As always, extremism and populism take root in the disenfranchised parts of the population, and the traditional parties have nobody but themselves to blame, because they always promise to help the poor and they never do.
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2025
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I can't remember exactly where I saw it and when but I remember in the last couple months seeing a poll where how important different issues and topics were to voters from each party were shown. Reform voters were very high on things like healthcare, affordability, nationalisation of industries and so on. Even more so than any other party besides the Greens, I think
Obviously immigration came out top for the Reform voters, but the poll as a whole says what leftists have been saying for so long now. Some will be voting for Reform from just a racist perspective, of course, but most will be doing it because they've been tricked into thinking that the reason they can't have those things that they really want is because of immigration. Especially in all the many poor, struggling areas Reform are doing best in
Our media has cooked so many people's thinking. And our electoral system is going to force us to have a strong chance of a fascist government when the majority don't want it
In fairness, scapegoating minorities - be it jews, romas, blacks, latinos or immigrants - has always been an easy argument for populists. It's nothing new: it's as old as humanity, and while the media doesn't help, it really isn't the primary cause of this.
The way to prevent people from shifting the blame for their ills onto others is making sure they don't have ills to blame anybody for. All the moderate parties have failed to do that.
Education also plays a role: somebody who's poor but educated will be harder to convince that some minority or other is entirely responsible for their being poor. And again, all moderate parties have failed to promote proper education.
Oh easy peasy! Just solve all of societies problems!
Sarcasm aside, that's really hard, and it's not like we don't have examples of other countries trying other strategies than what we're trying.
It's not easy to fix the media either, but it's a smaller area to focus on than all of our problems...
Oh easy peasy! Just solve all of societies problems! Sarcasm aside, that’s really hard
Is it though?
How many poor people who have their lives made instantly better enough to think twice before voting for a demented convicted felon orange fascist, using only a fraction of the obscene wealth of Elon Musk alone?
If it were easy, some country would have managed it, or at least most of it.
Not sure what Musk's has to do with it unless you think that labour has some way of seizing his assets, nor what Trump has to do with it unless you think he's running for labour leader.
It's very simple: tax the rich fucks who currently don't pay their fair share of taxes and you'll get plenty of dosh to make poor people noticeably less financially stressed out and less willing to vote for extremist shit, is what I meant by my Musk comment.
So, you could do that on income or on wealth.
On income, the "rich fucks" could be defined as the top 1% of individuals with an income over £160k. Call the average income of someone in that bracket 200k, and tax them every penny they earn - that's about £68 billion, which is net 40 billion once you subtract the tax they already pay. This is not a marginal rate of 100%, this is leaving them with no income. £40b is a decent but not massive amount, equivalent to 3% of the current budget.
That maximum shrinks from 40b to something like 20b once you decide on a marginal rate instead, and probably to something like 10b once behavioural change from those high earners trying to pay less tax.
So wealth then. The commonly touted version (I believe that's 1% on everything anyone owns over £10m) is projected to earn 24bn a year, but then rapidly be avoided by people stashing their money elsewhere. A one off wealth tax might work much better, and would work well from the point of view of "wealth inequality has increased massively, we need a once in a generation rebalancing" but this would raise 160bn once only.
If we can optimistically raise £44bn per year for a while, that works out at £1500 per household, or £30 a week. That is not nothing - many households are desperate for that much. But that is not an amount that just fixes poverty for the entire country. It is not an amount that pays for every school with RAAC to be renovated, or every GP surgery to have enough appointments, or every town to have a bus service that isn't shit.
This doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. The country does not tax the rich enough, and fixing that will help equality. But it will not turn the country around. It will also have knock on effects that make its practical efficacy even less.
So, you could do that on income or on wealth.
You could also apply the only truly fair tax: VAT.
Sales tax are great because they don't care where the money is coming from: if you can blow a lot of it, you pay a lot of taxes. If you can't, you don't. Very fair.
As for imported goods and services, apply duties to collect the money as if it was sold locally.
Finally, if you think taxing rich people enough will drive them away, consider this:
- The rich keep saying that so local government don't dare tax them, but in fact not that many follow through an actually pack up and leave.
- If they do want to leave, good riddance: they're not contributing anything to the economy anyway, and they won't be taking their local brick-and-mortars with them. If they don't have business physically in the UK, double-good riddance.
The idea that rich people will just "move their wealth elsewhere" fundamentally misunderstands how rich people's wealth actually looks like. We're talking businesses, factories and stocks here, so just tax those. It's very hard to move a supermarket out of the country.
I'm all for taxing the wealthy more heavily, and in particular those companies that operate in the UK but extract their profits to other markets, but it just isn't as simple as that.
Most of the tax opportunities to levy against wealth, capital gains or inheritance tax for example, are easily avoided. There would need to be wholesale reform of the tax system and even if any political party had the capital there really aren't that many billionaires or centi-millionaires in the country. There are 55 people in the UK with wealth over a billion.
These people are also the most able to move assets out of a tax system to one that is more forgiving or to hoard assets, transfer them to trusts and family etc.
