Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 27,813]

The destitution that sets the UK apart from Europe

Social stigma against welfare benefits has made devastating poverty acceptable in Britain.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-destitution-that-sets-the-uk-apart-from-europe

 

Britain today: decaying Victorian/Edwardian terraces, decrepit postwar social housing (I Wei Huang / shutterstock.com)

 

 

Britain is in a poverty crisis. Over 14 million people (one in five) are living in poverty. Of these, four million, including one million children, are classed as destitute—regularly unable to meet basic needs for shelter, warmth, food and clothing.

Cuts to the welfare state over the last decade have contributed to a deepening of poverty in Britain not seen in any of its European neighbours. What sets Britain apart (and has made it possible for these cuts to continue) is the intense stigma placed on people living in poverty who receive state benefits.

Stigma sorts people into two categories: ‘the deserving’ and ‘the undeserving’. Elderly (pension-aged) citizens, children and disabled people have tended to fall into the deserving category, while people deemed able-bodied and hence able to work are viewed more harshly if they receive support.

This has been seen throughout the UK election campaign, in discussions about getting people back into work. The outgoing prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has said that his Conservatives intend to cut the welfare bill by getting people into work. In the last pre-election television debate, he said it was ‘not fair‘ of people on benefits not to take a job they were offered after 12 months out of work. The implication was that some people who received benefits were cheating the system.

Peculiarly British phenomenon

The social-policy researchers Robert Walker and Elaine Chase argue that using stigma to ration relief is a peculiarly British phenomenon, having declined in more egalitarian, less class-riven European states. Stereotypes pitting ‘scroungers‘ against those in ‘genuine’ need have been especially acute in the age of austerity. From 2010, the then Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition sought support for swingeing cuts to the welfare system, by persuading the public that those receiving benefits were ‘trapped in dependency’. The then Tory prime minister, David Cameron, declared ‘a war on welfare culture’ in 2011, arguing that the benefit system ‘actively encourages’ people to act irresponsibly.

A moral panic about ‘benefits cheats’ followed. Politicians and journalists portrayed working-age adults receiving benefits as a lazy or criminal group who were deliberately scamming hardworking taxpayers. Hundreds of hours of ‘reality’ television programmes exploited this theme, creating a new genre of ‘poverty porn‘.

The late social-policy expert John Hills argued that framing state welfare as an unaffordable system of cash benefits exploited by ‘economically inactive’ people was incorrect and a ruse by politicians to slash all public services. Drawing on social-attitudes data, he found that the very idea of welfare had contracted in public consciousness to a debate about ‘a stagnant group of people benefiting from it all, while the rest pay in and get nothing back—”skivers” against “strivers”’. Sunak has revived these claims with proclamations about Britain’s supposed ‘sick note culture’, with disabled people ‘parked on welfare‘.

This view is borne out in policies that have, over time, increased job search and work requirements—known as ‘conditionality’—for people receiving benefits. This is despite evidence showing such policies don’t work and that 38 per cent of people receiving the main benefit known as universal credit are in work.

For more than a decade, I have studied the effects of stigma on people living in poverty. I have interviewed health, public-sector and charity workers, including general practitioners and headteachers, about the effects of deepening poverty and the impact of this toxic stigma narrative. By framing poverty in Britain as a deserved consequence of poor life choices or a reluctance to work, stigma diverts blame from political decision-makers on to those struggling to make ends meet.

The impact of stigma

Feeling ashamed of being poor stops people seeking help and support. The gnawing anxiety that their lack of resources will be exposed to others can lead people to withdraw from social activities and become isolated. A former schoolteacher I interviewed was forced to give up work due to illness as stories about benefits cheats peaked:

You only have to watch any programme and there is evidence there that your kind are hated. These people are stealing your taxes and you’re thinking, ‘that is me they are talking about’. Trapped in this cycle of being hated by everybody … It’s relentless. Never-ending. One constant cycle of judgement. Until you are ashamed to do anything.

I am part of a team commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to investigate the effects of stigma and explore how to stop it. Our recently published report describes stigma as ‘a glue that holds poverty in place’. When politicians (through speeches and policy) and the media (through ‘reality’ TV or stigmatising reports) teach us to see poverty as a result of others’ bad choices rather than a systemic problem, it becomes socially acceptable. In this way, poverty and poverty stigma reinforce each other.

