Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election
bbc.com
bbc.com
* Cut your taxes, and raise everyone else’s.
* Nationalize Adele.
* Build at least one affordable house.
* Hold a referendum on whether Pluto should regain its planet status.
* move the hand dryer in the Crown & Treaty pub in Uxbridge to a more sensible location.
This YouTube video shows just how dire the situation is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbartLXCYZo
I would have voted Count Binface too (as the least absurd candidate).
No, so he can say that the voters have spoken and that they don't care.
It seems to be that it's common belief in right wing parties that winning an election means all cases against you are dropped. They aren't, unless you get elected president of the US. But I think that's where they're all getting it from.
Clacton has to bear all the costs of these by-elections, but then it's their own fault for being stupid enough to follow Farage.
They put them at the bottom of the candidate list on the voting slip. Good to see the election officials had a sense of humor.
* Not Nigel Farage* capping the price of a 99 flake ice cream at 99p
His immediate response.
“Well, if the exchequer wants a 99 flake, it’ll cost them 99p.”
* Pretending that an election should decide the result of a corruption trial.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRBh7uGwxmU
some extras
* apply nurses pay to MPs
* bring back ceefax
* rename london bridge after phoebe waller[0] not a lawyer [1] what does “nationalise” even mean?
The shareholders or owners may or may not receive compensation.
Presumably a normal(?) interpretation would be that the British government uses whatever eminent domain law it has and it takes over Adels copyright on all her songs and gives her whatever the fair market value of the catalog is.
But because this is a joke candidate, could be anything.
Etc.
(not a lawyer)
It would also require us leaving a whole bunch of international treaties though since "Nationalising a pop singer" kinda breaches a few of them.
North Korea? China? Russia? Israel? Gaza? Iran? The USA?
What’s are international courts going to do about it? Gaol Britain? Apply sanctions?
What’s Europe going to do, send in a deal team to extract Adele?
The promise could be re-interpreted in some funny ways. For example, Count Binface didn't specify when nationalizing Adele would occur.
They could create another[0] special case in UK copyright law with a minor twist: Instead of eventually entering the public domain, the copyright of Adele's works would transfer to the UK government which would donate any proceeds to a charity that builds affordable homes.
Silly, but it'd mean two promises kept.
[0] https://neverlandofficial.com/discover/peter-pan-copyright/
I could get behind most of them, actually ... were I to live in the UK.
> A promise not to accept £5 million gifts from crypto billionaires (on Earth).
I'm old and out of touch, my brain confused Adele with Alizée and thought that was a little aggressive for a foreign policy.
Well it would certainly make her less productive
* Take millions in funding from shady crypto-billionaires.
* Use anti-immigrant demagogy and lies.- European countries to be invited to join the United Kingdom, creating a new ‘union of Europe’, if you will. (2024)
> That's why Count Binface has been able to stand in so many high-profile elections. He has, however, lost his £500 every time, after failing to meet the minimum 5% of votes cast in order for his deposit to be returned.
It would seem he didn't lose his £500 this time...
Anybody can donate to a political party in the UK so that's how you would do it.
There's no citizenship/residency requirement AFAIK.
Here is his official entry on the register: https://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/English/Registrati...
And it's not true that "anybody" can donate. People can donate if they'd be allowed to vote in the UK, which currently includes people who don't live here and so don't care what happens but that might change to some extent. Non-people such as businesses can donate if they are legitimate UK entities with UK registration or whatever as appropriate (so e.g. a UK business you own for no purpose but to fuck with UK politics wouldn't fly, but if you've got a money-losing Californian Wine Importer that's a fun hobby you can make that loss $5000 bigger by having them them donate $5000 to Reform if you like)
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/political-registratio...
Political parties are responsible for checking the source of loans and donations over the value of £500 to ensure they come from permissible sources.
Foreign companies and individuals who are not on the UK electoral register cannot make political donations.
Other countries likely have similar restrictions e.g. New Zealand disallows foreign donations, and the source of larger donations much be known although I'm not sure if public (i.e. no anonymity above $X). Two digit millions is a significant amount in NZ politics.
Perhaps there's an intergalactic mixing service that can be used here to assist in finally solving this hand dryer situation.
Instead of trying to move forwards, we need to look backwards: a root-analysis of the font of hand dryers (beware d'evil Dyson).
Who is to blame: democracy is not the right tool.
probably
but the important thing is that you can't spend that much money (well compared to the USA) for a by-election the maximum you can spend is 180k (if youre a member of a national party the party can spend 54K on your behalf. )
in terms of crowdfunding the rules are pretty clear: https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/guidance-candidates-a...
there is quite a high paper trail bar for doing this.
However if you just want ot get your name on the ballot its £500. if you're just pissing about then thats all it costs.
A rule is only a rule if it's enforced.
Instead, a recall petition - requiring 10% of an MP's constituents to sign to then recall - is automatically triggered when an MP is suspended for 10 or more days.
Her recall got nearly 15% of eligible voters which is about half as many votes as she got to win the seat in 2019. Thousands of locals came out solely to sack this MP.
Quick timeline: elected December 2019; spreading covid September 2020; guilty plea August 2022; loses seat July 2023 (10 months before the next general election)
The petition is published for six weeks!
Farage must be very uncomfortable now.
The standards committee doesn't make decisions based on what they think is best. They make decisions based on the rules.
And they are highly likely to open another investigation into the Posh George stuff.
The lesson people should learn from Farage and Reform (which they won't, let's be real) is that the entire Brexit movement and all the subsequent European alt-right movements are incredibly astroturfed. They're the product of wealthy people funding fascism to avoid the electorate talking about economics ie why they're increasingly poorer and why there's increasing wealth and income inequality. Reform wants to direct attention to immigrants. It's pure distraction.
It's the exact same thing in the US. It's immigration here too but it's all the other culture war bullshit issues like trans people too.
What fomented all of this in the UK is that the UK government decided to bail out the banks after 2008 at the expense of taxpayers and then that was used to justify a decade of austerity measures that crippled the economy and wiped out the working class.
It didn't have to be that way. Other countries like Iceland [1] let the banks fail and their economies massively benefitted.
[1]: https://www.worldfinance.com/special-reports/failing-banks-w...
And on top of that you got JK Rowling fueling insane amounts of money into anti trans hate.
With Musk, who is doing similar stunts, I get it because in his warped world view he had IVF to make sure he had male offspring for almost all his children bar the first ones, and his daughter openly defies his will by, well, being his daughter. But what in God's name is the angle Rowling comes from? Who the hell hurt her so much that she's willing to burn everything?