It would take a decades long program of tax reform to generate any form of meaningful return.
Wealth taxes are part of the potential solution but the aren't the magic bullet people seem to see them as.
If it were easy, some country would have managed it, or at least most of it.
Yes, like Mexico.
That's great, but 18% out of poverty is not fixing an entire country. If labour had such results, Reform supporters would still be blaming the remaining 72% on immigrants.
Yes, but as seen in Mexico's latest election, people would be way less willing to listen.
I agree with everything you say here. I'm well aware it's long been a thing to scapegoat minorities of course, for centuries and centuries. The media isn't the primary cause, but it's the main thing that is driving us towards fascist ideas being legitimised, as I see it. Without them doing that we wouldn't be in nearly as bad a situation as we are today. We can't get to sorting out the ills as anyone who genuinely wants to is demonised and delegitimised
And our electoral system is going to force us to have a strong chance of a fascist government when the majority don't want it
If people don’t strategically vote green or parliament refuses to pass proportional representation. Britain is toast.
Extermism and populism can also be effectively astroturfed by a state actor with a well-trained troll farm and some bots.
This wouldn't be happening if Labour had competent leadership. Instead, Starmer is letting Farage and his mob drive the agenda, even shamelessly adopting the worst of their policies, such as the harassment of people with indefinite leave to remain: follow the rules, work with the system, get cated and screwed over. Great fucking message. And the fascists are still not going to vote Labour. It'll just encourage Labour's voters to stay home or vote Green.
This wouldn't be happening without Russia actively funding right wing extremism everywhere.
But yeah, what the FUCK is up with Starmer? He's not doing social democratic policy, he's doing right wing nutjob shit. What is that?
I’m not sure I agree. That’s not me saying Labour’s leadership is competent.
But we keep circling around “the message just isn’t being heard”.
I think the message js being heard fine, it’s just that people disagree with it. Labour’s core philosophy around how we should treat refugees and asylum seekers just doesn’t line up with what many voters believe.
Until we recognise that people, rightly or wrongly (I believe it’s wrongly, but that’s beside the point), feel immigration really genuinely is too high, and “we should take care of our own first”, Labour will, I think, continue to lose (as will the Tories) and Reform will continue to gain.
The social democrats of Denmark “solved” this. And when I say “solved”, I simply mean they adopted a policy on immigration that I personally don’t agree with, but one which has kept the more extreme views out of too much influence. Their argument, at least the public argument, is that “immigration puts pressure on those with few resources first” and “to look after those people, we need to curb immigration”. They call this “good social democratic policy”, and call out that immigration can’t be seen as more important than looking after those we’ve got.
If Labour wants to regain relevance in the industrial ghost-towns, they have to move towards an expressed and inacted “harder line” on immigration.
I don’t think they will, or can, or should. And therefore we are seeing weird FPTP results all around the country (LibDem suddenly have a huge chance of winning my own constituency, where before they were a remote third), but with an overall push towards Reform UK.
If you really want to change that picture, supporting our education system so that people vote backed by data, not by emotions, is the real change we need. But that doesn’t serve anyone - the uneducated can much more easily be told what to believe and thus vote.
Maybe Immigration and asylum seekers are not our biggest fucking problems. By constantly focusing and oscillating the discourse around a false dichotomy like that (immigrants, YES! vs immigrants, NO!), you can only but lose to populists and extremists.
Focus on proactive measures making people's lives better, state long term goals, focus on education, healthcare, and running a fair and functioning society, and most other ills are either resolved or see great improvement.
Inmigrants are a red fucking herring when we have profoundly and absurdly rich people using their wealth to manipulate democracy in order to get ever more money and power.
I mean, there's a reason most countries don't do what you're describing, and that's that it's economic suicide. It's easy to forget it what with the fascism and all that, but the first world is currently going through a demographic crisis and needs all the labor it can get.
In that case our democracy has lost all meaning.
If we can't do what's right, or best, for society, because "the economy" says so, then the economy has become the de facto governing principle of our nations. Which is clearly the case, as we can see.
If money is power, then capitalism is a form of government. But capitalism doesn't say shit about good human life, good human society, it only concerns itself with the accumulation and production of "wealth", and "good human society" is at best an afterthought, at worst an impediment to that process.
The whole world has become a game of monopoly. The rules suck, it's unfair, and in the end someone will flip the board and there will be violence.
then the economy has become the de facto governing principle of our nations
Always has been? Like, we tend to abstract this stuff as "the economy,"* but of course the (or at least a) governing principle of any society is keeping its members at least somewhat fed and clothed. Even if cutting immigration was going to curb the rise of the far right (it won't), it's not an option because it'd seriously compromise the welfare of society.
*This is ignoring the other economy, which refers to rich people's yacht money.
I 100% agree. I was talking about what I think Labour should do if it wants to stay relevant in British politics, not what I believe we, as a country, should do.
It would, because competent labour leadership wouldn't be able to magic up the growth they need to not have to have a shit choice at each budget. The best leadership in the world can't undo years of underinvestment and a massive spike in inflation, but had to pretend they could to get into power.