As we are exploring, stigma can be designed out of policies and services. For example, measures to ‘poverty proof‘ the school day, such as changing how meals (and free school meals) are delivered so students are not marked out as different, making school uniforms more affordable and designing school events to be accessible to everybody, can also help ‘stigma proof’ schools for children from low-income families. But this only works if organisations first listen to those living in poverty and learn to see things from their perspectives.

Poverty must be reframed as an issue of economic injustice, shifting blame away from individuals. The next government at Westminster must end the use of stigmatising labels such as ‘economically inactive‘ to describe people with disabilities or unpaid caring responsibilities, or ‘low-skilled’ to describe low-paid work. This latter point must go hand-in-hand with campaigning for greater pay equity and real living wages.

To end Britain’s poverty crisis, everyone needs to reject stigma, by exposing it for what it is—a tool used by the powerful to justify economic inequality and injustice.

[cosmicway 1,285]

Faamily pride demos.
You heard of those ?
I always thought the opposite to gay pride is milf pride - a demo of milfs seeking men.
What family pride ?

[cosmicway 1,285]

The day of waking up
 

 

[Fulham Broadway 16,528]

6 hours ago, Vesper said:

The destitution that sets the UK apart from Europe

Social stigma against welfare benefits has made devastating poverty acceptable in Britain.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-destitution-that-sets-the-uk-apart-from-europe

 

Britain today: decaying Victorian/Edwardian terraces, decrepit postwar social housing (I Wei Huang / shutterstock.com)

 

 

Britain is in a poverty crisis. Over 14 million people (one in five) are living in poverty. Of these, four million, including one million children, are classed as destitute—regularly unable to meet basic needs for shelter, warmth, food and clothing.

Cuts to the welfare state over the last decade have contributed to a deepening of poverty in Britain not seen in any of its European neighbours. What sets Britain apart (and has made it possible for these cuts to continue) is the intense stigma placed on people living in poverty who receive state benefits.

Stigma sorts people into two categories: ‘the deserving’ and ‘the undeserving’. Elderly (pension-aged) citizens, children and disabled people have tended to fall into the deserving category, while people deemed able-bodied and hence able to work are viewed more harshly if they receive support.

This has been seen throughout the UK election campaign, in discussions about getting people back into work. The outgoing prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has said that his Conservatives intend to cut the welfare bill by getting people into work. In the last pre-election television debate, he said it was ‘not fair‘ of people on benefits not to take a job they were offered after 12 months out of work. The implication was that some people who received benefits were cheating the system.

Peculiarly British phenomenon

The social-policy researchers Robert Walker and Elaine Chase argue that using stigma to ration relief is a peculiarly British phenomenon, having declined in more egalitarian, less class-riven European states. Stereotypes pitting ‘scroungers‘ against those in ‘genuine’ need have been especially acute in the age of austerity. From 2010, the then Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition sought support for swingeing cuts to the welfare system, by persuading the public that those receiving benefits were ‘trapped in dependency’. The then Tory prime minister, David Cameron, declared ‘a war on welfare culture’ in 2011, arguing that the benefit system ‘actively encourages’ people to act irresponsibly.

A moral panic about ‘benefits cheats’ followed. Politicians and journalists portrayed working-age adults receiving benefits as a lazy or criminal group who were deliberately scamming hardworking taxpayers. Hundreds of hours of ‘reality’ television programmes exploited this theme, creating a new genre of ‘poverty porn‘.

The late social-policy expert John Hills argued that framing state welfare as an unaffordable system of cash benefits exploited by ‘economically inactive’ people was incorrect and a ruse by politicians to slash all public services. Drawing on social-attitudes data, he found that the very idea of welfare had contracted in public consciousness to a debate about ‘a stagnant group of people benefiting from it all, while the rest pay in and get nothing back—”skivers” against “strivers”’. Sunak has revived these claims with proclamations about Britain’s supposed ‘sick note culture’, with disabled people ‘parked on welfare‘.

This view is borne out in policies that have, over time, increased job search and work requirements—known as ‘conditionality’—for people receiving benefits. This is despite evidence showing such policies don’t work and that 38 per cent of people receiving the main benefit known as universal credit are in work.