She is every bit as vile a bigot as Musk is, just with less (but still more than enough) money. And on top of that, her alter ego/pen name is male ("Robert Galbraith"), so it's yet another dose of bigotry on top - appearing as a male for... whatever reason, idk.
[1] https://www.advocate.com/news/jk-rowling-anti-trans-organiza...
JKR has probably received more of this abuse than any other woman. She's become a lightning rod for this deranged, abusive male behaviour, simply for advocating for women's sex-based rights and refusing to be intimidated to silence.
there was a nominal price bubble (especially visible in the rent vs buy graph) but rents did not show the same spike, there was no general shortage (as seen in vacancy rates), and since interest rates fell nominal prices went up, and the central bank overcorrected.
https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/the-2000s-housing-bubbl...
... the obvious problem is the low productivity of suburbs. spending a lot of money on building them is good for short-term GDP growth, but long-term it's a poor investment compared to the usual recommendations.
As Farage didn’t get an absolute majority last time, and as a majority of voters didn’t even vote last time, I was extrapolating that Count Binface had a real chance. Not just as a protest vote, but a magnet for everyone not supporting Farage as well as everyone wanting a laugh (in a British boaty-mcboatface way).
Perhaps a serious clean-up-politics neutral candidate would have done better, like Martin Bell - a very well known war correspondent - who stood on an anti corruption ticket against the scandal riddled Conservative Neil Hamilton in Tatton in 1997.
They get what they deserve.
And if the standards committee sees fit he will be doing it again soon.
From their perspective all this attention is probably better than being ignored even though the attention is for all the wrong reasons.
After all, what did nameless generic tory #4 ever do for them? what would labour do? Probably nothing much, just like farage.
jaywick is still the most deprived area of the UK.
Farage has barely been in Clacton for the last 2 years.
Not really. Clacton itself certainly wasn't; it has its problems for sure but other seaside towns do, and the corner of Clacton that is closest to Brightlingsea is I think fairly well off?
The constituency also includes Frinton-on-Sea, which is really quite affluent as east coastal towns go and fairly affluent on a national scale — a whole bunch of properties over a million quid, and Walton-on-the-Naze, which is a nice place, a bit more modestly expensive than Clacton.
The constituency does include a place that is often considered the most deprived place in the UK — the coastal village of Jaywick which is essentially a holiday resort village that collapsed.
Quite a lot of the people of Jaywick resent the allegation, as it goes. It certainly is more functionally deprived than most places in the UK though, as you have a lot of people living in what were basically beach huts in a holiday park.
And you can be absolutely certain that Farage does not give a damn about Jaywick. His entire argument, essentially, is that he, being Nigel Farage and occasionally even being Nigel Farage in Clacton, is good for Jaywick because it raises Clacton's profile. Locals evidently do not think he has done a thing, and regeneration would be a council effort anyway.
Good luck with the guy who wants to slash your benefits, people.
another expensive byelection. Farage has just wasted public funds to justify taking a big bribe
The Stand-up Maths channel just did a video on this, "Can Count Binface win?":
> "Can Count Binface actually win this election? In a word: yes. In more words: probably not… but we'll get to that later."
Because what if he had won (apart from Farage's utter humiliation, of course)? Would he sit in Parliament in costume? Need to know when to stop so that the joke does not turn into a farce.
Regarding first-past-the-post, the system plays heavily against Reform UK / Farage, actually. They currently have 5 MPs (well, 4...) with more votes nationally than the Lib Dems who have 71 MPs.
If they did it would be staged, like the modern (and perhaps ancient) slamming of the doors before Black Rod during a State Opening. It's just symbolic, they're going to allow Black Rod in, he did not have an inherent right, as a symbol of the King, to enter, he is knocking to get permission.
But Binface's garb isn't a political point, being turned away because he's wearing a bin isn't some grand political gesture supported by his voters, it would be pointless so that's why I wouldn't expect him to do it.
Well, that's worse. Wearing armour into Parliament is specifically forbidden since the year 1313 (1).
I'm sure that Count Binface could argue that it's merely a costume not functional, just plastic resembling actual armour. Or he could switch to a suit and tie.
I have no idea what way that debate would play out, but the debate doesn't need to happen at present.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_forbidding_Bearing_of_...
The thing that still confuses me about the whole thing is none of the other "real" parties even put a candidate up. If a joke candidate can get over a quarter over the vote then it seems like a real candidate could have had a chance, even though the city was chosen specifically because it was his strongest district in the last election.
For American voters it is kind of like if someone called Trump on his corruption and he decided to hold a national vote for President claiming that if he won it would prove that Americans don't care about corruption, but held the vote only in Corpus Christi, TX and the Democrats didn't even bother putting up a candidate.
Firstly, Farage picked this constituency to run in because it's deeply favourable to him. This is quite common for leaders of parties — if you can't even get your top guy to win an election, how are you going to convince other people to do the same? In the previous election, he ended up with 46% of the vote, so assuming the same people vote for him again, you'd need almost all the other votes to go to a single alternative candidate to beat him — that's very unlikely. So there's not much value in running to beat him.
Secondly, Farage was always trying to sell this as a people vs the establishment election, so it wasn't really in the interests of any of the other parties to indulge him in that. Either it's a resounding victory against the establishment, or another example of the establishment using its power to beat up the little man. (Ignore the reality that Farage is fundamentally part of the establishment — the question is more how Farage would attempt to sell the result.) So even if you take the approach that the big national parties ought to be able to field a candidate in every election, even if they aren't going to win, there's not much value there either because the result will be used against you.
Thirdly, the stakes aren't so large as if this were a vote on the President. Farage is the leader of his party, yes, but right now it's a fairly minor protest party, with only 8/650 seats in the House of Commons. They take up a lot of column inches, but in terms of actual power, right now they're not that important. Gaining that one seat in the Commons isn't so big a deal to the day-to-day running of the country — Labour would continue to have a sizeable majority and control the Government, no matter who won it. So there's no question of "who should run the country" here, it's essentially just a performance to the media and the people.
Fourthly, beating Farage here stops the disciplinary processes from happening, and those are probably going to be more damaging to Farage overall than him losing this one election. As long as he's an MP, he will need to deal with the fact that he failed to declare this particular donation, which means it's kind of in the interests of the other parties to let him stay as MP and hopefully face the music. In practice, the punishment will probably not affect him very meaningfully, but the rigmarole of going through the process itself and having his bribe and associations with crypto billionaires repeated constantly in the media will probably be more impactful.
And fifthly, this is kind of just an optional extra election that Farage has called. If the investigation finds fault (likely) and recommends a long enough suspension (more uncertain), then the people of Clacton can choose to recall Farage anyway, at which point there will be a "real" by-election. I've no idea whether that will happen, whether the people in Clacton will really want that to happen, or whether the other parties will abstain again, but I think because this was an election triggered exclusively by Farage for his own benefit, there is this perception that the election never really counted any way.
