The On-going Never-ending Brexit Story Part Four

Further to what I mentioned the other day...

Tories realise deportation policy could lose them loyal voters
The draft ‘deportation bill’ may alienate South Asian voters, who have shifted to the Conservatives in recent years

...

Badenoch said her party would spend time to “make sure that all our policies are coherent”, but the Conservatives feel under pressure from Reform. Nigel Farage has been less coy about his intention to scrap ILR entirely and “deport” – a term officially used only to describe the removal of criminals – hundreds of thousands of people who had lived legally in the UK for decades.

Even if the Tories eventually decide to choose anti-immigrant votes over those in, say, Leicester or Harrow, the political calculus remains risky.

“Every person here on ILR is not going to be isolated,” said Rob Ford, professor of politics at the University of Manchester. “They're going to have family. An awful lot of them will be people who are married to British citizens. You're going to have a lot of families where you're potentially splitting up parents, rendering children parentless, getting rid of grandparents.”​

It's not just people who would be directly impacted that are against it.

Almost everyone thinks it's a patently ludicrous idea, not least because they realise that significant numbers of people in things like healthcare would be in danger, which means that the elderly would be affected, and the thing about us is, we VOTE!!!

TBH, I think even reform would have to back off that if they hope to win a lot of seats.

 

Watching reform's Zia Yusuf being given a good kicking by Victoria Derbyshire.

Apparently, we'll all be OK if we're British and we set our alarm clocks... so that's good to know

 

Thank heavens Victoria still knows how to be a journalist.

 

Me, watching Zia Yusuf and Victoria Derbyshire...

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7lIhvGWxHtA

 

Was that on Newsnight?

 

Yes.

 

It's at the beginning of this...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002ls4l/newsnight-reform-uks-economic-relaunch

Something I missed was that since Farage said that Liz Truss' budget, (that wiped out the UK economy), was the best for 40 years, he's 'upgraded his systems'. Y'know, a bit like when you update your android phone... you get new features like NOT thinking that Liz Truss has the economic wisdom of a lettuce.

So, again... good news

 

It is somewhat ironic that Farage's party keep putting Yusuf up for interviews, given he's unelected.
I'm sure he used to complain about people in that position.

 

It's not like they've got a huge range of people who can speak and not sound like a complete imbecile. Well, he can't either but he sounds better than 30p Lee.

 

That's a low bar.

They appear to have locked Sarah Pochin away after her comments on adverts.

 

Yusuf is what passes for the brains trust in reform.

 

Great report that will surprise no one.

https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boosting-the-british-right-13464487#

 

The sorry state of politics today. Tim Davie has resigned as Director General of the BBC.
Basically, a former Tory election candidate, appointed by a Tory PM, has been forced out essentially for being not right wing enough.

 

It'd be nice if we had a governing Labour party willing to make a new BBC out of this.

 

UKIP are still a thing, and probably even more extreme than Reform. Their leader got caught out badly.

 

Well, you say 'caught out badly', I'd have said caught out quite well

 

GBnews goading a foreign leader to destroy the BBC.

Q: Is the president prepared to bankrupt the BBC?

LEAVITT: This is a leftist propaganda machine that unfortunately is subsidized by British taxpayers, and he thinks that's extremely unfortunate for the great people of the UK pic.twitter.com/yzgT76kzNE

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 12, 2025

 

I posted this elsewhere but it's worth repeating here...

 

An interesting perspective from the grauniad's Aditya Chakrabortty...

The real Reform voters have been revealed – it’s a slapdash coalition Farage will struggle to hold together
This is no single bloc marching under one ideology, or even a mass of ‘red-wall’ voters. What unites them is a desire for something different

I'm not so sure he won't be able to hold them together, though. Much as I'd like to agree with him.

During the brexit vote we found the fact that the leave campaign had various different, (and apparently mutually exclusive), positions, didn't mean they couldn't get people to vote one way.

In many ways it was precisely the fact that people could believe whatever flavour of leave fantasy they wanted that actually strengthened their hold on the group.