For more than a decade, I have studied the effects of stigma on people living in poverty. I have interviewed health, public-sector and charity workers, including general practitioners and headteachers, about the effects of deepening poverty and the impact of this toxic stigma narrative. By framing poverty in Britain as a deserved consequence of poor life choices or a reluctance to work, stigma diverts blame from political decision-makers on to those struggling to make ends meet.

The impact of stigma

Feeling ashamed of being poor stops people seeking help and support. The gnawing anxiety that their lack of resources will be exposed to others can lead people to withdraw from social activities and become isolated. A former schoolteacher I interviewed was forced to give up work due to illness as stories about benefits cheats peaked:

You only have to watch any programme and there is evidence there that your kind are hated. These people are stealing your taxes and you’re thinking, ‘that is me they are talking about’. Trapped in this cycle of being hated by everybody … It’s relentless. Never-ending. One constant cycle of judgement. Until you are ashamed to do anything.

I am part of a team commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to investigate the effects of stigma and explore how to stop it. Our recently published report describes stigma as ‘a glue that holds poverty in place’. When politicians (through speeches and policy) and the media (through ‘reality’ TV or stigmatising reports) teach us to see poverty as a result of others’ bad choices rather than a systemic problem, it becomes socially acceptable. In this way, poverty and poverty stigma reinforce each other.

As we are exploring, stigma can be designed out of policies and services. For example, measures to ‘poverty proof‘ the school day, such as changing how meals (and free school meals) are delivered so students are not marked out as different, making school uniforms more affordable and designing school events to be accessible to everybody, can also help ‘stigma proof’ schools for children from low-income families. But this only works if organisations first listen to those living in poverty and learn to see things from their perspectives.

Poverty must be reframed as an issue of economic injustice, shifting blame away from individuals. The next government at Westminster must end the use of stigmatising labels such as ‘economically inactive‘ to describe people with disabilities or unpaid caring responsibilities, or ‘low-skilled’ to describe low-paid work. This latter point must go hand-in-hand with campaigning for greater pay equity and real living wages.

To end Britain’s poverty crisis, everyone needs to reject stigma, by exposing it for what it is—a tool used by the powerful to justify economic inequality and injustice.

So many people are not aware that the Conservative Party are there solely to represent the very rich, sow division and chaos, destroy EVERY public service, and steal billions of public money. There is nothing else about them.

[cosmicway 1,285]

36 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

So many people are not aware that the Conservative Party are there solely to represent the very rich, sow division and chaos, destroy EVERY public service, and steal billions of public money. There is nothing else about them.

E vero. But now it's the Billy liars.

[Beorn 11]

On 06/07/2024 at 19:09, Fulham Broadway said:

That Richard Lynn that Beom quotes above is a totally discredited racist fuckwit and the University of Ulster withdrew his title of Professor in 2018 because he was an unmitigated twat and editor of White Supremacist journal . 

Sure , but I have literally no idea who he is , he isn’t someone I follow. He was just on one of the articles I saw following a google search. Who knows if he conducted the study himself or is just commenting on it. The point wasn’t to put Scottish or anyone else down anyway 

if you write “they aren’t the brightest over there” you’re very unlikely to receive a positive response from the people “over there”. In fact, if you wrote the exact same thing about Somalians or Pakistanis you’d be in hot water yourself. 

 

[Beorn 11]

On 06/07/2024 at 19:57, Sir Mikel OBE said:

Its actually sad.

 

This is a man from an, objectively, poor area who's only thing that he can grasp on to feel better about his lot is an idea of being superior for having white intellect. This flys in the face of reality he sees every day in living in a poor area, but when a man has nothing he will cling on to whatever he can get. Its an inferiority complex, and instead of being grateful to a wider UK(and specifically the south east), he looks his nose down on you for having immigrants. God bless him.

Great narrative, but I don’t live in a deserted village in Belarus. Let’s not get carried away 

[Fulham Broadway 16,528]

4 hours ago, Beorn said:

I have literally no idea who he is , he isn’t someone I follow. He was just on one of the articles I saw following a google search. Who knows if he conducted the study himself or is just commenting on it.

 If you look him up he lost all credibility and was stripped of his academic credentials in 2018 at the University of Ulster for being a racist fuckwit.