At winning? No. Count Binface got 26.9% of the vote (1), and overperformed expectations at that. He was not expected to win outright.
At being funny, and making Farage look weak, petty and silly? Yes, he overperformed at that too.
It’s not a great town but it’s also not truly awful. It’s a reasonably deprived town that harks back to its former grand past with an older demographic constantly topped up by people retiring there from east London.
There’s a lot of very nice people who are mortified that Farage is the MP and that the town has become a political joke. I struggle to see how people can vote for Farage but if you walk around the town center (which is perfectly safe like all of the UK is regardless of what social media and US news outlets say) you can understand why people want some change.
In reality there’s no well paid jobs and, with the aging demographic and no reason for anything to be based there, no reason for there to ever be any sadly.
Also Farage is in the district a lot more than the media makes out, I hear enough second and third hand sightings of him that he must be there more than once a month.
Photo ops are all vey well.
Painting all far-right voters as evil is wrong and unproductive. Saying this as a far-left voter.
The interesting question is: would a “real” candidate have beaten him?
Also, Monty Python's own take on the phenomenon, for those who haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVI5ZOT5QEM
If I had to take a guess, I would say that the western European political systems seems to work well in a homogenous population where you mostly need "alignment" (e.g between companies and labour unions) but seems seems to struggle with major reforms. Too many stakeholders, too many vetos and too many processes.
To give an concrete example. The Netherlands has a severe housing crisis. Despite being a relatively rich country it's not uncommon for people (sometimes even couples) to live with their parents untill they're well in their 30ies.
Yet a single guy was able to block the building of almost a hundred houses on the chance that there might be some rare(?) frogs living at the building site. While I'm all for nature conservation, surely the needs of a hundred families should go above the concerns of some hypothetical frogs.
Everyone agrees that this is crazy, seemingly very little changes.
I'm now writing a book provisionally called "How Democracy Got Strangled by Bike Lanes".
> Everyone agrees that this is crazy, seemingly very little changes.
People understand instinctively that "just building more" is not working and never will.
You're still going to have someone sleeping under a bridge, but now really smart people will raise their hand, and yell: "See? Building more was stupid, it didn't work."
During that time, the population grew from 16785299 to 17722333.
So they literally built MORE houses than the increase in population! Yet it's somehow a "housing crisis".
You need to account for:
- Existing deficit
- The changing demographics, people are more likely to (prefer to) live alone putting more stress on the housing market
- The location
More young people are single and more old people prefer to live alone.
At the same time the housing crisis in Groningen might be less severe than in Amsterdam which is not visible in the nationwide numbers.
For a young single person in Amsterdam the situation will definitely feel like a crisis.
So there's clearly something else going on.
And what makes you think that just building even more housing without understanding the underlying reasons can solve the issue of the soaring costs?
Wait. Why? Do they?
If the problem is the lack of housing. Why wouldn't building more be a solution?
Or are you refering that the phrase itself is dismissive of existing issues?
It's not. I don't have statistics for the Netherlands ready, but I would bet that they have more housing units than households. In the US, there's 1.1 housing unit per household.
> Why wouldn't building more be a solution?
Because it's not a housing problem. It's a problem with housing near dense city cores in an ever-dwindling number of cities.
Economic forces concentrate people into dense areas: dense population provides a larger talent pool for employers, so companies with offices in dense city cores have a long-term competitive advantage. This in turn attracts more people. Rinse, wash, repeat.
The solution is to recognize the externalities and properly manage them. For example: cap&trade/tax the dense office space, give tax incentives for remote work, provide tax holidays for people in sparse areas, and so on.
On the other hand if you also have public and co-op projects, rent control, vacancy and second home taxes to complement private developers then prices will definitely go down or at least stop growing faster than inflation. The housing market can never be competitive without state involvement because land is a natural monopoly.
Of course making building easier is also an important piece of the solution. One radical change I support is replace top-down zoning with a community vote so corrupt developers can't bribe their way to gentrification, and loud NIMBYs can't stop projects everyone else wants. Architects will hate it but cities are for the locals not for aesthetics.
Does this seem to you like it's working?
That approach failed around 2000. When the left was protesting against globalization, social democrats had people like Blair in charge, leaving no moderate options for those opposing globalization. And when the nationalist right started growing a bit later, the center-right similarly rejected them and the issues they raised.
You could say that the center-right and center-left parties fail, because they are no longer center-right or center-left. Instead, they are divided into ideological and moderate wings. The former want to address the same issues as the more radical parties on the same side, but they are unwilling to collaborate with the other side. The latter are all for collaboration, but they are unwilling to disrupt the status quo.
The issue in the UK is that living standards have been dropping, or perceived to be dropping for the last 15ish years.
Housing and local community are the bigger issues. most people under 35 who don't own a house now will not be able to. So youre stuck renting. which means shitty houses.
Your local council has no cash, so the only thing they provide is adult social care and bins. Everything else fun/cohesive/community making has been cut. There are no kids clubs, and because there are so many renters, no real community in a lot of places.
Job prosepects are not great for 18-25 year olds and there are a record amount not in education employment or training (NEETs) which means they are rightly pissed off and depressed.
The causes are many, globalisation, cost cutting, and poor industrial policies. (plus a boat load else.)
The issue with PMs is they come in and promise change, but deliver only sound bites.
Cameron: stopped spending on the poor, set in chain brexit
May: delivered "brexit" but couldnt sell it to her party, thus we got a really shit deal (mind you no one wanted to compromise, so we are all guilty on that)
Boris: corrupt chancer that couldnt give a shit about anything for any length of time. Had a great way to get something devisive in the news papers and nothing else
Sunak: Tim nice but dim. No experience, charisma, or authority. No real guiding vision for what britian is supposed to be
Truss: Utterly deranged.
Starmer: confused having shit opponents with being good. Failed to think about policy until after he got in. Didn't want to make decisions, had no ability to create an argument for anything.
Burnham: he was a weak performer in the brown years, but that makes him a star performer in this present age. He failed to read the room in the last two leadership election. Was somewhat effective as the mayor of manchester. He might be alright, but he also has fuck all time, money or authority to do much
What the UK actually needs to do is land reform. All these duchies (etc) need to be dissolved and returned to the state. Next, the UK needs to build significant stock in social housing, much like Vienna did a century ago. That would be through a combination of building new housing stock and buying existing stock. Part of doing that would be by popping the buy-to-let economy, which is the only thing the UK produces now. And that's political suicide because more than half of the voters are deeply committed to ever-increasing housing prcies.
