Carl Benjamin, on the Lotus Eaters, recently compared the right-wing ecosystem in Britain to the Middle Ages, with various dukes and barons now expected to declare for either Restore Britain or Reform UK.
Farage just wants to be welcomed to the Tories table after being scorned by them for many decades. Rupert Lowe won't tolerate any Tories who are culpable for the situation that Britain finds itself. Rupert Lowe is out there to change Britain and that makes all the difference.
If there is anything to be criticized in this piece of yours, Mr. Morgoth, it is that - unlike all your other work - what you explain is all-too-obvious or, more correctly, _should_ be all-too-obvious. And yet the mere fact that there is a controversy around it demonstrates that it needed to be spelt out. Thank you for that.
TBH, basically the only person/show from GB News that I followed in any capacity was Neil Oliver in the good old Covid days. I thought he put out very solid work on that topic at the time. I haven´t been able to find anything from him on the Reform vs Restore question. From what I understand he´s still with GB News. Maybe he´ll have something to say on this topic.
That sphere seems to prefer David Kurten and Heritage Party, who I genuinely have a good deal of respect for. Alas, they just don't have that X Factor.
It's actively depressing discussing this stuff with normies. They just cannot see the frame at all, and I don't know why. They cannot see the Punch and Judy show, it's like it's been performed in front of them for so long that its seeped into their subconscious as the correctly ordered 'way things are'. "Of course you vote for the least-worst option, that's what democracy is!" says the normie, with a knowing chuckle, for he 'knows' that your naivety of attempting to vote for actual change is folly. "Better the devil you know!" he wryly smirks, as he puts the mark in the box of Backstabby McBackstabber for the 100th time.
It shouldn't shock me that the normie can't see the Punch and Judy show. It was created precisely because it was effective. I have a more emergent phenomena view than most in our circle, so it seems to me that such things arise organically to meet the dual demands of power and the psychological need of the lumpen to not have the unveiled face of power shoved in their face. It has arisen and stuck around precisely because it's effective at serving these two ends, so it really shouldn't depress me as much as it does that it's effective -- that's why it's here.
I don't think Farage started Reform in its current incarnation as a cunning plot hand-in-hand with the Tories, frankly I don't think he has the farsightedness or impulse control for such a thing. Rather, I think he is a weak, vain man and the various rats feeling the sinking Tory ship saw Reform as a good opportunity to further their own duplicitous careers. In short order, Reform goes from being an ill-controlled, uninspiring populist rabble to being a vehicle for failed Tories. It was always going to be captured by subversive elements of the Punch and Judy right precisely because of its unseriousness.
But that's also why anyone who can see the Punch and Judy show should agree with your tweet, Morgoth. It doesn't matter if we win or lose in '29. What matters is destroying the uniparty: destroying the Punch and Judy show. This is simply a continuation of the motivating factors behind Zero Seats. If Restore solely serves the purpose of fragmenting the attempt of the Punch and Judy right to reassemble itself then it will have done a sufficient job. If that means more Labour, or Labour with a Green spin, so sodding be it. Until the traitors on our side of the aisle are purged to extinction there can be no political solution, so I care not a whit what else comes to power in the interim.
"Who knows what shoots may begin to sprout through the ground?"
Even at the policy level they won't allow any new thinking. Thus we had Farage haranguing unemployed young people for "not working hard enough" and promises to ban working from home even though many *employers* use it to save on overheads.
Taken together with the promise to repeal the new employment and renters legislation it just lies bare what neoliberalism is: a stick to continually beat people with to keep them down while the elite feasts in the trough.
Because you see what the centre right understand above all is the power of FEAR. Survey data from the Financial Times shows the average Reform / Tory voter is way to the left of those parties on economics. But they keep voting for them because they're afraid of Labour's economic record.
I said it when they got elected I'll say it again here: Labour won't make it to 2029. The leadership is incompetent and deeply unpopular with the rest of the party. They don't have answers to the country's problems. Starmer is more concerned with pursuing the Ukraine agenda.
I think the US will be watching Britain very closely. They aren't going to let their point man in Europe slip away. Britain has the fourth highest savings in private pension funds. Its gilts have the highest yields in the G7.
It wouldn't take much to induce a financial crisis which would stampede Middle England back into the arms of a Tory-Reform coalition in an emergency election. Farage himself said there could be "economic meltdown" by 2027. So I reckon Labour will be out of office by the middle of next year.
I think they'll give us removing the illegals in hotels and stopping the boats. But we'll also ape Trump in getting a lot of performative cruelty around "people on benefits". It's already in the Reform manifesto that unemployed people will have four months to find a job and then no more money. This is the American model. It's how you end up with city centres full of people with nothing to do but mill around and take drugs. To some extent we're partially there already.