[YorkshireBlue 2,949]

This political topic got interesting real quick 

 

*Insert Micheal Jackson eating popcorn GIF*

[Fulham Broadway 16,528]

11 minutes ago, Beorn said:

Couldn’t care less. It’s beside the point. Are you going to provide scientific evidence showing the welsh people are unintelligent (compared to other people groups)? Or are you going to continue to make unfounded racist comments behind your computer like a coward ?

It was stating they were thick for voting Brexit. My opinion. Don't get personal with the insults or you're gone.

Several members have already asked for you to be removed. 

[Fulham Broadway 16,528]

The New Popular Front (NFP), a left-wing alliance formed at the last minute to fight the election, appears to have won the most seats. But it does not have an absolute majority.

This means it's still not clear who will run France.

Much will depend on the balance of power within the NFP. Its constituent groups range from social democrats to hardcore anti-capitalists. Some moderate socialists could be tempted to peel off and join Macron's group to form a centre-left government.

If no working majority can be cobbled together, then President Macron can ask the largest party to lead a minority government. 

[Vesper 27,813]

[Vesper 27,813]

How Nigel Farage took over my hometown – and why Keir Starmer should be worried

With the highest leave vote in the country, Boston and Skegness became known as Farageland, so it was no surprise to Zoe Beaty that it was where Reform’s Richard Tice won a seat. It is also why Labour needs to stop treating Farage like a joke

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/nigel-farage-reform-boston-skegness-starmer-labour-b2575183.html

Almost exactly 20 years ago, on June 14, 2004, I sat in my mum’s living room, turned on the TV, and watched footage of my hometown, Boston, in Lincolnshire, burning. The previous day, more than 100 people had rioted in the town, reports said. Hours after England crashed out of the Euros, tightening racial tension over immigration in the market town snapped, and erupted. Police cars were set on fire. Nearly every shop window was smashed. At school the next day we tried to grasp what happened and deduce which of us now had family members on the run from the law.

The riots were a response to a rumour, allegedly spread by the BNP, that the council was banning the flying of English flags during the football tournament. It was entirely false but that didn’t matter, and soon enough national news reports on Boston showed a portrait of a town alight with anger, a poster child of English nationalism, growing racism, discomfort and unrest.

In the years that followed I watched my home town attract more headlines – for high rates of teenage pregnancy, as the murder capital of the UK, the least integrated town in the country, the most obese and one of the poorest. By the time Brexit came around over a decade later, Boston’s migrant population – who almost exclusively do necessary “back-breaking” field and factory work in Lincolnshire’s vast food and agriculture industry – had grown by more than 460 per cent and the borough was synonymous with anti-immigration rhetoric. It resulted in the highest leave vote in the country in the referendum: just over 75 per cent, with a turnout of 74.2 per cent. Boston and neighbouring Skegness became known as Farageland.

Then came this week’s headline. While the majority of the country was swept up in Labour’s landslide victory, in Thursday’s general election Richard Tice, chairman of Reform UK, won one of five seats for the party in the constituency of Boston and Skegness, ending a 27-year Conservative hold.

A shock? Yes, that Matt Warman, who served as MP in the constituency for nine years, was ousted from one of the very safest Conservative seats in the UK. But the fact that it was Reform who were responsible, less so. In fact, in the four hours it took me to drive home yesterday, I had several messages from friends and family saying exactly that. “It’s no surprise,” was the gist of most of our post-match analysis; if you lived there, you could see it coming.

For years, fringe right-wing parties have often been treated as a bit of a joke by mainstream politicians. At the launch of Labour’s manifesto last month, Keir Starmer declared he was bidding to run the UK, “not a circus”. “If you want politics as pantomime, I hear Clacton is nice this time of year,” he ribbed.

Despite obvious warnings – the substantial rise in race hate crime post-Brexit, the growing presence of the far right in Europe; Marine Le Pen’s fandom for UKIP – Farage and the rest of his cast were rarely treated as a real political threat until the very last minute. Now it’s beginning to look like the joke’s firmly on Westminster.

According to analysis, despite winning just five seats in the election, Reform received more than four million votes: that’s 600,000 more than the Liberal Democrats, who took 71 seats in total. Without the first past the post system – which Farage immediately denigrated upon winning his first election, on his eighth try – Reform would now be the third biggest party in the UK, after winning almost 15 per cent of the popular vote.

