Speaking as a German: part three – How do we stop the right-wing surge in Britain?

A lot of people have asked me, after my last few posts: “All right Claudia — what do we DO about it?”

Honestly? There is no magic answer. But here is what works, and what doesn’t. Plain English, no fancy words.

✅ What actually works:

1. Stop copying them. Every time Labour or the Tories “sound tough” to win Reform voters back, they only make Reform’s ideas sound normal — and voters go for the original, not the copy.
2. Fix the places people have given up on. Reform wins in towns where the buses have gone, the bank has closed, the high street is boarded up. Pour real money in. Slow. Unglamorous. Works.
3. Get people OUT of their phones and INTO real life. Community centres, sports clubs, churches, mosques, choirs, trade unions, allotments — anything that puts neighbours in the same room. We are at our most racist behind a screen, and our most decent across a kitchen table.
4. Talk to the people in YOUR life — not strangers online. You won’t shift a Reform voter by shouting on Facebook. You MIGHT shift them if you are their colleague, their cousin, their neighbour, and you say quietly: “I don’t think this is who we are.”
5. Talk about what it COSTS. Don’t argue whether migrants are “really a problem.” Talk about what kind of country we become if we let this win. Who gets hurt. What we have to apologise for in eighty years.
6. Don’t legitimise them. And TELL people that nearly 45 Reform councillors elected last year have already resigned, defected or been expelled. That story doesn’t spread by itself.
7. Make it easier to vote, not harder. Scrap the Tory voter-ID rules. They silenced exactly the people least likely to vote Reform.
8. Teach our children HOW democracies fall. Not the Holocaust as something “over there” — but how ordinary, decent people, in a respectable European democracy, let it happen. Every German child learns this. British children do not.
   
   ❌ What does NOT work:
   🔻 Banning them — makes martyrs.
   🔻 Ignoring them — they don’t go away.
   🔻 Debating them on TV — Farage has built a career on that.
   🔻 Fact-checking — facts don’t shift hearts. Stories do.
   
   The hard truth?
   The easy moment to stop Reform was before they polled at 30%. We are past it. The work from here is slow, hard, and has to be done anyway — by all of us. The teacher. The bus driver. The vicar. The neighbour. The grandmother who keeps posting on Facebook even when people call her a bot.
   
9. That last one is not a small thing. That IS the work.
   Nobody is coming to save this country. WE are the someone else.