Neil O'Brien has just published a "welfare atlas". It's basically a map of the areas his party deindustrialised and then flooded with foreigners. Given the ever rising food prices and threats to the food supply itself it might well end up being a death map.
They'll expand the prison system to take some of them and they'll probably stop publishing the job vacancy data.
In the US I can't say for sure what Trump will do about Iran but I certainly don't see him launching an all out attack. The military clearly has cold feet. He himself, like Farage actually, looks increasingly tired. Maybe he'll accept standing down to be replaced by Vance who, to me, looks truly dangerous.
I wish I had something positive to say but in the short term I don't.
I think you underestimate how tired working-class people are of being bled white, paying taxes for people on benefits. It's true of course, that they're being ripped off in all manner of ways, but they actually see people on ''PIP'' living it large while they graft day and night.
No one lives it large on PIP and it is not an easy benefit to claim. I can tell you that from having accompanied genuinely ill people to DWP tribunals.
They are only tired because they're continually incited to see things that way. The unemployment system is the most miserly and punitive in Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people have had their benefits sanctioned and it has led to scores of deaths. On top of that we have policies like the bedroom tax.
Britain abandoned Full Employment in 1979. Currently there are 1.84 million unemployed people versus around 700,000 job vacancies and most likely quite a few of the latter are ghost vacancies. One of the purposes of mass immigration is to keep that ratio in place. Ditto Bank of England monetary policy. Its November report stated it was "building slack in the labour market" AKA increasing unemployment to dampen inflation.
All you've done there is do what Lefties do about immigration and multiculturalism: deny actual reality.
Sorry but this simply isn't true and comes across as Jeremy Corbyn idealism.
Everyone knows people gaming the benefits system. I was very poor at it and suffered.
I understand where you're coming from with your left-leaning anti-neoliberalism, but I think you've swung too far in lionising ''the poor''.
I of course totally agree that immigration is used to flood the jobs market, but that doesn't change the fact that there are millions out there taking advantage. Indeed, it was when I realised the jobs agencies and dole were in cahoots that the last vestiges of belief in the system evaporated.
There is a strong case to be made that people should simply grab what they can.
I worked as a functional assessor dealing with new claimants and those up for review for 6 months after leaving clinical nursing. The system is having the tits milked off it. In my experience, those that were honest struggled to reach the required amount of points. I got feed up with people lying to my face, usually those that had done their homework looking at all the info on how to claim from online forums etc. During the 5 week training the “claimant experience” was always mentioned. The contractors SERCO and INGEUS are nothing but bottom feeders.
It's not a question of lionising the poor, it's knowing how the system is set up not to be gamed. I'm perfectly realistic about human nature. Maybe some people work on the side and take the wages in cash so it can't be spotted by the DWP - it's all linked up between the DWP and HMRC now and they can demand to inspect your bank account. But it won't be many white Brits doing that.
"Everyone knows people gaming the benefits system"
Everyone says they know someone. I've had these discussions before in Reform group chats. People say "I know a guy who claims..." and you say "What's his name and where does he live?" And they prevaricate.
Then you say "What benefit is his claiming? Is he claiming it fraudulently?" and they prevaricate some more. Then you offer the DWP benefit fraud line and suggest they report it. And they don't. I've had that conversation so many times.
Because this guy is a figment of their imagination. At most it's someone in their street they don't like the look of mixed up with the degraded people who appeared in "Benefits street". When that docu-series was made there were 3.5 people to each job vacancy.
Anyway, what will be will be. They come in, they'll limit unemployment claims to 4 months, they'll stop people claiming the higher rate of UC for various illnesses and the number of people who are not in work won't shift an inch because it's not designed to.
I don’t doubt it. My sister’s husbands parents were on the dole for decades before reaching pensionable age. These folk lived in Teeside, but having worked in the South in A&E departments for 25 years, there was no shortage of people on benefits who had frequent A&E attendences or “regulars” as they are known. Meanwhile, you have some poor individual on chemotherapy still trying to work because they have to, to avoid penury. Successive governments of all stripes have promised welfare reform for decades. They never succeed because they are liberal and don’t have the bollocks for it.
My mother worked part time when I was a kid and got income support. In 1994 when I reached the age of 14 she was made to take a full time job which she then did until she retired at 68.
Farage just wants to be welcomed to the Tories table after being scorned by them for many decades. Rupert Lowe won't tolerate any Tories who are culpable for the situation that Britain finds itself. Rupert Lowe is out there to change Britain and that makes all the difference.