The first 5 PMs on your list were just Conservative shills for the billionaire class and the aristocracy. They were astroturfed by those same interests that drove Brexit. It's just theft from the British taxpayer on a massive scale.
The real reason this was allowed to happen can be blamed on Tony Blair. Just like Bill Clinton in the US, there was this disastrous wave of so-called Third Way noeliberalism that abandoned the working class and just becamse Conservative Lites. Labor ceased to represent the working class in the 1990s as a result.
We had a brief bright spot with Jeremy Corbyn but this brings us to Keir Starmer. He was part of a political hit on Corbyn, in big part because Corbyn was anti-Israel. Starmer got fewer votes than Corbyn did in either of his elections. All that happened was that the right-wing vote was split between Conservative and Reform. That mistake won't happen again. The Conservatives have effectively been wiped out since. This is a consequence of first-past-the-post.
So Starmer was just a tool of the same establishment that backed the previous 5 PMs who was there to maintain the status quo.
Burnham is still an open question but I'm not super hopeful.
YES. I think this would solve a number of problems, especially if they were built well and were built for a mix of sizes, family up to old people studio apartment
Well I don't.
Respectfully, when it appears everyone agrees but nothing happens, usually that means not everyone agrees.
Along with (IMHO) a polycrisis of far-right immigration agitation, post-COVID stagnation, high energy costs, NHS/social care strain, housing/planning hell, lack of infrastructure investment.
We're not in a great place and, to your point, there is no clear way out.
I think an important issue in the UK political landscape and public is the polarisation that makes people label immigration a "far-right agitation".
Immigration is a serious and key issue, which impacts everything else, too. As long as the left of centre denies that it is an issue at all (because only "far right" people have a problem with it, apparently) Nigel Farage and the like will only keep increasing their share of the vote. The other aspect of Reform UK's rise is that the Conservatives only paid lip service to the issue so lost the support of many on the right and were destroyed at the last general election (still very visible in the polls).
Perhaps this, like Brexit before, also highlights another issue in the UK/England, which is that London tends to live in its own bubble.
So while it's an issue, it's not even in the top ten of of the UK's most important practical issues.
And the racism it generates - including Brexit, and currently the collapse of income from foreign students, which was a huge earner for the university sector - does huge and lasting harm.
It's a political shiny penny used for distraction, not a realistic solution to anything. And the people who make careers out of promoting it are provably cynical, corrupt, incompetent, and disinterested in solving real problems.
Also, I don't know why you think opposition to migration is driven by anti-brown-people racism. That opposition grew quite a lot when migration was coming mostly from Eastern Europe. I'd expect concerns over jobs, housing, public services etc. to be more important - I'm not claiming that those are correct, though I don't think they are illegitimate.
Lastly, I am not sure why the empire is relevant. Is the story that because Britain had an empire, it's morally obligated to accept immigration? That could be true for e.g. Hong Kong or Ugandan Indians, but I'm not sure it need be true for all time and everywhere.
LEGAL migration of 1 million per year. For one year only during Boris Johnson's term. Mostly it's in the 100,000s.
Most migration is legal. People crossing the channel in boats is minuscule in comparison (tens of thousands). And, whilst people crossing the channel in small boats is certainly a problem (for their lives, if nothing else), it is not something that should be taking up so much political air. It's a side issue in the big scheme of things.
Governments should certainly have more strategic plans for dealing with the legal migrants, like infrastructure building, and if they're unable to deliver the infrastructure, limit the legal migration. But the rest of it is often driven by political opportunists and bigots.
Arguably even illegal immigration is a policy choice at this point considering the clear reluctance of the government to do much about it. So this has a big symbolic and political impact.
This public growing skepticism about immigration while successive governments have made the choice to support it is fuelling the Reform vote.
This isn't unique to the UK, we see the same pretty much across Europe.
No, it isn’t. Rampant corruption, parties at No.10, Liz Truss, and then inflation because of the Ukraine war causing a cost of living and cost of energy crisis. You know, “it’s the economy, stupid”.
If it was about immigration, why did Labour get in, when they were accused of “opening the floodgates” to European migration in the past?
It may be your biggest issue, it’s not the country’s.
> This public growing skepticism
You spelt “manipulation” wrong. This is raw unfettered populist manipulation. Sure, immigration comes with costs (also benefits), but it’s the rhetoric that’s made this a hot topic, not anything of substance.
This country is a nation of immigrants. And whilst immigration should be managed properly, it is nowhere near the top of the list of things the government should be prioritising. But they’ll have to, wasting time and resources, to hold back this tide of nonsense.
Brexit, Torie implosion, Reform polling in first place or just about... clearly it isn't "my issue".
Your comment, and others, illustrates my original comment about some people absolutely refusing to acknowledge that immigration is a major issue, for some reason and even resorting to conspiracy theories.
(The UK has only seen mass immigration since after WWII, by the way)
Pretty sure we have been invaded by: Vikings, Romans, Germanic tribes which gave us our name, Normans, Beaker folk, Huguenots, and our Empire past literally led to us giving out British passports after WW2 to get immigration from the former colonies to help us rebuild after the devastation of the war.
We are all likely the offspring of immigrants, there are likely very few ‘original’ Celtic bloodlines. Whatever the fuck ‘original’ means when it comes to being born in a place, like it matters.
I am not refusing to acknowledge the issue of migration. But if people like you were really serious about it, you would be talking about global causes of the migration: war, poverty, climate change. But let’s face it, most people are not interested in that, they’re interested in having fewer brown people in their line of sight.
There are pretty much no other visible artefacts of migration in daily life.
Helping people from Ukraine and Hong Kong is overwhelmingly popular. Loss of freedom of movement is much less so, but was an inevitable result of the Brexit vote. And the surge of Xenophobia in the past couple of years has come despite a huge drop in immigration.
It's almost as if it were being driven by demagoguery rather than anything to do with policy choices or delivery.
No, other things are serious and key issues, and immigration is the scapegoat that gives people someone to blame for their problems, distracting from actual solutions that don't fit in a one-sentence slogan the way the non-solution "kick out all the Xes" does. This has been an electoral tactic of right-wing populists for a long, long time.
"I'd vote for the left, but they do nothing about the brown people." I wish these people just stayed at home on the voting day.
Since then it's really only foreign students who have had issues, so the group that probably makes the least sense to 'hit' (although there was abuse of the system that needed to be addressed)but the easiest politically, again because it's the least resistance path within party and party supports while allowing to say that they are acting.
