A plurality of Brits see Reform, their policies, and their voters as racist – politicalbetting.com
A plurality of Brits see Reform, their policies, and their voters as racist – politicalbetting.com
Labour have been on the attack, branding Reform UK policies "racist" . A new YouGov poll for @itvpeston.bsky.social examines what Britons think% saying Reform UK…policies are generally racist: 46% (net +10)party is generally racist: 47% (net +11)voters are generally racist: 43% (net +8)
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If Farage comes next you'll be yearning for the days of Starmer and Reeves.
IN the world according to @Keir_Starmer if I grew up in, say, Somalia, I could credibly claim to be Somalian. Could I? Really? I think that would be laughable.
https://x.com/sundersays/status/1973352925880787217
https://x.com/IsabelOakeshott/status/1973051041428963374
I actually have a bigger issue with the reverse. Joe Biden's claims to be Irish wind me up no end.
If so worrying that 60% of current Conservative voters don't consider Reform to be racist, that could be another 10% Reform could gain from them.
The net change to NI was a tax increase, as you know full well.
Was it enough to close the deficit entirely? No. Was it an unfunded tax cut? Also no.
But I’m not sure every time a political partner makes a stupid statement we need to be demanding politicians disavow it. A party official or politician is one thing but this is a little barrel scraping.
So. Yesterday's conniptions that calling a policy racist was equivalent to calling their voters that doesn't actually exist as a distinction in the minds of the public.
When Rigby asked Starmer today did he think Farage is a racist, he said no nor are their supporters but their policy is racist
Therefore Starmer concludes neither Farage or Reform voters are racist
How can you square a circle ?
His alleged schoolday anti-Semitism, his vile race-baiting politics and his dislike of people whose colour is darker than his pasty mush should be called out everyday and not celebrated. I posted earlier a Telegraph piece reporting that a Reform councillor in Cumbria? had promised to "shoot Starmer myself", yet according to Yusuf Starmer calling Reform POLICIES racist means Starmer has put a target on Farage's back.
Although when Farage made his broadcast one couldn't deny it was clever because the BBC and the Mail would deliberately misinterpret what Starmer had stated as a real and present threat. It was clever, but it is straight from the Trump playbook. The ghosts of the 1930s are here.
Come on you Tories, call this Charlatan who will devastate the country you love, out. Calling out Farage doesn't mean you don't support stopping the small boats.
If you grow up in the UK/Somalia and take British/Somali citizenship then you are British/Somalian.
If you do not take citizenship, then you are not.
I am British but like you grew up as a child overseas. We never took citizenship of the country I was living in then. After 7 years as ex-pats living there, we moved back home to the UK. Could I claim to be from there? No, I would not. Did it influence me? Yes, of course.
Had we taken citizenship and had I still lived there could I claim to be from there? Yes.
The moment someone takes British citizenship, they are British. Where they were born is inconsequential at that point. However if someone has not yet taken it, they're not.
Kids who go to international schools don't get to call themselves the nationality within which that school happens to be.
It's a powerful and authoritative eirenic stance. That is the type of gesture that could turn around chronic division in the USA, by comparison especially with Trump's 'I hate my enemies, and we will take revenge.' It has potential to build bridges, not walls.
The shooter's family may now be left adrift - given the USA, will possibly be subject to hostility, and have now most likely lost a breadwinner for years, or for life if found guilty.
I can think of parallels, but not many. One may be the disciplined peacefulness of the Civil Rights Movement, or Ghandi's campaign (which i do not know well), or the attitude John Wesley wrote about in his journal of a Moravian community emigrating to the USA when at risk in a storm. Or amongst persecuted church communities in different places, or amongst threatened Muslim communities in the UK asserting their community's values of peace & quiet enjoyment (the legal term) in OUR political maelstrom.
I think the most distinctive tweet is this reply:
Gail Finke @gailfinke
While I think this is lovely in theory, does anyone know anything about the wife? I haven't seen much about the shooter at all, and nothing about her. I would like to think she had no idea he meant to do this, but I don't know one way or the other.
10:33 PM · Sep 30, 2025· 5,603 Views
Derek Andersen @DerekjAndersen 17h
It actually doesn't matter. Our response to the tragedy is not contingent on her feelings or actions regarding us. This is the way.
The political responses will be a thing to watch.
I think almost every Tory (or ex-Tory like myself) on this site believes that and openly says it.
That if her kids are raised in the UAE, then a future government may not see them as fully British?
It's because of the Irish experience of emigration, that was so prevalent that the Irish population continued to decline after the famine and didn't reach a minimum until the 1960s, that the Irish have tended to maintain stronger links between emigrant communities and family back home.
So, well, you might find it "amusing", but the main reason it happens is that the English fucked up Ireland so very badly that the majority of people were forced to leave the place. Which doesn't seem that amusing to me, really.
Arguably bred could be a synonym for ‘conceived’, but I really don’t want that to be the case.
Very interesting analysis of where the various party’s voters fall on by politics & by job category.
