Six Degrees of Reform UK – Mapping the UK's Entrepreneurial Far Right | Hacker News Reader

Six Degrees of Reform UK – Mapping the UK's Entrepreneurial Far Right

adu.autonomy.work

48 pointsseangrvs38 comments

Related work: Mic Wright's diagram of "nepo babies", aka who in the media and politics is related to who else. https://brokenbottleboy.substack.com/p/mapped-out

Would be great to see this sort of thing for all political parties, or at least Labour and Conservatives.

I was thinking the same thing. I'd imagine a LLM could do a pretty good job after you crawl the data from companies house.

Hammer meet screw.

Companies House is already a large graph of companies and ownerships. You can do this with naive methods easier.

Not that I care politics but one should think why reform and why the label "far right"? Why now?

Why not?

Is it not?

Channel 4 News: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLRCY5fSM7s

At my time of writing 202406282043 - I'd consider that 'now'.

By 2024 standards, saying that a man cannot be pregnant, or that illegally coming into a country is... well, illegal, is enough to be "far-right".

Interestingly one of the very few other political parties that understand women to be female and men to be male - the Party Of Women - is also a limited company, just like Reform is: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...

Maybe this is the new standard for parties of protest against the neoliberal consensus?

No other political parties are constructed as a limited company controlled by a single person, that's what's so interesting about Reform.

That is true. However The Conservatives have a lot of satellite companies run by politicians. There are some fairly well known ones even though it's not obvious they are run by party members.

Yeah, but then you get into disambiguation hell. My first serious coding project was an insanely ambitious attempt to do something like this with CH data. Great punt for a Masters thesis, but not the sort of thing I'd base proper research on.

Love the look of the library they used to do this, in considerably better shape than my attempt.

https://github.com/ribenamaplesyrup/sugartrail

Not research, but I spent 5 years writing matching algorithms for data for financial companies which was entered from random crappy mainframes driven by the lowest bidding data entry workers. This tied together the financial relationships of millions of people. The dumber it was the measurably more accurate it was. Hell even some of it used soundex scoring and a naive z-test to work out the confidence that two names were matching.

Maybe I missed something in the article, but it goes through the companies office finding companies based on the names of key Reform UK members.

Couldn’t the same be done for other major members of the other major UK parties?

Quite possibly. The same could be done with the Register of Members' Interests. But again, Reform is unusual in that it has no internal democracy and is basically the Richard Tice party.

Buying your way into British politics is very cheap. He'll get maybe 15% of the vote and no seats in exchange for spending an amount 1/100th of a minor US senate seat race.

Is it a big conspiracy that Leave.EU, Reform UK, UKIP, and Nigel Farage are connected to each other? Other than that, the rest of this article seems to simply be talking about businesses that someone named Richard Tice (who is also connected to Reform UK) is involved with.

All of these people are publicly connected to each other. They also seem to be pretty small fry. Wouldn't be surprised if this itself were funded by the Tories, in order to quote in press releases. If not for Reform, the Tories would be at least running even with Labour in this election.

The correct axis is free vs. anti-free. If you map your ideology on economic freedom vs. government control of the economy, and personal freedom vs. government control of your body, then you get a quadrant rather than a left-right divide.

If you support personal liberty and economic freedom, you are a libertarian. But you would be labeled "far right" by many.

There is this pervasive believe that the far right is somehow supported bottom-up. But historically, capitalists and technologists have only been too happy overthrowing status-quo to become part of the new oligarchy.

A blog post that says a lot of words without really saying anything at all.

The whole post boils down to "The founders of Reform have multiple companies."

This is your last chance, somebody stop them please. /s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com