This would have been less of a problem if Leave had itself been a single position, rather than as it turned out to be several different positions that all started off in the same vague direction but pulled apart almost immediately, with those involved all insisting the rest of them "weren't proper Brexit" or were "secret Remainers", ignoring all the times Temainers said "What? Them? They aren't Remainers!" unless said Remainers pointed out this division at which point all these supposed "secret Remainers" who wanted something that wasn't "proper Brexit" suddenly were totes Leavers what are you talking about.
But yeah, polycrisis, and it's not just the UK, but the UK seems to have it worse than most because Brexit added to it.
* Hard right - Reform
* Far right - Restore
Restore are a far right party. Luckily they get about the same number of votes as the old far right parties, like the BNP.
The label "far right" is just used to smear people, rather than something that represents a real group in Britain.
* Conservatives “centre right” to “right wing” [1]:
* Reform: “far right” [2], but they have tempered their original far-right rhetoric and are clearly positioning themselves as hard-right these days.
* Restore: “far right” [3]
I don’t know why you think this is odd. Political parties tend to carve out their niche on the political spectrum.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Party_(UK)
The Tory saga was mostly caused by Brexit and poor handling of Covid. Theresa May was ousted by Boris Johnson over Brexit, Johnson was ousted for hosting parties at number 10, whilst Covid lockdowns were in-place, and poor party management (ironically). Liz Truss tanked the UK bond market by thinking she could present an unfunded budget full of tax cuts for the rich, she didn't last as long as a lettuce. Rishi Sunak only had a short time before the next election, so didn't really get a chance to bed in, but he was seen to be grossly out-of-touch.
Now we're into the Labour saga: Kier Starmer seemed to actually be doing OK, but he didn't tell anybody about it. Then had a number of U-turns that made him look weak to the country and especially his back-benchers. He was a decent technocrat, but it's clear someone like that can't exist in this modern fast-comms world. The online vitriol against him was unbelievably disproportionate to his performance.
Now we have Andy Burnham, who seems to know how to flood-the-zone (Trump style) without being a bigoted, corrupt, criminal, paedophile. So his communications seem to be carrying a honeymoon period, for now. But the press in the Uk is mostly right-wing biased, so you can expect the attacks to start soon.
In many ways you could argue all of those prime ministers deserved to go and it actually shows 'The UK' will get rid of you if it's not working. They weren't good enough and our main parties have mechanisms to get rid of you if it's not working out.
Outside of that, the UK's biggest problem is its debt and the fact we left the EU. Which is tightening the budget and making it difficult for any government to put money into things that are visible to the average voter. This makes governing especially hard right now.
Oh, and the clear targeted propaganda from hard right-wing organisations, Elon Musk, Russia, and Iran are clearly trying to destabalise the UK on the beloved free-speech platforms of America. It's absolute poison day-in, day-out. And unfortunately, some people fall for it, and end up voting for assets like Nigel Farage. But that isn't real life. Or, at least, the beloved free-speech platforms of America don't represent the the UK in any true form.
That is such a weird take. "It rightly caused friction with Privacy International" might be a better position to take ;)
The US is technically not allowed to spy on it's own citizens. However, legally speaking, if the UK spies on your citizens and forwards whatever is interesting, it's not the US spying on it's own citizens.
You say this like the FBI hasn't asked Apple for a back door before here in the US
It was all theatre.
What happened in 2014? Nothing of note. Quality of Life for most people is how much free cash they have at the end of the month to enjoy life (the UK has low crime, good employee protections, decent education system, universal healthcare, childcare provision and pretty good public services, therefore QoL is mostly about spare cash). So, what has reduced the cash in the pocket? Increased property values up to around 2020. They've been steadily reducing since (in real terms). Inflation: post Global Financial Crisis, the UK government was quantative easing, trying to inflate their debts away, which reduces the value of everybody's wage. Then the oil spike because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And then there's the debt, which reduces government spending (GFC again and Covid).
And finally, Brexit, knocking 6% off GDP.
So, yeah, that's reduced the spare cash for many, which increases the stress for many. But it's also not really a UK problem (other than Brexit, which could have been avoided). I'm sure the decade after the Great Depression was tough for many too. But I'd definitely argue that the UK is not really in a bad position. It's a grown up country, with grown up institutions, life isn't bad in the UK. It only appears bad if you live online.
I spent my 20s in late 1990s and early 2000s London. It was fucking awesome. I wasn't earning much at all (£19,000) when I first moved, but I lived in Highgate and was out every night of the week, enjoying life in London. The main difference I see between then and now: cost of housing, UK debt levels, and the UK was in the EU. To 'fix' the current issues, it seems we need:
* To build many more houses. It could do this by starting a government funded house builder. It is clear the main house-builders are sitting on land banks and not building enough housing. So we should start our own and use compulsory purchase to acquire land-banks for building. The additional supply should help reduce house prices over time. It could also go along with a massive trades apprenticeship programme, improving employment, and reducing the astronomical costs of getting anything built.
* Ban foreign ownership of residential property and all companies that own residential property must be based in the UK. With all taxes from companies holding residential property to go directly to government funded house building.
* Rent pricing control: yearly rent rises to be capped by inflation. So, over time this will start to feel a bit better for the average renter and they have more confidence in future costs.
* Pay down the UK debt as quickly as possible. This is harder to solve when there's no spare cash in the coffers. My suggestion: rejoin the EU and use the 6% of additional GDP to pay down the national debt to more manageable levels as quickly as possible.
* There's a political debate over mining the remaining oil in the North Sea. In reality it won't be economically realistic in about 12 years. So, put all North Sea oil revenues into a Sovereign Wealth Fund asap.
* Transition to a fully renewable/nuclear grid asap. The price of energy is too high and the quicker we get there the better, even if there's some short-term pain. We have got to stop being in-hoc to the whims of megalomaniacs like Putin and Trump.
We, of course, don't have the post-USSR peace dividend. And the electorate will still have their minds poisoned daily by the beloved free-speech platforms of America. So, it won't be exactly the same as the 90s, but people would be in a better position to enjoy life more.
Still, on the whole, I think it's over-egged. Life is more difficult than it was in the 90s, but the country is still better than most in many regards.
The instability means paralysis. No-one believes any policy will last the 5 years+ it needs to be implemented, so very little happens.
The PM is selected from the party that has the majority in Parliament (typically the party leader), so if the PM changes without a national vote, it's still a MP from the majority party.
The stability of the US presidency comes at a cost. It allowed a senile president to stay in office when it was clear to everyone that he was incapable of assuming his function. Or with the current presidency, it enables a president to renege on pretty much all of his electoral program with impunity. Both would have been replaced 6 months into their term in the UK.
Boris actually seemed to be a charismatic leader in the same class as Blair and Thatcher but seems to have been rather morally flawed which ended up bringing about his downfall.
