Cost of Living Responses
A couple of days ago, I politely put out a post on 𝕏 for Reform supporters to tell me what they understood of their party’s fiscal policies — specifically how they thought Reform UK would tackle the cost of living crisis, based on policy announcement so far.
I’ve collated a few of the replies, so let’s take a closer look at them now.
There were two clear winners in the trend analysis, but we’ll get to that a bit further down. This was my question; you can see that it has a reasonable amount of traction, and 617 replies is a decent return on a post.
There was a sizeable contingent that replied to me with — not Labour or the Tories — totally disillusioned with life under the status quo, they feel like, regardless of policy, Reform UK can’t be any worse. This group may be the most disheartening of all to me; they have no care for policy or political responsibility other than to see a change — a protest vote. This is the Brexit contingent that were sold on soundbites rather than taking a detail oriented look at the outcome. We all understand how that worked out — now.
Before I go on, this was a genuine attempt to gauge opinion. I am often bombarded with Reform UK voters telling me that I should be worried or that Farage will be our next Prime Minister. I wanted to ask a straight question and collate the replies. There is no malice or judgement attached — well, except for the outright racist replies.
Sidebar
One early respondent to the post was Councillor Michael Squires. I didn’t include his replies though as he’s an actual Reform UK councillor and has the answers to hand as part of his job; I wanted to gauge knowledge from voters and supporters of Michael’s party. I thought I should add this info for fairness’ sake. I like Michael and we often chat, although we disagree a lot!
Our next grouping is the second most popular trend across all the replies, and the one I find most worrying. I hasten to add that there is no scientific methodology at play, just my own counting. I am not a self-declared polling company — at this stage!
It seems as though Richard Tice’s incessant bombasts about ending Net Zero has had real cut through with Reform UK voters. They see it as a crucial mechanism in cutting costs across the country. No one replied with an explanation as to how this would work because Tice et al. don’t truly have an answer to that — something about using our own oil and fracking, neither of which can viably happen. But, his constant repetition of ‘net stupid zero’ appears to have landed with their base.
Whilst the soundbites come across as convincing, the economic reality hits hard; scrapping long term environmental goals would have a catastrophic impact on the county’s investment, growth, employment and GDP. This policy has been widely discredited across the board. Have a read of this extremely detailed piece in Yorkshire Bylines for a thorough explainer, but the gist is that their policy announcements don’t match up to reality. Many Reform UK people, including Richard Tice [Tesla driver], subscribe to the wider green agenda.
In a director’s report in 2022 from one of his companies, Quidnet Reit Ltd, Tice announced the installation of solar panels and EV chargers across his estate of business properties, claiming that “he had always said unsubsidised solar panels on roofs can make sense for the homeowner or business tenant”.
This from the Ferret in February.
Today is not a day for deep dives into the policy makeup of Reform UK, however, this is about the views of its support base, so we move on to the perhaps unsurprisingly the largest trend in the hundreds of replies I had — immigration.
As you can see, the overwhelming majority of responses were along the lines of the posts above — mass deportations etc. with even one respondent calling for my deportation. I guess they think that I can be forcibly removed back to my homeland of Scotland.
This is a serious concern, though; one we’re all too aware of — Reform UK is built on a single issue template. They have spent years building this cult-like following of people who only want to hear about immigration, regardless of anything else that is going on.
My initial question about how Reform would deal with the cost of living crisis has been mostly ignored by this group — they just parrot the well-worn slogans that have followed Nigel Farage since his UKIP days. A great many of these posts have racist connotations and an awful lot of them may not even be real — we know that Reform UK have artificially boosted their social media, I proved that back in January. I didn’t include any of the outright racist posts, no one needs to see that. I reported them all on 𝕏 but, without exception, they were all found not to have violated 𝕏’s policies; natch.
So, there is a real-world disconnect between policy and rhetoric that is proving hard for this group of social media users to separate. Very few engage with the actual question at hand, in favour of sloganeering. There are some, credit to them, that responded with arguments, and I’m not using this article to debunk them — that can wait for another day, but what is clear, is a monumental lack of understanding across the respondents.
You can see from some of the comments above that the numbers are not even tangentially related to reality: £100 billion in savings — £8 billion a year — 10 million foreigners — 1.2 million foreign benefit claimants — potentially billions of economic migrants.
None of these are factual, but this is the game Farage plays; facts are unimportant to Reform UK … only rhetoric. This is borne out by my question and replies.
As I mentioned at the beginning, this is not, by any stretch, a scientific study — far from it, it’s anecdotal at best, but it does give you an idea of what goes on within the online world; a world that is dominated by the far-right. A small handful engaged in good faith, but the majority only have the single issue to fall back on … immigration. It’s no wonder that it was considered only the 8th most pressing issue to voters before the last election but has now been rocket boosted into first place by Reform UK and their fan base.
In the real world, this isn’t the truth — we don’t discuss immigration day in, day out. The cost of living is a far more pressing and debilitating issue for most, but it is being drowned out by the Reform noise. Those who tried to answer my question properly were immediately drowned out by the immigration responses.
I hope you found this somewhat interesting. Thanks to everyone who replied — except the racists.
If you made it here, thank you. If you haven’t signed up, then please do — it doesn’t have to be a paid subscription. I will put out my main pieces for free, but I don’t get paid for anything I do here, so if you are feeling generous, I would be eternally grateful, and you’d be helping me get stuck into more investigations. No worries if not, though. 😃