The party came second in 103 seats, despite only being reformed in 2021, and have found voters in all age groups – 8 per cent of those aged 18 to 24 picked Reform on the ballot; 9 per cent of those aged 25 to 34. “We’re coming for Labour,” Farage told his audience in Clacton, Essex, the seaside town he now represents in parliament.

Like everyone else from Boston and Skegness, I’m well aware by now that these threats aren’t just part of Farage’s circus show. In fact, it looked shockingly easy, first for Farage during the Brexit campaign, and now Tice, very recently, to pull large swathes of these towns further over to their agenda.

A recent trip back to visit my family provided a small snapshot of why. On a walk around the town centre I ended up by the local police station, adjacent to a now-empty B&M store in the shadow of the Stump, Boston’s famously foreboding church. The walls of the abandoned building were wrapped in bright, grossly optimistic adverts for the government’s Levelling Up fund, which promised £14.8m investment for the square; below them were several dank mattresses and threadbare tents where rough sleepers dwell.

The thing is, Boston is lacking in much more significant things than a nice-looking new square. And for years – since way back in 2004, well before Brexit and for all the years after – promises made by successive governments have left gaping holes where they’ve failed to materialise. Beyond the headlines, Boston is a complex case study of the effects of austerity, a growing population and what happens when there’s a profound lack of infrastructure to support it. Weak, or non-existent regulations on houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) and gangmasters – a person who oversees the work of manual labourers – early on left hefty dents; schools have long been extremely oversubscribed, and the local hospital, the Pilgrim, is stretched way beyond its capacity.

Despite many locals’ insistence that leaving the EU was the right thing to do, Brexit hasn’t improved anything and has simply further harmed the area’s biggest economy, agriculture. Coupled with rising rents and a cost of living crisis, Boston’s high street, like many in the country, has been decimated. Crime in Boston is 50 per cent higher than in the rest of Lincolnshire.

It’s not easy living somewhere that feels unsafe. Farage set up shop – literally, in a former second-hand shop – in the town before the 2015 election. He saw that the fear and resentment that grows in environments like Boston presents an opportunity. An opportunity to weaponise already harmful prejudice for political gain and a personal agenda.

In his party’s latest incarnation as Reform, immigration has once again been the central campaigning issue, and racism and prejudice is even less cloaked (as revealed by Channel 4’s undercover investigation, which the party denounced as “election interference”). While Farage took to the podium yesterday giving his “100 per cent promise” to rid Reform of “bad apples” after the party had to suspend multiple candidates for racist and homophobic comments, in my mind, much of the racist rhetoric has simply been rebranded as “common sense”.

Reform also sold the election to Boston on the idea that it represents “real issues that affect real people, that don’t affect the metropolitan middle class, who aren’t in the real world” (apart from its two metropolitan upper-middle class leaders). And it’s this that we can’t afford to ignore: however cynical, a party that successfully engages a growing class of dangerously disillusioned people wields an awful lot of power. In the end, Reform helped Labour to win more than 400 seats, but the upstart’s solid performance in huge swathes of red wall seats means his warning to Sir Keir that it was now “going after Labour votes” should be heeded.

It seems quite mad to me that Boston – which wholeheartedly rejects the bourgeoisie, and where child poverty increased to 30 per cent last year – would choose a privately educated multimillionaire property developer who had never set foot in the area until mere weeks ago to represent them. Whether Tice and Reform can deliver plausible answers to big questions this small town needs is another thing entirely. I hear that Tice, from London, has “promised” to move to the area, which feels like a start (and something to hold him to).

But the result also says a lot about waning trust in (and apathy towards) mainstream politics. The last decade has left people feeling unseen in the fog of political scandal, one after another. And in four seats – and very nearly in 103 more across the country – neither Labour nor the Conservatives have done enough to rectify that.

While there were no riots and no one on the run this time, for Boston and Skegness the general election was certainly a protest. On a local Facebook group, with a thread of hundreds of people celebrating and debating the win, one ominous comment stands out. “From little acorns, mighty oak trees grow,” it says. On Thursday, the seed was planted.

 

 

 

[cosmicway 1,285]

The Clacton wind did not reach France.