The other leaders have been uninspriring second raters - Andy Burnham himself is a Gordon Brown B-side fully compromised by PFI but perhaps he's grown via his mayorship.
Seems now to have some of the common touch of Boris which is positive.
Britain itself is quite a grey and timid place, challenged by both fear and awe of it's great history and the complex consequences of its impact on the world.
It's neither the diverse heaven the left would tell you, staggering unfairly under the weight of brexit foisted on an unwitting populace by the big bad press barons, or the front line of the fight against Islam and a liberal-triggered decline into a violent dystopia that our more swivel-eyed compatriots on the right would have you believe.
However there are some insights to be gained by listening to all those voices about it's current state and potential - but the ensuing noise represents the confusion and disagreement that is holding us back from moving into the light with purpose.
the charismatic bumbling idiot thing was always pure stagecraft. he deliberately messes up his hair before going in front of cameras.
There are various factors at play, some of which are by no means unique to the UK like the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment. But IMO one aspect which is somewhat UK-specific is the first past the post system, which doesn't really work that well in situations where there are more than two parties seriously challenging for power. Starmer won in a "landslide" when you look at seats gained, but actually a lot of that was due to the right wing vote being split between the Tories and Reform. And on the other side you have left or centre-left parties like the Greens and Lib Dems which are now threatening to split the left wing vote. It's a pretty nonsensical and undemocratic system and I do think it plays a large part in the fact that no government ever seems very safe, even when they get a large surplus of seats in Parliament.
(I am not a UK citizen but I have lived here for years.)
The USA does have a constitutional method to remove a President.
Nevertheless, in living memory all Presidents have survived their impeachments. Whereas (with the exceptions of Major, Brown, and Sunak) all UK Primes Minister have been removed while in office.
It makes an interesting study in the effectiveness of a written and inflexible constitution.
The last VONC to pass was in 1979, and Callaghan continued to lead Labour (albeit to defeat) in the General Election.
This is muddied a bit in modern times with press and overseas engagements and higher salaries for PMs than MPs.
Once upon a time it was the usual practice for the PM to be from the Lords, but in modern history that seems very unlikely to ever happen again. In principle (though this certainly was not how it was done historically) you could elevate somebody of your choice to become a Life Peer, just so that they can be PM.
When I say this wasn't done, I mean Life Peers didn't even exist until relatively recently, so back when "Lets have Lord So-and-So as PM" made sense they were a Lord for life anyway, typically because their father and his father and so on, the Life Peers are a new thing - created in the 20th century.
The Government led by that person falls. Parliament can in principle pick a new government, but in practice is likely to trigger a General Election instead and replace all the MPs. Since the Prime Minister is chosen by those MPs, the new one even if it's the same person, clearly does have their confidence, at least for now, right ?
Anyway, even when the PM survives a confidence vote that's often bad for them, if some of "your" people vote "No confidence" (as must happen for a Majority government) or even if those who've promised Confidence to you (in a Coalition) actually renege, you're done even if you carry the day in the House. This is also true for internal processes. You can, and often Tory PMs do, win a 1922 committee vote and then resign by next week because you'd expected to win by a huge landslide and instead it turns out dozens of people you'd thought were solid have doubts after all.
I don't know precisely what they were thinking, but in America someone who is impeached and convicted by the Senate can be personally barred (by simple majority vote at that point) from ever holding any federal office ever again, which seems the political equivalent of a "beheading".
Charles I was beheaded. Even if the day after Parliament had thought better of it, their only option was to make somebody else King instead, Charles I was dead.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/votes-of-no-confidence/
It absolutely does. Now, it's rare that it is used, because normally the party will dump the leader first (or simply implicitly threaten to). But it exists.
The UK's real issue is that it is a corrupt hollowed-out plutocracy run for the benefit of corporations and privileged opportunists, many of whom live abroad. They control the media, they buy politicians, they own much of the land and property market, and key companies and resources, and they set the narrative.
They have no ethics beyond power and money, and their signature attitude is contempt for voters.
The result is PR politics where major issues are ignored - climate catastrophe, the dire state of many utilities, lack of investment, lack of national strategy - and the media concentrate on fear-mongering and distractions, including racism (esp. Brexit and Islamophobia), punching down at the weak, and aggressively disproportionate punishment of very mild public dissent.
A series of comically incompetent and personally grotesque figurehead prime ministers - who can be talked up on installation and trashed when minor release is needed - is just another of the distractions. It simultaneously enrages the population, forces them into apathy (because nothing fundamental can ever change), and reassures the country's owners that money and resources can keep being extracted while the government "can't afford" more spending on healthcare, education, and critical infrastructure.
If you're thinking "That sounds like the US" - yes, it does, and that's not a coincidence.
If you got an education in an area that’s in demand and you are a good communicator, made sensible choices and were lucky to not have any major misfortune hit you directly then more than likely you have a pretty nice life that has been getting better and unaffected but the political circus.
If you were unlucky with your starting point in life, didn’t get an education in an in demand area, or did but really struggle to communicate, or got hit by some bad luck then life could feel very stalled at the moment and frustrating.
There’s a lot of negative news around the UK at the moment and I think a lot of it is taking real aspects of life here and massively blowing it up or extrapolating across the whole country. I suspect by a certain political party funding negative news on a mass scale.
Crime is up in some places, but still generally not very high. Pot holes are up in many areas, but roads are still good in the main. Some industries are declining but even within things like manufacturing there is a lot of growth and jobs.
It’s the fifth largest economy in the world and most things works pretty well. So swings and roundabouts.
Which was always the case, but now you can find someone online with an agenda to manipulate you. Or, in reality, the algorithm pairs you.
The UK doesn't produce anything anymore. The best returns on investment aren't in productive output. They're in hoarding land. This is exacerbated by an anachronistic system whereby artistocrats are still significant landowners (eg the Duke of Westminster). The UK badly needs land reform but the system is designed to protect landowners through the House of Lords. Up until only fairly recently, the House of Lords still had hereditary peers.
This relaly started in Thatcher's time but was made significantly worse in the aftermath of 2008. The UK government chose to bail out the banks at the expensive of taxpayers and then pay for it by crippling the economy with 15+ years of austerity measures.
So there's been a revolving door of British PMs because literally none of them have been interested in addressing these core issues. What we really need is another Oliver Cromwell.
[1]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6571818
I'm not quite sure what the answer is. In a few decades it will have blown over.
We're probably more united in that both leavers and remainers are getting more in agreement that Brexit didn't work very well.
Yes, the referendum was a binary choice, but I think it was flawed in that Brexit covered many different, incompatible options (e.g. soft, hard, in-between). If the referendum had depicted the situation more accurately, then we wouldn't have wasted so much time and money going through the whole charade (mainly because "remain" would have won).