If there is anything to be criticized in this piece of yours, Mr. Morgoth, it is that - unlike all your other work - what you explain is all-too-obvious or, more correctly, _should_ be all-too-obvious. And yet the mere fact that there is a controversy around it demonstrates that it needed to be spelt out. Thank you for that.
We're seeing who has and has not got stakes in the system, and I've genuinely been surprised.
What have been your biggest surprises (if you think it proper to share that)?
GB News seems to have a pass to simply be a Reform propaganda outlet, despite being hounded by Ofcom in the past for bias, that's fine now, it seems.
TBH, basically the only person/show from GB News that I followed in any capacity was Neil Oliver in the good old Covid days. I thought he put out very solid work on that topic at the time. I haven´t been able to find anything from him on the Reform vs Restore question. From what I understand he´s still with GB News. Maybe he´ll have something to say on this topic.
That sphere seems to prefer David Kurten and Heritage Party, who I genuinely have a good deal of respect for. Alas, they just don't have that X Factor.
It's actively depressing discussing this stuff with normies. They just cannot see the frame at all, and I don't know why. They cannot see the Punch and Judy show, it's like it's been performed in front of them for so long that its seeped into their subconscious as the correctly ordered 'way things are'. "Of course you vote for the least-worst option, that's what democracy is!" says the normie, with a knowing chuckle, for he 'knows' that your naivety of attempting to vote for actual change is folly. "Better the devil you know!" he wryly smirks, as he puts the mark in the box of Backstabby McBackstabber for the 100th time.
It shouldn't shock me that the normie can't see the Punch and Judy show. It was created precisely because it was effective. I have a more emergent phenomena view than most in our circle, so it seems to me that such things arise organically to meet the dual demands of power and the psychological need of the lumpen to not have the unveiled face of power shoved in their face. It has arisen and stuck around precisely because it's effective at serving these two ends, so it really shouldn't depress me as much as it does that it's effective -- that's why it's here.
I don't think Farage started Reform in its current incarnation as a cunning plot hand-in-hand with the Tories, frankly I don't think he has the farsightedness or impulse control for such a thing. Rather, I think he is a weak, vain man and the various rats feeling the sinking Tory ship saw Reform as a good opportunity to further their own duplicitous careers. In short order, Reform goes from being an ill-controlled, uninspiring populist rabble to being a vehicle for failed Tories. It was always going to be captured by subversive elements of the Punch and Judy right precisely because of its unseriousness.
But that's also why anyone who can see the Punch and Judy show should agree with your tweet, Morgoth. It doesn't matter if we win or lose in '29. What matters is destroying the uniparty: destroying the Punch and Judy show. This is simply a continuation of the motivating factors behind Zero Seats. If Restore solely serves the purpose of fragmenting the attempt of the Punch and Judy right to reassemble itself then it will have done a sufficient job. If that means more Labour, or Labour with a Green spin, so sodding be it. Until the traitors on our side of the aisle are purged to extinction there can be no political solution, so I care not a whit what else comes to power in the interim.
Quite, it reaches a point where you just have to consider which option won't keep you awake at night.
"Who knows what shoots may begin to sprout through the ground?"
Even at the policy level they won't allow any new thinking. Thus we had Farage haranguing unemployed young people for "not working hard enough" and promises to ban working from home even though many *employers* use it to save on overheads.
Taken together with the promise to repeal the new employment and renters legislation it just lies bare what neoliberalism is: a stick to continually beat people with to keep them down while the elite feasts in the trough.
Because you see what the centre right understand above all is the power of FEAR. Survey data from the Financial Times shows the average Reform / Tory voter is way to the left of those parties on economics. But they keep voting for them because they're afraid of Labour's economic record.
https://www.ft.com/content/d5f1d564-8c08-4711-b11d-9c6c7759f2b8
I said it when they got elected I'll say it again here: Labour won't make it to 2029. The leadership is incompetent and deeply unpopular with the rest of the party. They don't have answers to the country's problems. Starmer is more concerned with pursuing the Ukraine agenda.
I think the US will be watching Britain very closely. They aren't going to let their point man in Europe slip away. Britain has the fourth highest savings in private pension funds. Its gilts have the highest yields in the G7.
It wouldn't take much to induce a financial crisis which would stampede Middle England back into the arms of a Tory-Reform coalition in an emergency election. Farage himself said there could be "economic meltdown" by 2027. So I reckon Labour will be out of office by the middle of next year.