[cosmicway 1,285]

9 hours ago, Vesper said:

How Nigel Farage took over my hometown – and why Keir Starmer should be worried

With the highest leave vote in the country, Boston and Skegness became known as Farageland, so it was no surprise to Zoe Beaty that it was where Reform’s Richard Tice won a seat. It is also why Labour needs to stop treating Farage like a joke

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/nigel-farage-reform-boston-skegness-starmer-labour-b2575183.html

Almost exactly 20 years ago, on June 14, 2004, I sat in my mum’s living room, turned on the TV, and watched footage of my hometown, Boston, in Lincolnshire, burning. The previous day, more than 100 people had rioted in the town, reports said. Hours after England crashed out of the Euros, tightening racial tension over immigration in the market town snapped, and erupted. Police cars were set on fire. Nearly every shop window was smashed. At school the next day we tried to grasp what happened and deduce which of us now had family members on the run from the law.

The riots were a response to a rumour, allegedly spread by the BNP, that the council was banning the flying of English flags during the football tournament. It was entirely false but that didn’t matter, and soon enough national news reports on Boston showed a portrait of a town alight with anger, a poster child of English nationalism, growing racism, discomfort and unrest.

In the years that followed I watched my home town attract more headlines – for high rates of teenage pregnancy, as the murder capital of the UK, the least integrated town in the country, the most obese and one of the poorest. By the time Brexit came around over a decade later, Boston’s migrant population – who almost exclusively do necessary “back-breaking” field and factory work in Lincolnshire’s vast food and agriculture industry – had grown by more than 460 per cent and the borough was synonymous with anti-immigration rhetoric. It resulted in the highest leave vote in the country in the referendum: just over 75 per cent, with a turnout of 74.2 per cent. Boston and neighbouring Skegness became known as Farageland.

Then came this week’s headline. While the majority of the country was swept up in Labour’s landslide victory, in Thursday’s general election Richard Tice, chairman of Reform UK, won one of five seats for the party in the constituency of Boston and Skegness, ending a 27-year Conservative hold.

A shock? Yes, that Matt Warman, who served as MP in the constituency for nine years, was ousted from one of the very safest Conservative seats in the UK. But the fact that it was Reform who were responsible, less so. In fact, in the four hours it took me to drive home yesterday, I had several messages from friends and family saying exactly that. “It’s no surprise,” was the gist of most of our post-match analysis; if you lived there, you could see it coming.

For years, fringe right-wing parties have often been treated as a bit of a joke by mainstream politicians. At the launch of Labour’s manifesto last month, Keir Starmer declared he was bidding to run the UK, “not a circus”. “If you want politics as pantomime, I hear Clacton is nice this time of year,” he ribbed.

Despite obvious warnings – the substantial rise in race hate crime post-Brexit, the growing presence of the far right in Europe; Marine Le Pen’s fandom for UKIP – Farage and the rest of his cast were rarely treated as a real political threat until the very last minute. Now it’s beginning to look like the joke’s firmly on Westminster.

According to analysis, despite winning just five seats in the election, Reform received more than four million votes: that’s 600,000 more than the Liberal Democrats, who took 71 seats in total. Without the first past the post system – which Farage immediately denigrated upon winning his first election, on his eighth try – Reform would now be the third biggest party in the UK, after winning almost 15 per cent of the popular vote.

The party came second in 103 seats, despite only being reformed in 2021, and have found voters in all age groups – 8 per cent of those aged 18 to 24 picked Reform on the ballot; 9 per cent of those aged 25 to 34. “We’re coming for Labour,” Farage told his audience in Clacton, Essex, the seaside town he now represents in parliament.

Like everyone else from Boston and Skegness, I’m well aware by now that these threats aren’t just part of Farage’s circus show. In fact, it looked shockingly easy, first for Farage during the Brexit campaign, and now Tice, very recently, to pull large swathes of these towns further over to their agenda.

A recent trip back to visit my family provided a small snapshot of why. On a walk around the town centre I ended up by the local police station, adjacent to a now-empty B&M store in the shadow of the Stump, Boston’s famously foreboding church. The walls of the abandoned building were wrapped in bright, grossly optimistic adverts for the government’s Levelling Up fund, which promised £14.8m investment for the square; below them were several dank mattresses and threadbare tents where rough sleepers dwell.

