politick babble
The UK Reform party are basically now parroting current US government policies. They're announcing that, if elected into government, they will create a UK version of ICE and will deport illegal immigrants or lock them up in concentration camps.
I look around the internet and it feels like all Western countries are in the same boat - rising cost of living, housing shortages/sky high rents, low wages, destroyed or depleted public services and a right wing party that, whilst not in power, promises to fix everything with massively authoritarian measures if they are voted in (or are already in power: Amirite, Americans?).
It certainly feels like our current Labour government have been installed as a placeholder before an ultra right-wing Reform government sweeps in on a landslide at the next General Election. Factions inside Labour, traditionally a Socialist party funded by workers and workers' unions, worked hard to remove all left-wing elements of the party whilst it was in opposition and the entity that took power a couple of years ago, after 14 years of the Conservatives destroying the fabric of the country, is barely indistinguishable from the government it replaced.
Austerity wasn't reversed, the rich weren't taxed, immigrants were demonised, trans people vilified and had laws enacted against them, Draconian (and mostly ineffectual) age verification laws were introduced on the internet under the guise of child safety (when in reality it's all about tracking everyone's online activity), the ability to lawfully protest was limited by laws, certain protest groups were made illegal - all unthinkable under the old, Socialist Labour of the 1980s.
There's a glimmer of hope with the rise of the Green Party, which is positioning itself as a party of change. It claims it will make Britain great by taxing the rich, investing in infrastructure and schools, privatising public services etc. etc. These were all similar promises to those of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2017. He was crucified by the media (the BBC famously had a Photoshop of him dressed in a Russian hat with the Kremlin behind him as a news background - at a time when Boris Johnson was hobnobbing with the son of a KGB agent, who eventually became a member of the House of Lords on Johnson's insistence) for trying to stand up for the working people of Britain against the super rich and vested interests that he saw were sucking the country dry.
I get the feeling exactly the same thing will happen to Zack Polanski - the leader of the Greens - because he is threatening the status quo. He'll have his private life trawled through, there'll be accusations of racism/sexism/antisemitism/homophobia - just enough mud slung to stick to him (see Corbyn and antisemitism for the playbook).
It just feels now that the Government no longer runs the country, that it's now just a facade to make us think nothing has changed whilst something more powerful moves, barely perceptible, in the background...