Child poverty exists everywhere – my wife works in a school that has its own food bank just for the families of pupils. However, a lot of the wealth that’s spoken about here (north south divide) is in housing, it *doesn’t really exist*.
My in-laws were teachers with a modest house in central Oxford they bought for less than 10k in the late 60s. They eventually downsized to Wales in retirement and cleared £400k in profit… Sorry *hard earned equity*, or so they call it.
Absolutely insane they’re sitting on final salary pensions, and almost 1/2mn in cash… when today’s teachers can’t afford a mortgage at all and often have 2nd jobs.
The far right despises the people this article is referring to so it’d be turkeys for Christmas all over again like Brexit was.
If you’re poor, on benefits, have no GCSEs then you should vote far left, those parties will coddle you.
The Far Right and Populists are always good at capitalising on divisions and inequality in society, but don’t actually offer any solutions. The Reform “manifesto” is a pretty good example. Ill thought-out, self-contradictory, unrealistic…
The only way to really stop people turning that way, though, is to provide actual solutions tp the same problems, which people can get behind. Mainstream politics isn’t doing that, and until it does, things will only get worse.
The right wing are backed by the wealthy and powerful, the left are opposed.
Putin is encouraging immigrants into Europe, stoking the far-right, so he has a nice excuse to invade where he fancies, while saying to his people at home it’s because he’s the good guy. This manipulation needs to be explained (without patronising) to the people whose situation or insecurity means they need something to blame / follow. I don’t blame the people falling for this as they have had 14 years of Tory boot on their neck…labour need to make things materially better for these people and quick, within the next 2/3 years. I have no solutions, but I’m not running for government…
Just to add – reform are the only party that says on its website that it will scrap employment laws to help employers- this is not a party on the side of the people, but it gets little coverage behind their more extreme noise they are trying to create. You need protection from your employer- no matter how nice they are, they are chasing the profit.
Mark my words, Starmer’s meek policies will only lead to an increase in the far right.
Don’t worry folks – Starmer is going to win the biggest landslide victory in British electoral history, with which he will…[checks notes]…implement more austerity (aka “iron clad fiscal discipline”), privatise the NHS (aka “reform”) and launch a series of increasingly bizarre and arbitrary authoritarian crackdowns; after five years of that, the threat of the far right will have been well and truly put to bed!
The issue with the north South divide is that as someone else said it’s based on house prices. Even though the south appears more wealthy, the individuals on lower wages (the majority of those who don’t work in London) have a harder time because they cannot get a property and their spending power is worth less and everything else costs more.
The left wing parties appear to favor those on benefits, the Tories appear to benefit those on 150k or more. The middle people feel unrepresented, and put on by both the major parties. These are the sort of people who can’t afford a private dentists and can’t get an NHS one, they would love a brand new car but drive an old banger, that’s not allowed to drive in cities anymore unless they pay a fee they can’t afford, they need a prescription but I have to pay nearly 10 pound each item as they earn slightly to much for benefits, the council tax goes up to the maximum amount every year but the bins get emptied less and less and the potholes get more and more (but never mind they’ve got nice new carpets and furniture at the council buildings).
This is why reform has picked up such a pace, the middle seems the major parties as crooks who are just emptying their pockets and making life hard.
Maybe just maybe if reform do “well” the traditional parties may look at their policies to help the waged workers a bit more.
We already have a far right Government. There is literally no policy on migration across Europe that is more right wing than the Rwanda scheme.
Reform are dead. No party which doesn’t have an MP already will win a seat in an election any time soon.
Far right (and, indeed, far left) parties usually have the issue that they can’t get activists to help them with a ground game, and they constantly have to throw people out for literally stanning Hitler or Putin or Stalin or Mao or whoever.
Basically every social group has been pulled down, really going back 20 years and including the tail-end of the New Labour years.
How it was not noticed is because the separation between social levels was maintained, giving people the sense they were ‘doing all right’. But even the middle-classes were being propped-up by welfare under New Labour, that stopped happening under the coalition of course.
It only got worse and eventually most people are bunching-up at the bottom of the down escalator of life… It’s crowded down here.
Labour do need to be quite radical but they sure aint talking that way.
The thing I cant wrap my head around is the tendency of politics to drift right as inequality grows.
How/why do people think that voting for ever increasing rightwing politicians is going to improve equality? Has that ever, anywhere actually happened?
