Can we normalise normal please?

Alun Smith

It’s difficult to know where to start with the benefits announcements Reform UK have made over the last days. It’s tempting to put it down to their M.O and say “yes, standard fayre for them”.

But we mustn’t ignore it, because whilst it’s true that their latest hateful rhetoric is becoming normalised, that is, in fact, what makes it worse. It’s worse because it’s no longer shocking to any of us.

Their fanbase, (because that’s what they are, they’re not the ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’, they’re a cult), expect it from them, demand it, and lap it up when it happens, and the rest of us, brow-beaten and bereft of energy, are being led by the nose to offer up no more than a resigned shrug in response.

This can’t fly. We must call it out, and allow ourselves to engage with the anger we’re feeling about it. And believe me, many of us are feeling very, very angry about it, not least because their odious vitriol pervades MSM, who report on it as if it’s a completely normal part of our news diet. It isn’t, nor should it be. Reform have a handful of MP’s, they’re not a major political party.

Literally days after Farage threw every resource he had (including a gleeful Dan Thomas, elated to be attending Farage-Fest, rather than looking out for his own constituents in Wales), into beating a comedy candidate in Clacton, and then lying about the reasons why he didn’t turn up for the count (pun intended), his cultic minions Tice and Jenrick, announced that they would make sweeping benefits cuts were they ever to be in power.

Why don’t you trial this heinous non-policy in Clacton Nigel, where over 9000 of your constituents receive Personal Independence Payments? That’s without the thousands of people there who claim LCWRA (the health element of Universal Credit), which you’ve also said you’d cut.

Let’s see how that works out for you. We are talking about the lives of almost 3 million British people and Reform frame it as a cost-cutting exercise. It’s abhorrent and what it really is, is a life-cutting exercise. For the record:-

1) P.I.P is an IN-WORK benefit.
2) P.I.P and LCWRA are extraordinarily difficult benefits to get. You get awarded them, yes awarded, they’re not thrown around like sweets at a pantomime.
3)The majority of monies spent on the Welfare Bill go to pensioners. That shouldn’t even come under ‘benefits’. They earned that money.

No one has yet satisfactorily explained to me WHY the benefits bill has to be cut. We have advanced medical technology now and we have an ageing population, people are disabled, people get ill, people get old.

Leaving them to die because you want to save money to fuel your war-machine, so that you can make even more sick and disabled people in foreign climes, and kill even more innocent people in other countries cannot, must not, EVER be the answer.

And this speaks to a wider problem that I alluded to earlier. Wrong-speak is being normalised everywhere and not called out. The Independent used a headline recently that read ” Plaid Cymru and Reform led Wales”. What!? Plaid Cymru are in government in Wales, albeit with a minority, Reform are the opposition. How on earth did this pass unnoticed across the editors desk? Or was it, in fact, noticed and ignored? Another win for the insipid, anti-woke, drip-drip of the nastiness that sloshes around in our peripheral lives?

Division

There is altogether too much hate and division, and it’s absurdly easy to deflect and ignore the demonisation of the poor, the disabled, the infirm, the foreign, the other, and it’s all being normalised and it’s got to STOP!

The day cannot come soon enough when the architect of most of this monstrous malevolence flooding through our society, Farage, is found guilty by the standards committee he’s about to face, and dismissed from parliament and from all of our lives.

Once that happens, I’m hoping beyond hope that the whole septic tank that is Reform UK rusts and fades away.

Maybe then we can all get back to living our lives with some modicum of peace, where we look out for each other again, debate with reason and integrity and learn to embrace our differences.

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