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And if you can persuade more people to vote for the reasons you do, then you potentially affect change. Unfortunately most voters are short termists, so most politicians are short termists.
I did some consultancy work for Reform at the last election, so I have nothing against them per se. I quite like Nigel Farage personally (as politicians go). But I heavily suspect you'll find that even were they to form a government they might not do as much as you'll like about immigration. Even for natural Reform voters the economy featured highly in internal polls. Nigel knows that.
Understood, and that’s interesting to hear. I wanted to write something about the difficulty of getting genuine policy preferences in an election or polling situation:
The former is a well known issue with indirect democracy. For the latter, put it this way: if you ask people ‘do you want A’ devoid of tradeoffs, that doesn’t tell you how they’ll respond to real electoral offerings. OTOH if you add in tradeoffs, you have other problems:
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