And your party leaders are wringing their hands. Kemi considers Starmer's accusation as schoolboy insults, that being so she is tacitly agreeing that Starmer is wrong, and Farage and his policies are not racist. F*** him, f*** Reform then once you have done that take the attack to Labour if you wish.
And why is it not enough. Big G, David, myself and many, many, many more Tories and ex-Tories routinely call out Farage and oppose him and vote against him. That's all anyone can do in a democracy.
There's a reason why most Tories here are Tories and not Reform voters.
My tongue was in my cheek, but the main thrust of my argument stands. As for "bred" you are splitting hairs, we are both children of immigrants, my parents were only second language English speakers. We both grew up and were educated in England. I can't see how you can put a cigarette paper between our upbringings.
That's because of how much emigration there was from Ireland and it's one of the larger differences between Ireland and England as countries.
Now sure, most Irish people will still have a laugh about US Presidents visiting and having their distant relations presented to them, but it's building on a real cultural difference in the way that ties between emigrant communities and Ireland are maintained.
But if he's not personally racist, then he's something worse: someone who is fully willing to use racism and racists to achieve his own political ends. And that'd be worse because he knows it's wrong.
(Gets list out of an Ian Allen ABC...)
https://x.com/noelreports/status/1973385539706392684
They’re having a rather unlucky day.
They spoke to a black man of a similar shade to Lammy on a BBC Vox Pop yesterday afternoon who said he was scared to go into his city centre because they thought he was an asylum seeker.
I think we've just about had enough of Robinson and Farage and their fellow travellers
(Edit - damn auto(in)correct!)
I do agree with you - on the spectrum from 'English' to 'not English', Rishi Sunak is right up at the former end. I just disagree that 'born and bred' is the phrase to use.
But 90% of people use it the way you do. I am fighting a rearguard action for it in the same way that I am for 'disinterested' - because if we use 'born and bred' (or disinterested) to mean 'born and raised' (or indifferent) we no longer have a word to use when we definitely do want to say 'born and bred' (or disinterested).
Although it seems to be that there are more Americans who self-report German ancestry than either English or Irish ancestry. Just as with industrialisation, immigration to the US seems to be something that the English took an early lead on, but the Germans later surpassed us.
Because Americans mostly ended up speaking English we sometimes have an assumption of thinking that they're mostly of British descent, but more immigrants will have been from the European continent.
Picking my words carefully as I was there at the time...
There was a huge backlash against what was perceived as corporate socialism in the 1970s - what was perceived as the abject surrender of Heath and the Conservatives to the NUM in 1974 was fresh in the memory and among some there was a vitriolic opposition to what was seen as over-mighty Union power which had proven itself, seemingly, more powerful than the democratic process itself.
Fascist imagery was prevalent at the time - David Bowie, for instance, in 1976 took that imagery into the musical mainstream while you'd had the movie A Clockwork Orange in 1971. Young people were influenced by it and whether that found a voice in punk and other forms of nihilism or anarchy or in an homage to the European authoritarianism of the 1930s depended on the individuals and the surroundings.
On top of that was the growing sense the post-war economic settlement - Butskellism - had failed or was failing and a new economic model needed to be created as the country drifted into stagflation and what seemed like a dead end socially and politically.
He once said that the reason he didn’t like the privately educated was we think we’re better than everybody else.
I replied that’s not true, I don’t think I am better than everybody else, I know I am better than everybody else.
His wife knew I was joking as did his daughter but it confirmed his worse suspicions about me.
Thief, Baggins !!!
Badenoch called both Starmer AND Farage as '2 schoolboys squabbling in the schoolyard '
Badenoch will next week lay our clear lines between Starmer AND Farage
(Not a criticism of you; I'm just interested.)
Did humiliating me like one of Farage's Reform b*tches enhance the conversation?😭
Still, Russia's sent many of the people supposed to fight wildfires to the front, and we can hope that the winds are favourable...
Though small in number compared to overall immigration, the boats are totemic and Starmer has not stemmed the flow despite all his policies
Indeed Rwanda scheme is rising in popularity in the polls and certainly detaining all on landing and sending them immediately on block to a safe country to process their claims would do that
This is the big test for Starmer and one in one out will not cut the mustard
Jack Hadfield 🇬🇧 @JackHadders 2h
Lucy Connolly told me she came out to the Pink Ladies protest today outside Downing Street to show her support, and let them know “how proud of them” she is.
She added it was a “really unintelligent argument” to paint all of the protesters as “racist or xenophobic”
https://x.com/JackHadders/status/1973375046497468798
Background: JH is one of the in house 'independent journalists' of the movement. His background is Breitbart. (For context.)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/breitbart-racist-facebook-group-jack-hadfield-young-right-society-a8081071.html
Incidentally, here's the ngram for 'Born and bred':
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=born and bred&year_start=1500&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1;,born and bred;,c0
I'd take it to mean born (for the 'born' part!) and lived for a long time (particularly during formative years) in a location, even if elsewhere now. My wife is Yorkshire born and bred, though her dad's a southerner. Her mum's from a long line of Yorkshire folk, though, so my wife might still pass the Cookie race laws?