I like to think of an analogy where people are asked what they want to eat for dinner and they're given a choice of "meat" or "vegetarian". If 40% want vegetarian, 30% want beef and 30% want pork, then the "meat" option will win, but then someone has to choose whether it's beef or pork. That ends up with a choice that only suits 30% of the voters.
Also, it makes sense for a referendum to specify the required margin for whether the choice is carried through and I think the vote was too close to lead to such a destructive change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waldo_Moment
Reality these days sometimes feels as strange as fiction.
Exactly. In a corrupt political system that each voter has little or no faith in, how do they signal this to others so that everyone knows they're not alone?
You can simply not vote, but then you're accused of being lazy, etc and the overall point is lost.
At least with a joke party, getting a sizeable portion of votes creates an undeniable spectacle to spark discussion.
It's like if there is a Twitch streamer who shrieks and does stupid stunts to impress 6-10 year olds, I'd be skeptical when someone says that hey actually they are also really a intelligent scholar and whatnot. Then why do they have to go for the cheap effects?
If you have proper policy proposals, you don't need a ridiculous bin on your face.
And if it's really just protest voting, then my original comment stands. You may accidentally elect him for some role and you have no idea what he would actually do because nobody cared about that part, just the protest joke aspect.
Your comparisons are distasteful and strike me as someone who doesn't really know the man, and just tosses out preconceived notions at him. His messaging doesn't have any undertones of "look how much I'm better and superior than the bureaucrats, I'm just like you guys!". Frankly I'd say he's less like the average person than an average politician. Neither is his humour cheap, nothing like shrieking for 6 year olds that you automatically accuse him of.
He presents himself this way because it's what he's good at. He's a highly educated comedy and satire writer. Also, he runs as a single candidate and probably doesn't really expect to win - but he does take the political system seriously and wants people to be engaged with it.
Humor has always been with us. I don't see what makes it so horrible. If a story can drive a point through it, why can't political messaging? Why is making pertinant jokes about the current situation worse than reading bullet points off a list regardless of the argument being made?
If you have real proposals, it will be interesting enough without the "ha-ha, I'm so quirky, I'm so random" costume.
"build at least one affordable house?" Is poking fun of the other candidates that would not do such a thing. Not one affordable house. If he went and said that directly, it would likely be defamation. But as a joke he gets the rally of the people while the other candidates are none the wiser. Yes the people want to hear this, yes they want both affordable housing and to see it recognized that other candidates have other ideas, but that doesn't mean they're being tricked.
This is the first time he's passed 5% of the vote and he was the only other candidate on the ballot. It seems quite clear cut that these are protest votes.
All that being said, purely off of vibes, I agree with the parent comment saying he would probably not misuse his power if he were to get it, which I think is already good enough in terms of "having no idea what he would actually do".
The second one is to make water companies CEOs swim in the Thames.
That is a program.
- Have money
- Use money to saturate the political attention, making most people eventually wonder are any other candidates even running?
- Attack ads for competing candidates with actual attention already
(1) Seeing this situation, and (2) knowing that everything you have been told about the candidates that you have heard of might be flowery bullshit but you don’t quite know, (3) and not trusting them, you might just as well decide to tell the “eager volunteers” for the millions-funded candidate: I am not impressed and you are unwilling to give me anything that I want. But I vaguely know about this other candidate dressed as a hamster, and he is saying some damn fine and good things for me, the ordinary pedestrian (populist in the literature). Want my vote? Come and try and get it with more than your flowery bullshittery.
This is known as uninformed and irrational in the literature, I vaguely recall (it’s been what, 15 years?), pedestrians not simply taking the flowery bullshit, I mean information they have been graciously given for free by their betters, and then making an altruistic least-harm calculation based on that. (Concessions and bargaining based on personal interest is for tHe eLite; pedestrians are supposed to lie on their backsides and think of Xland.)
Brexit needs to be reversed already.
Support for reversing Brexit / rejoining the EU is a bit mixed:
> While 55% of Britons say they support the UK rejoining the EU, this falls to just 35% if the UK had to rejoin without its prior opt-outs, with 43% opposed
* https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54925-what-do-britons-thin...
The UK had a pretty unique setup previously, and I'm not sure if the EU would really go along with it again.
Sounds like Project Fear to me! The EU needs Britain more than Britain needs them! The German car/French wine/etc. industry will beg the European Commission to give Britain all their opt-outs back to secure a rejoin!
> However, 58-61% think the UK should have to participate in all major EU policies if it rejoined, like Schengen and the Euro
> If it were only willing to rejoin with its old opt-outs, support for the UK rejoining falls to 36% in France and 39% in Germany
* https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/55023-ten-years-after-the-...
Schengen and the Euro were hardly minor:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_opt-outs_from_E...
There were only four (now three) countries in the EU that got any opt-outs at all, and the UK the most opted-out items (4):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opt-outs_in_the_European_Union
This doesn't make sense. If they wanted to protest Farage, wouldn't they be better off running a serious candidate against him?
They neutered that move by not entering the contest in the first place. And Binface (with support of 32 other candidates) turned it into a humiliating exercise.
Farage can't say "The people want me more than your other serious candidates even after this controversy" if there are no serious candidates running.
None of the other major parties stood for election in Clacton, which meant that all those tens of thousands of votes cast for the other parties at the 2024 election should have gone to Binface in protest to make Farage fail. And the volunteers who would normally be canvassing for those parties should have strategically been out on the street trying to get votes for BinFace or another.
But instead the voter turnout remained similar to 2024 levels (around 40% at both elections), which means the voters who turned out were either new voters for Farage, or the voters of the other parties voted strategically for Farage.
My guess is that the other parties decided Farage is so fatally damaged with the ongoing scandals, that keeping him as Reform Leader is their best bet at maintaining the usual 2-party state (and more so as there is an paused parliamentary investigation into Farage that would resume only if elected).
It is of note that Reform's popularity and Farage's popularity nationally is on an ongoing decline and if Farage had been voted out, Reform could have either imploded (thereby allowing another right/far right party to replace them by the time of the next election i.e. the Elon Musk backed Restore Britain) or had a change of leadership at Reform UK with Farage stepping down
There is also the question of whether Farage is controlled opposition acting his part to give artificial hope to the people of change.
The truth is the 2-party state has existed for years and given the deep-state in the UK predictable control. If that system was broken, then it's a risk of major change to the establishment/british aristocracy.
If Count Binface took just 6,393 more votes from Farage he would have won!
Maybe Farage was always destined to win.
