never get voted out.

Look at Hungary, and Poland. It took an almighty effort to get the fascists out in Poland, and it will take a lot of work to undo all the damage they did.

We urgently need proportional representation.

The inews article does quote that paragraph, but it does not say whether the Russian media who praise Farage mentioned it. I’m going to guess not.

Aside: Farage is so full of shit it’s amazing he manages to sit down without it dribbling out of his mouth… “[Here’s why Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the fault of Western ‘liberals’…] I have never sought to justify Putin’s invasion in any way and I’m not now.” Sadly, his open contempt for the intelligence of his supporters seems to be entirely justified.

Conservative members chose Liz Truss as leader too. It’s really not a good look.

The real problem for the Conservatives is just how far their membership has diverged from the mainstream of British society. Post Brexit entryism from UKIP supporters has left the Conservative Party in real trouble.

British people want less immigration because they have been fed a deluge of racist, far right propaganda for years, if not decades. Propaganda that mainstream parties have failed to counter, or even tacitly endorsed.

Immigrants are not just good for the UK, they are essential. Of course immigration grows the economy, and makes us all richer (yes, even the poorest segments of society). But more than that, without immigration, our population will shrink, slowly at first, and eventually catastrophically. We need people to keep everything working, lest there is literally no one left by the time we get to retirement age.

Of course immigrants struggle to integrate when right wing governments have cut the programmes that existed to help them do that! In the 2000s, my wife (an immigrant) trained to teach English as a second language - a programme specifically designed to help immigrants learn English. The Conservatives cancelled that, along with a slew of similar initiatives. And then they feigned surprise when the far right stole their voters, and eventually took over their entire party.

Vastly reduce immigration from countries that don’t have very similar cultural identity.

So the best way to fight the fascists is to give them what they want?

Oh my goodness. I just read her Wikipedia article, and she appears to be the worst sort of racist, low-life chancer, somehow elevated to the House of Lords.

Sorry. I find it incredible that anyone would want to roll back the few modest advances towards a sensible, modern cycling and pedestrian infrastructure.

.

What the actual fuck?

This makes me angry.

The two finest innovations of postwar British planning were green belts and urban conservation areas.

Lol. There’s no hope for rational discourse, if this is the starting point of your opponent.

Green belts (and restrictive planning policy more generally) have been a disaster for the country. They are directly responsible for our crushing housing costs, poor housing quality, terrible urban design, and the stranglehold over our built environment that is held by a handful of gigantic, pointless building companies.

https://txtify.it/https://www.economist.com/britain/2017/02/11/britains-delusions-about-the-green-belt-cause-untold-misery

I think it’s about using the platform she currently has to poison the waters, and shift the Overton window as far as possible in favour of the far-right, in the short time still available to her. Lucrative book deals etc. are just icing on the cake.

John Major actually managed to govern reasonably competently.

Sunak’s main selling point is simply that he’s not actively trying to destroy the country, most days. I mean, yes that’s a huge step up from Johnson & Truss, but…

If real fascism ever made a return, nobody would be able to identify it.

Especially you, apparently.

Will he eat another page of his book if he’s wrong yet again?

Honestly, I don’t give a fig what this fash POS has to say.

It’s ridiculous to accuse the Tories of being “neoliberal”. Perhaps they used to be*, but they’ve since morphed into a far right populist party. They are actively working against everything that liberals stand for: free trade, human rights, personal freedoms, regulated free markets, etc.

I get that you don’t like those things, and that you also don’t like the Tories, but to conflate the two just makes you sound ridiculous.

* - if “neoliberal” had any concrete meaning - which I would dispute.

Only in the land of Corbyn cosplayers.

Their web-site’s one and only policy is “fuck immigrants”. Nice to know where they stand.

This has to be bad news. Given the UKIP entryism into local parties, this will likely further embed the Conservatives’ shift away from the centre, towards the far-right.

We need a centre-right party in UK politics. The longer the far right are able to wear the skin of the old Conservative party, the more unwarranted influence they will have over the direction of the country.