Mailwatch(ed) Forum

Another Angry Wank has had another of his periodic spurts (pun intended) of activity on the Facebook. This time, he is taking aim principally at Farage, Jenprick, and Reform, and actually turns in quite a good appraisal, but he slides back into Keir-bashing in his final two paragraphs, because he just can't help himself :

Nigel Farage has an interesting strategy of rapidly filling the Reform UK ranks with many of the most despicable Tories from the previous government. The very people who were responsible for creating the mess Britain is in today.
It seems extremely odd for a political movement that styles itself as some kind of brave anti-establishment insurgency to welcome a bunch of deeply unpopular Tory establishment stooges on board like this, but it's clearly what's actually going on.
It seems an awful lot like it's intended as a signal to the the establishment order that Reform are just a rebranded version of the Tory Party, with the same politics of class warfare against the poor and ordinary; austerity ruination; vandalism of the social safety net; privatisation mania; and handouts for corporations and the mega-rich.
It's like a bat signal to greedy CEOs, city slickers, media moguls, tax-dodgers, exploitative slumlords and the like, that Reform are hiding an agenda of "more of the same" behind their anti-establishment posturing.
The Tories that Reform are absorbing into their ranks are the very same people that the British public were so sick of that they allowed Keir Starmer to win a historic landslide election by default in 2024, but Reform seem confident that the bulk of their voters won't care that they're handing such despicable and unpopular people a route back into power.
They don't care because they seem to be assuming that the majority of their supporters are low-information "vibe" voters.
They're counting on the ignorance and gullibility of their own voters. Not just that they're unaware of who the likes of Nadhim Zahawi and Robert Jenrick actually are, but that Reform’s entire anti-establishment schtick is a brazen fraud, designed to appeal to the hopelessly naive.
It's hardly surprising to see. After all, the Tories spent their 14 years in power treating their voters like gullible idiots, and Keir Starmer's spent the last year and a half in power gleefully watering down and outright abandoning all the pledges and promises he made to con his own way into Downing Street.
Apparently, treating your own voters like gullible piss-witted scum whilst lying straight in their faces is the established way of winning power in modern British politics.

What watered down pledges? From 2024, or 2020? Because it makes a massive difference.

Anything happen after 2020 that might have hit the public finances at all? How would that stuff be funded without raising taxes by a lot more than they've had to do anyway? Just add that to "the rich and corporations are paying" or "abolish austerity' (there isn't any, there's a decent sized fiscal stimulus.

If you never win power, you can just pretend everything you put in a manifesto would have definitely happened. The cost of Covid was something like £360bn.