13 comments
The full report is available here: https://fairnessfoundation.com/the-canaries
Child poverty exists everywhere – my wife works in a school that has its own food bank just for the families of pupils.
However, a lot of the wealth that’s spoken about here (north south divide) is in housing, it *doesn’t really exist*.
My in-laws were teachers with a modest house in central Oxford they bought for less than 10k in the late 60s. They eventually downsized to Wales in retirement and cleared £400k in profit… Sorry *hard earned equity*, or so they call it.
Absolutely insane they’re sitting on final salary pensions, and almost 1/2mn in cash… when today’s teachers can’t afford a mortgage at all and often have 2nd jobs.
The far right despises the people this article is referring to so it’d be turkeys for Christmas all over again like Brexit was.
If you’re poor, on benefits, have no GCSEs then you should vote far left, those parties will coddle you.
The Far Right and Populists are always good at capitalising on divisions and inequality in society, but don’t actually offer any solutions. The Reform “manifesto” is a pretty good example. Ill thought-out, self-contradictory, unrealistic…
The only way to really stop people turning that way, though, is to provide actual solutions tp the same problems, which people can get behind. Mainstream politics isn’t doing that, and until it does, things will only get worse.
The right wing are backed by the wealthy and powerful, the left are opposed.
Putin is encouraging immigrants into Europe, stoking the far-right, so he has a nice excuse to invade where he fancies, while saying to his people at home it’s because he’s the good guy. This manipulation needs to be explained (without patronising) to the people whose situation or insecurity means they need something to blame / follow. I don’t blame the people falling for this as they have had 14 years of Tory boot on their neck…labour need to make things materially better for these people and quick, within the next 2/3 years. I have no solutions, but I’m not running for government…
Just to add – reform are the only party that says on its website that it will scrap employment laws to help employers- this is not a party on the side of the people, but it gets little coverage behind their more extreme noise they are trying to create. You need protection from your employer- no matter how nice they are, they are chasing the profit.
Mark my words, Starmer’s meek policies will only lead to an increase in the far right.
Don’t worry folks – Starmer is going to win the biggest landslide victory in British electoral history, with which he will…[checks notes]…implement more austerity (aka “iron clad fiscal discipline”), privatise the NHS (aka “reform”) and launch a series of increasingly bizarre and arbitrary authoritarian crackdowns; after five years of that, the threat of the far right will have been well and truly put to bed!
The issue with the north South divide is that as someone else said it’s based on house prices. Even though the south appears more wealthy, the individuals on lower wages (the majority of those who don’t work in London) have a harder time because they cannot get a property and their spending power is worth less and everything else costs more.
The left wing parties appear to favor those on benefits, the Tories appear to benefit those on 150k or more. The middle people feel unrepresented, and put on by both the major parties.
These are the sort of people who can’t afford a private dentists and can’t get an NHS one, they would love a brand new car but drive an old banger, that’s not allowed to drive in cities anymore unless they pay a fee they can’t afford, they need a prescription but I have to pay nearly 10 pound each item as they earn slightly to much for benefits, the council tax goes up to the maximum amount every year but the bins get emptied less and less and the potholes get more and more (but never mind they’ve got nice new carpets and furniture at the council buildings).
This is why reform has picked up such a pace, the middle seems the major parties as crooks who are just emptying their pockets and making life hard.
Maybe just maybe if reform do “well” the traditional parties may look at their policies to help the waged workers a bit more.
We already have a far right Government. There is literally no policy on migration across Europe that is more right wing than the Rwanda scheme.
Reform are dead. No party which doesn’t have an MP already will win a seat in an election any time soon.
Far right (and, indeed, far left) parties usually have the issue that they can’t get activists to help them with a ground game, and they constantly have to throw people out for literally stanning Hitler or Putin or Stalin or Mao or whoever.
Basically every social group has been pulled down, really going back 20 years and including the tail-end of the New Labour years.
How it was not noticed is because the separation between social levels was maintained, giving people the sense they were ‘doing all right’. But even the middle-classes were being propped-up by welfare under New Labour, that stopped happening under the coalition of course.
It only got worse and eventually most people are bunching-up at the bottom of the down escalator of life… It’s crowded down here.
Labour do need to be quite radical but they sure aint talking that way.
The thing I cant wrap my head around is the tendency of politics to drift right as inequality grows.
How/why do people think that voting for ever increasing rightwing politicians is going to improve equality? Has that ever, anywhere actually happened?