 

Is the Reform coalition kind of like the MAGA coalition here in the US? They have a wide variety of overall policies that they believe it, but their core policy is very nativist and nationalist? So, instead of Make America Great Again, is Reform a "Make the UK Great Again", or maybe it is "Make England Great Again" since they don't seem to be making inroads into the other UK countries?

 

They are top in a lot of polls in Wales fighting the PC and in Scotland they are 2nd behind the SNP.

A lot of their voters are ex tories, also a fair few who have never voted before and the scew heavily with older people.

The Green party is the most popular among younger generations and some polls put them ahead between 18-49 year old.




The UK has the biggest age polarisation of any western democracy.

 

https://news.sky.com/story/wife-of-...arns-uk-fans-travelling-to-world-cup-13469849

Depending on many UK teams qualify. You hope your group games are in Canada or Mexico.

 

There are obvious similarities. It doesn't entirely track across because the voting system is different in that we're a parliamentary democracy, where we vote for an MP for a specific constituency.

In the brexit vote, of course, it WAS similar to a presidential election in the sense that it was simply a vote across the entire country, albeit without an electoral college. In that the total number of votes counted.

So it doesn't matter HOW many reform votes there are in the country as a whole... they actually have to get them in 650 different constituencies to get even ONE seat.

I'm hopeful that the tories can sort themselves out, (and THAT'S not a sentence I'd ever thought I'd type ), because it means the right-wing vote will be split in much the same way the left is often split in individual constituencies.

That's the big danger... that the left in the different constituencies don't sort themselves out to keep the right out. It's OK the greens having a young and fresh look but if all it does is split the vote, what good does THAT do.

There's another dynamic at play and that's that a lot of the older voters in more wealthy areas, particularly in the south, are actually quite liberal socially and many are pretty appalled by the sort of idiots in reform.

That's the sort of dynamic that Chakrabortty is discussing. That in a constituency of only some tens of thousands of voters, (as opposed to several hundreds of thousands or even millions in a state), they tend to be more 'of a piece', politically so it might be harder to unite around a line that all the disparate parts can get behind.

But bear in mind, we also have almost 4 years to try and sort things out as a government so it's a bit early to be panicking.

 

Yeah a lot of tories voters in the south of England (especially in the home countiess) are socially quite liberal. That's why they lost so many seats the Lib Dems.

Aslo America and the UK are culturally and politically very different from each other so comparing them generally won't work.

If you want to have a good comparison with the UK look at other Western European countries especially France and Germany and of course Spain for obvious reasons.

 

It's hard to see where the constituencies are that will coalesce around a reform candidate.

Many of the red-wall constituencies are also ones that have older people that rely on the NHS, (which has a large proportion of immigrant workers), so a proportion might feel wary of voting for a party that wants to throw out people who have been here for decades and are gainfully employed.

This isn't like the US where there ARE relatively large numbers of undocumented immigrants.

That's why reform started to waver on their suggested policy of removing ILR from people who are already here, particularly those who have been here for a while...

https://yougov.co.uk/politics/artic...nk-about-scrapping-indefinite-leave-to-remain



So the level of support, even among reform voters, for deporting people who already have ILR, (reform's flagship policy), is barely over 50%. So that's a tad over 50% of the 30% of the population that say they're likely to vote reform, in a single constituency, i.e. about 16%.

That doesn't seem like something likely to lead to electoral success.

Also, of course, reform holds several councils now so are 'in government' and, despite saying they were going to CUT local taxes, are busy putting them up.

Reform councils set to raise taxes for nearly 5 million people despite promising cuts
It comes after Nigel Farage walked back on his party’s plan to cut taxes if they win the next General Election.

So the other factor on that list, cost of living, will again be a HUGE question mark by the time we get to the next GE in 3 - 4 years time.

We'll see but I'd be surprised if they retain their current position as things develop.

It's just a question as to whether the left can have a unified opposition in the constituencies... that's the question mark IMO.