Britain has a first-past-the-post election system so the candidate with the most votes wins in each constituency.
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.
the pre vote discusions centered on
" The Count Binface" getting more than 5% of the votes as bieng a sign of great discontent, 25% + suggests that politics as it is, wont be for long.
Actually a bad result for Binface: you'd have expected the whole opposition to converge on him (they would have had nothing to lose), but many non-reform didn't vote at all, giving Farage the absolute majority.
> 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...
Can someone in the UK explained how the country has fared with multiple PMs since Borris Johnson? My read as an outsider is it would take another brexit exit (a singular, definable political question that can cleanly classified in a binary label) to create a unifier but I also have no idea what that could be (ai, immigration, climate change, etc are too load bearing and multifaceted to see such a clean binary moment).
I've lived here. My take is it's been mildly depressing. Economically tearing up our trade agreements hasn't been good, immigration wise having european immigrants replaced but a bunch of dark skinned immigrants hasn't made the anti immigration folk happy. We have large amounts of debt which makes it hard for governments to do much. As a result people get pissed off, try changing the leader, it doesn't actually change anything, and repeat.
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.
> another brexit exit (a singular, definable political question that can cleanly classified in a binary label)
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.
* 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.
if a quarter of votes is what Count Binface got as a candidate backed by every other party against Nigel Farage this is not the "success" people hope it looks like. On the contrary Farage got his highest percentage ever.
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.
The contributed proposition by the 10 year old kid to make fossil fuel companies pay for solar panels is perhaps the best policy proposal I’ve ever seen.
The second one is to make water companies CEOs swim in the Thames.
Be careful with joke parties. It may seem fun and may seem like they are obvious "good guys", but you really can't know. It's easy to hide behind irony. In Hungary, we had the Two-Tailed Dog party which essentially turned into the personal enrichment of the couple leading it, and political background deals and embezzlement of state funds. A lot of times, the regular old human affairs poison these joke parties too, as anywhere else, except they may have lots of naive people around them who are even easier to fool and exploit.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 27.8 ms ] threadAlso, Monty Python's own take on the phenomenon, for those who haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVI5ZOT5QEM
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.
Especially against count binface.
> 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...
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.
While being a sketch-action, there is for sure a lot of preassure in playing this role for month?
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.
The second one is to make water companies CEOs swim in the Thames.
That is a program.
Maybe Farage was always destined to win.
What's stopping it?
Can a human be the "frontend" to skirt around age and citizenship requirements?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waldo_Moment
Reality these days sometimes feels as strange as fiction.