General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
Source is here: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/survey-results/daily/2025/02/20/c33bd/1
That source allows you to see the results according to political affiliation. Pluralities of supporters of the Conservatives, Labour, and Lib Dems think that supporting Ukraine is more important.
The exception is Reform UK, whose supporters think that good relations with the USA are more important than supporting Ukraine.
This American supports the priorities shown by the polling numbers.
We need more nations standing up to Trump, not more nations bending the knee. It doesn't just help you, it helps us.
seriously. our coup government needs to be stopped
It needs to be stopped from the inside. Your rapist leader needs to be put down like a rabid dog.
absolutely. but we need help. ~30% of the country supports this. ~25% abhors it. the remaining ~45% are living in a false sense of thinking they know what's going on and the other ~55% sound like two different kind of lunatic. we are doing all we can to wake them up, but we need the world to say we, as a nation, are the baddies. that will push some of the 45 into the 30, but it will do more to push thore 45 into the 25. americans like to think themselves the heroes of history. so please. saction us like we're russia. because we are
Nah screw your help, you're the most armed civilian force on the planet. Go and organise/join the resistance against your nation. You've destoryed the planet and now begging for help? Get a gun and die for the revolution big dawg. Gaza's given up 300,000 lives and Ukraine also in the hundreds of thousands of not million. You already lose countless people a day to due medical debt or your justice system Might as well
Nothing will change until GOP base turns on him.
A sovereign needs only like 30% of the adult population to maintain sufficient support for what Trump is doing.
He is clearly that and some. He has support of the oligarchy.
Luigi.
the last two deposed US presidents jfk and nixon were deposed by the ruling class.
trump already had two attempts fail.
until his base and or ruling class turn on him. he is gonna rule.
Probs but i wasnt talking about going after trump. Plenty of other people that will send the message. Be creative.
If it were an option, then it might be better to selfishly keep good relations with the US. But Trump will always try to extract as much as possible, regardless of 'good relations'. So the choice is really between helping Ukraine or not, knowing the US will be the same either way.
it might be better to selfishly keep good relations with the US
Or the UK could prioritise good relations with Europe instead, which the public seems to support (source for below image):
You say Europe but your chart says the EU. Let's not conflate the two.
In this case they are analogous though, really.
No they are not. You don't get to arbitrarily choose when to rename something.
Why aren't they? I understand the nuance (The UK is in Europe but not the EU), and in certain situations the distinction is important; the UK is not it's own continent and Britons are Europeans.
But the two are (or have become) analogous when we're talking about trade and politics.
Just because not all European countries are in the EU doesn't mean that by saying you want better relations with the EU you want to tell Norway to go fuck themselves.
A valid point in general, but since this is from a uk trade perspective, there isn’t much in Europe but outside the EU. Norway, Switzerland and a few Balkan countries.
Fair point. Arguably the British public has a more negative view of the EU than Europe as a whole though. So if the British public wants to increase trade with the EU then they would probably be fine with increasing trade with Europe as a whole.
By the way I'm not including Russia when I say "Europe". They don't even consider themselves European - they consider themselves Eurasian.
getting your thumb slammed in a door is more important than good relations with the usa
The slime mold growing up the side of a seasonal creek down the road is more important than good relations with the USA...
What would be the point of sucking up to the current iteration of the US? They'll stab you in the back regardless.
It's a clear time to increase unity with Europe. I don't mean re-open any EU discussions, simply work with them on united response to Russian aggression.
It's almost like the disunity with europe is part of some targeted effort
American here. Good.
Damn right.
If Ukraine falls it won't matter if you have good relations with US, because Russia won't stop there.
Indeed. I really hope EU already knows this.
Absolute insane suggestion that completely ignores the reasons why Russia invaded Ukraine in the first place.
Hush, your bullshit only works in your echo chamber
I'm American, and I think that too.
Came to say the same.
Half of us think the country shits gold and the world will bend over.
If you had a family member who behaved like we did, it would be time for an intervention.
Christ, I'd rather see Boris Johnson as our president than what we have, at least he's Mr Bean level of political stupid. Ours is just vile hate and greed.
Johnson would be better but his Mr Bean act is totally on purpose. He acts like that so you wouldn't think him capable of far right cruelty. I've read that he even intentionally messes up his hair before he goes in front of cameras.