But Farage did not get to control the narrative of the situation ghat _he_ created - instead managed to beat a man with a bin on his head.
Well done, Nige.
I suspect this is sarcasm? Farage did underperform and Binface did exceed expectations so... I'm not sure whether or not that's due to internet energy or not, but it certainly went well for Binface... and more importantly, increased attention on the crypto corruption.
Farage wanted a huge mandate from the voters and got at best a tepid response and then he didn't even show up for the vote count and cancelled planned events. This was an embarrassment for him and reform and might mean a very likely future by-election could be much more competitive than it was before all of this.
What's stopping it?
Can a human be the "frontend" to skirt around age and citizenship requirements?
While being a sketch-action, there is for sure a lot of preassure in playing this role for month?
So his results should be much higher
It's hard to explain what seaside towns are like if not from the UK but I can tell you that this is the end of farage and reform. He didn't even show up at the vote count because he tried to host a glamping after party that nobody attended. He knows he has a couple of weeks left before he's arrested or resigns again
And look what happened to Laurence fox, he lost to binface and a party who want to rejoin the EU. It's really the end of the far right in the UK
I used to live in that constituency. The 'great' thing about the first past the post system is you get a MP representative of that constituency. I dont like it, but Farage increased the votes he received.
However, it can be a shrinking island. People laughing at him and Count Binface, may put some of the floating voters across the country off him.
#Hope
Realistically he was hoping to put Farage to shame, for which he didn’t even have to win. But this result wasn’t that. A bit of nice PR but essentially a debacle for the other nationwide parties, because that was all they could come up with.
Prediction: Farage has good chances of becoming the/a future pm
But let me get this straight: because Farage won absolute majority it is the end of the far right in the UK?
Have you got any mechanism in place to remind yourself about that grand prediction about Farage getting arrested in „a couple of weeks“? Maybe a predictionmarket link or something.
(Any country in which that sort of thing works is fucking insane.)
Farage's shtic just now is that he has a democratic mandate, and that when the investigation starts, the people of his constituency are behind him. Binface was the only person who had any chance of stopping him being re-elected. In fact, as Binface rightly said, if they had elected him instead of Farage, there wouldn't be a second by-election in the future.
did they endorse and fund him?
are they running him for the next PM?
Especially against count binface.
(better than the elected one, that's for sure.)
A win in a fight
- that Nigel personally picked himself because his own personally dubious way of living and coming into money caused Parliament to investigate him
- where a novelty candidate won more (a greater share of the vote) than most novelty candidates ever have
- that Farage fought explicitly (he has said so) to attempt to discredit any legitimate recall election triggered by his standards investigation
- that has only cost Reform money campaigning for a race he'd already won.
- that only caused more scrutiny on Posh George, his mother, the money, Tice, on the fact that their crypto-based funding is so shady, banks and the police are investigating it
- where Farage decided not to turn up to the count, claiming the police had told him not to, which turns out not to be the truth
- that took effectively took Reform's party leader off the national media stage because of impartiality regulations on reporting
- that possibly caused them to lose the Manchester mayoral election (or at least lose worse than they could have) because the entire party abandoned campaigning in favour of Clacton
Farage "won" but he lost. Reform only lost.
ETA: Count Binface won by more votes than any recall petition would need to force Farage out of his seat and to fight it again. That is a huge deal.
- it won't stop the investigation, which has restarted
- it won't stop the investigation triggering a recall petition if the findings are serious enough
- the recall petition needs 10% of the electorate to sign it to trigger a recall
- if it gets ten per cent of the electorate, Farage loses his seat and has to fight another election
- Count Binface got more than 12% of the electorate to vote for him, many of whom, perhaps the majority, will have voted for him in person (because it's effing hilarious)
- So if the standards commission finds Farage broke the rules in a way significant enough to trigger a recall petition, it seems likely Farage will lose his seat
- And then have to fight it again, this time against other candidates
- There are surely going to be more stories that come out about exactly how Posh George's money reached the party (which is the second investigation that will almost certainly start)
But the second one, it actually needs to be broken down that way, because it's sort of complex point-by-point stuff. And I was thinking out loud a bit I suppose.
He was always going to win this election. Nobody practically-minded ever thought Binface winning was anything more than technically possible.
What is your understanding about why the election happened?
Binface has been around for years, he never received this level of coverage before. Its pretty obvious that the bbc's natural bias against any anything right of soft left is why he got this much coverage from them.
Or left of soft left. Anybody who will change anything politically is an enemy of the BBC. They have a bias towards backroom deals between near-relatives.
Politics is bigger than a single election. The goal wasn't to win here, it would have just been a really funny outcome if it happened.
Binface and Farage will have got more or less equal time on the BBC for this election, because a) the rules demand it and b) Reform would kick up a fuss.
This is such a ridiculous take. In his last by-election result he got 95 votes, which up until last night's result was this highest he'd ever achieved. So getting nearly 10,000 votes is ridiculously good for a 'novelty' candidate. Your expectations of how every single voter who was for the other parties is instantly not for Nigel Farage doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The Conservative bloc, for example, wouldn't necessarily have skin in this game, whereas liberal and left leaning voters would.
So he has never, until now, kept his deposit. This win was large and it is politically significant.
Considering Count Binface got 26.93% (i.e. +2.13% Vs. the previous combined), the opposition did in fact converge on him. It just so happen that in Clacton the opposition is tiny, it is a very right wing area - which is why Farage picked it.
So I'd not consider +2.13% over the previous combined opposition a bad result, quite the opposite. Unless you believe previous Conservative voters would pick Binface over Farage, which to me seems highly unlikely.
All numbers from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Clacton_by-election#Resul...
I'm not sure the traditional parties standing aside in favour of a joke candidate, even if none of them stood a chance in this constituency individually, paid off. It probably just pissed off Farage voters hence his increased vote count with a reduced turnout.
The whole thing was cringeworthy, insulting to the voters, and just played into Farage's hands.
Turnout percentage wasn't much different to 2024 elections. So if you say that many non-reform didn't vote, then it means new people of a similar volume did vote.
Which I think is unlikely, I suspect the other parties strategically wanted to keep Farage in (see my standalone comment )
Story about politics .. check
Story about local "celebrity" politician .. check
Covered by mainstream TV news .. check
Comment thread full of political bickering .. check
Hundreds of votes and to the top of the front page you go!
Elections are there to show the sacrosanct power of the people. Candidates like this just makes a mockery out of it and people are just going along with it. Safe to say these types of candidates are not what UK wants, but definitely deserves.
This election was forced by Farage as he is under investigation for corruption and undeclared funding. He was hoping to delay and distract from this investigation.
That is why the count stood against him and all major parties abstained.