I think they'll give us removing the illegals in hotels and stopping the boats. But we'll also ape Trump in getting a lot of performative cruelty around "people on benefits". It's already in the Reform manifesto that unemployed people will have four months to find a job and then no more money. This is the American model. It's how you end up with city centres full of people with nothing to do but mill around and take drugs. To some extent we're partially there already.
Neil O'Brien has just published a "welfare atlas". It's basically a map of the areas his party deindustrialised and then flooded with foreigners. Given the ever rising food prices and threats to the food supply itself it might well end up being a death map.
They'll expand the prison system to take some of them and they'll probably stop publishing the job vacancy data.
In the US I can't say for sure what Trump will do about Iran but I certainly don't see him launching an all out attack. The military clearly has cold feet. He himself, like Farage actually, looks increasingly tired. Maybe he'll accept standing down to be replaced by Vance who, to me, looks truly dangerous.
I wish I had something positive to say but in the short term I don't.
I think you underestimate how tired working-class people are of being bled white, paying taxes for people on benefits. It's true of course, that they're being ripped off in all manner of ways, but they actually see people on ''PIP'' living it large while they graft day and night.
No one lives it large on PIP and it is not an easy benefit to claim. I can tell you that from having accompanied genuinely ill people to DWP tribunals.
They are only tired because they're continually incited to see things that way. The unemployment system is the most miserly and punitive in Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people have had their benefits sanctioned and it has led to scores of deaths. On top of that we have policies like the bedroom tax.
Britain abandoned Full Employment in 1979. Currently there are 1.84 million unemployed people versus around 700,000 job vacancies and most likely quite a few of the latter are ghost vacancies. One of the purposes of mass immigration is to keep that ratio in place. Ditto Bank of England monetary policy. Its November report stated it was "building slack in the labour market" AKA increasing unemployment to dampen inflation.
All you've done there is do what Lefties do about immigration and multiculturalism: deny actual reality.
Sorry but this simply isn't true and comes across as Jeremy Corbyn idealism.
Everyone knows people gaming the benefits system. I was very poor at it and suffered.
I understand where you're coming from with your left-leaning anti-neoliberalism, but I think you've swung too far in lionising ''the poor''.
I of course totally agree that immigration is used to flood the jobs market, but that doesn't change the fact that there are millions out there taking advantage. Indeed, it was when I realised the jobs agencies and dole were in cahoots that the last vestiges of belief in the system evaporated.
There is a strong case to be made that people should simply grab what they can.
I worked as a functional assessor dealing with new claimants and those up for review for 6 months after leaving clinical nursing. The system is having the tits milked off it. In my experience, those that were honest struggled to reach the required amount of points. I got feed up with people lying to my face, usually those that had done their homework looking at all the info on how to claim from online forums etc. During the 5 week training the “claimant experience” was always mentioned. The contractors SERCO and INGEUS are nothing but bottom feeders.
It's not a question of lionising the poor, it's knowing how the system is set up not to be gamed. I'm perfectly realistic about human nature. Maybe some people work on the side and take the wages in cash so it can't be spotted by the DWP - it's all linked up between the DWP and HMRC now and they can demand to inspect your bank account. But it won't be many white Brits doing that.
"Everyone knows people gaming the benefits system"
Everyone says they know someone. I've had these discussions before in Reform group chats. People say "I know a guy who claims..." and you say "What's his name and where does he live?" And they prevaricate.
Then you say "What benefit is his claiming? Is he claiming it fraudulently?" and they prevaricate some more. Then you offer the DWP benefit fraud line and suggest they report it. And they don't. I've had that conversation so many times.
Because this guy is a figment of their imagination. At most it's someone in their street they don't like the look of mixed up with the degraded people who appeared in "Benefits street". When that docu-series was made there were 3.5 people to each job vacancy.
Anyway, what will be will be. They come in, they'll limit unemployment claims to 4 months, they'll stop people claiming the higher rate of UC for various illnesses and the number of people who are not in work won't shift an inch because it's not designed to.
My wife's best friend has never worked a day in her life. Neither have my brother's friends.
So, you know, real.
But again the question is, why bother?
I don’t doubt it. My sister’s husbands parents were on the dole for decades before reaching pensionable age. These folk lived in Teeside, but having worked in the South in A&E departments for 25 years, there was no shortage of people on benefits who had frequent A&E attendences or “regulars” as they are known. Meanwhile, you have some poor individual on chemotherapy still trying to work because they have to, to avoid penury. Successive governments of all stripes have promised welfare reform for decades. They never succeed because they are liberal and don’t have the bollocks for it.
How has she / they managed to do that?
My mother worked part time when I was a kid and got income support. In 1994 when I reached the age of 14 she was made to take a full time job which she then did until she retired at 68.