The thing is, Boston is lacking in much more significant things than a nice-looking new square. And for years – since way back in 2004, well before Brexit and for all the years after – promises made by successive governments have left gaping holes where they’ve failed to materialise. Beyond the headlines, Boston is a complex case study of the effects of austerity, a growing population and what happens when there’s a profound lack of infrastructure to support it. Weak, or non-existent regulations on houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) and gangmasters – a person who oversees the work of manual labourers – early on left hefty dents; schools have long been extremely oversubscribed, and the local hospital, the Pilgrim, is stretched way beyond its capacity.

Despite many locals’ insistence that leaving the EU was the right thing to do, Brexit hasn’t improved anything and has simply further harmed the area’s biggest economy, agriculture. Coupled with rising rents and a cost of living crisis, Boston’s high street, like many in the country, has been decimated. Crime in Boston is 50 per cent higher than in the rest of Lincolnshire.

It’s not easy living somewhere that feels unsafe. Farage set up shop – literally, in a former second-hand shop – in the town before the 2015 election. He saw that the fear and resentment that grows in environments like Boston presents an opportunity. An opportunity to weaponise already harmful prejudice for political gain and a personal agenda.

In his party’s latest incarnation as Reform, immigration has once again been the central campaigning issue, and racism and prejudice is even less cloaked (as revealed by Channel 4’s undercover investigation, which the party denounced as “election interference”). While Farage took to the podium yesterday giving his “100 per cent promise” to rid Reform of “bad apples” after the party had to suspend multiple candidates for racist and homophobic comments, in my mind, much of the racist rhetoric has simply been rebranded as “common sense”.

Reform also sold the election to Boston on the idea that it represents “real issues that affect real people, that don’t affect the metropolitan middle class, who aren’t in the real world” (apart from its two metropolitan upper-middle class leaders). And it’s this that we can’t afford to ignore: however cynical, a party that successfully engages a growing class of dangerously disillusioned people wields an awful lot of power. In the end, Reform helped Labour to win more than 400 seats, but the upstart’s solid performance in huge swathes of red wall seats means his warning to Sir Keir that it was now “going after Labour votes” should be heeded.

It seems quite mad to me that Boston – which wholeheartedly rejects the bourgeoisie, and where child poverty increased to 30 per cent last year – would choose a privately educated multimillionaire property developer who had never set foot in the area until mere weeks ago to represent them. Whether Tice and Reform can deliver plausible answers to big questions this small town needs is another thing entirely. I hear that Tice, from London, has “promised” to move to the area, which feels like a start (and something to hold him to).

But the result also says a lot about waning trust in (and apathy towards) mainstream politics. The last decade has left people feeling unseen in the fog of political scandal, one after another. And in four seats – and very nearly in 103 more across the country – neither Labour nor the Conservatives have done enough to rectify that.

While there were no riots and no one on the run this time, for Boston and Skegness the general election was certainly a protest. On a local Facebook group, with a thread of hundreds of people celebrating and debating the win, one ominous comment stands out. “From little acorns, mighty oak trees grow,” it says. On Thursday, the seed was planted.

 

 

 

The tents and rough sleepers are the result of super tax evasion by the rich and super taxation of the poor people, the middle class people and the industries.
What has it got to do with the Reform political platform ?
You may be a reformer but Reform - UKIP and co has - never had any relation with the such problems.
 

[YorkshireBlue 2,949]

1 hour ago, cosmicway said:

The tents and rough sleepers are the result of super tax evasion by the rich and super taxation of the poor people, the middle class people and the industries.
What has it got to do with the Reform political platform ?
You may be a reformer but Reform - UKIP and co has - never had any relation with the such problems.
 

Let's not pretend alot of the rough sleepers didn't fuck there life up with drugs and crime, let's not blame everything on politics, unfortunately people are dumb and make stupid fucking decisions then blame others for there own down fall 

[cosmicway 1,285]

7 minutes ago, YorkshireBlue said:

Let's not pretend alot of the rough sleepers didn't fuck there life up with drugs and crime, let's not blame everything on politics, unfortunately people are dumb and make stupid fucking decisions then blame others for there own down fall 

Yeah ok - brain surgeon rough sleepers following a wage cut are not that many.
I mean in a very general sense.

[YorkshireBlue 2,949]

25 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Yeah ok - brain surgeon rough sleepers following a wage cut are not that many.
I mean in a very general sense.

Tbh in a general sense most homeless are ex criminals ex forces or junkies, the genuinely normal people that end up homeless are the exception to the rule.