It's all part of his cleverly crafted persona. Just like him using his middle name. The average Brit doesn't know that the real man is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, who used to burn £50 notes in front of homeless people for fun.
Remember this guy wanted to invade the Netherlands.
This time it's the US that's 4 years behind. You have your own Dominic Cummings and everything.
Trump is [hopefully] a temporary problem.
Putin isn't going anywhere.
Trump is a temporary symptom. The problem is that a third of the US sees his evil bullshit and fucking loves it; another third sees his evil bullshit and remains completely apathetic to it and can't be bothered to so much as waddle over to their mailbox to submit a ballot in opposition to it; and the remaining third is only given a lesser-evil option that comes with some seriously demotivating baggage like fucking genocide.
And even if it's less genocide than the other guy, shit like that is always going to make a major dent in that third's turnout, paving the way for the situation we're in now.
Even if Trump is actively being assassinated as I post this (yo, god: pretty pretty please?) some other evil bigot will fill the vacuum. Now, if he gets assassinated too, we might be on to something: sending the message that being an evil oppressive sack of shit comes with a major mortal liability is the short term fix we absolutely need, but we've all seriously underestimated the degree of enthusiastic evil in the average voter.
Trump may be temporary, but the oligarch fascists flocking around him have realised how blatant they can act without facing any repercussions, and they will not relinquish this overt control of political power again, regardless of which president wins.
Fuck the current U.S. gov't. They're not interested in good relations with any of their allies. Russia is the true bed buddy.
Why is there a "Neither" option? I mean in practice "Neither" could mean to strike a perfect 50/50 balance. Or it could mean to antagonize both of them. Or it could mean "i don't really care". So what makes "Neither" a separate and relevant category to "Don't know", which could also mean "i don't know how to prioritize the two" or "i don't really care" or "what is an US and is it a newer model or older than the Ukraine?"
"Neither" implies they have an opinion on the relative prioritisation of the US and Ukraine by the UK, and believe that both should be prioritised to a similar degree:
"Don't know" implies they do not feel they know enough about the relationships the UK has with either country to form an opinion.
But yes, there is some fuzziness, as anyone who does not care is more likely to choose "neither" as there is no "either" option, yet many of this type of respondent will have picked "don't know".
I recently read an opinion piece by a GB News writer (masochism I guess) in which he said Keir Starmer was out of touch with UK sentiment for prioritising Ukraine over the US. Now, Sir Keir is a woeful prick of a red tory, but its quite nice to have confirmation that GBeebies are badly misinformed on this topic too.
Many people will claim that the public is on their side, without providing actual evidence. I guess that's why polling is important.
Then you have some people who claim the polls are rigged, but I think it's more likely that the polls are pretty accurate.
American here - they're right
Good to see UK!
It absolutely is.
I love "don't know" people. Those are the real MVPs.
Honesty is a lost art
I see YouGov: I downvote
Why? Do they have credibility or other issues?
Yes, they only attract a certain kind of users (i.e. easily tricked by "bonus points" systems). It's an opt in rather than a random selection. Even if they claim to use common strategies to spread out the responses statistically, there is no way it is accurate.
YouGov bad: https://undark.org/2024/06/26/trolls-polls-survey-science/
YouGov good: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/poll-of-polls-mrp/
Many thanks for the links, the first article was very interesting, I don't agree with your conclusion though :)
My takeaway is that traditional polling is mostly dead, because it has become prohibitively expensive to get a representative result. So if we still want to see regular opinion polls, then opt in polling is what we're going to get. And when it comes to opt in polling, yougov appears to be one of the better firms, from the article: "But opt-in polling firms run the gamut. Some, like YouGov, publish their methodology and strive to ensure the integrity of their data. Others, experts say, do not.".
Are they inaccurate? What polling company would be better for this sort of political question?
After brexit indont give a shit anymore that the UK public thinks. They showed they're more than happy to vote for something insanely stupid and against their own best interests, only to start investing the subject right after voting for it.
This may be positive for us, but they may just as well vote for Putin taking over the UK government because some nitwit made an ad about it on a bus
The Uk is between a rock and hard place geopolitically. It seems that joining the eu is political suicide but aligning economically with the Usa means selling off the nhs.
I guess the best we can hope for is going our own way and hoping for some economic miracle . Maybe we'll discover some more north sea oil....