* 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.
Do we have any English lawyers here who can comment on whether it may actually be legal to nationalise Adele (the person) under English law? ChatGPT says it may be possible through an act of parliament, but I’m unsure whether I can trust ChatGPT in this case.
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.
Parliament theoretically has unlimited power, practically I think this stops short of reintroducing actual slavery. Lawyers would be busy arguing in international courts; but hopefully 50℅ of the electorate might actually bother to vote.
(Obviously the MP for Clacton has the power to talk sturnly to someone with actual power in the councel over the bin collection schedule; the is no plausable way to deliver any of their pledges)
A simple bill of attainder would do it, but she'd have recourse to the ECHR to appeal it, which would in practice bind the UK. If we thought she wasn't going to be chill with it, we'd first need to withdraw from the ECHR. As it happens, withdrawing from the the ECHR is a prime Farage objective.
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.
Generally water nationalisation means nationalising the companies which supply water to homes and businesses. Not, er, literally nationalising water as in the substance.
If we project her lifespan as 50 more years and assume the UK population stays stable at 70 millions, that works out at 3835 and a half lunches per day.
The history of ceefax is worth reading when you have a spare moment. If you want to go further down the rabbit hole, there's Prestel with its 1980s "electronic mailbox".
Every election should have a funny absurdist person like this absorbing all the blank and null votes to give the other candidates more incentives to convince the electorate.
Back when I was in college, student union elections had a candidate called RON on each vote. RON was Re—Open Nominations. Basically “none of the above”, which would cause a restart of the election for than role if it got the most votes.
In this particular case, the main stream parties did not take part (i.e. field candidates) because the current MP (Farage) resigned just to retake his own seat - basically trying to distract from his dodgy dealings with crypto bros and convicted fraudsters.
I would have voted Count Binface too (as the least absurd candidate).
> basically trying to distract from his dodgy dealings with crypto bros and convicted fraudsters.
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.
> Every election should have a funny absurdist person like this absorbing all the blank and null votes to give the other candidates more incentives to convince the electorate.
We have absurdist clown candidates in America, the difference is they actually win... even after failed attempts at insurrection.
Here in Brazil we once had an actual clown on a representative election, with a slogan that translates to "I literally can't make it worse!" (but was a pun in Portuguese.)
He was the most voted candidate, and is now a professional politician. He failed to make good on his slogan...
Don't forget about the California recall that put Arnold in charge. There were pornstars and all sorts absurdist candidates due to the nature of how the recall works. More recently, you had some ex-reality TV personality running for mayor of LA.
> 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...
And this time he got enough votes that if they were to be signatures in any recall petition if triggered by the standards investigation, Farage will lose his seat and have to fight it again if he wants it.
Here's a prediction. The standards committee won't do a recall. The reason, Farage won this election despite the accusation over the £5 million. Having another byelection would get the same result so it would be a complete waste of public money.
They don't decide on a recall. They can sanction an MP, such as suspension from the House of Commons.
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)
I don't think the committee will be swayed by this stunt at all, especially since Farage has essentially admitted that he started all this to make them look silly.
And they are highly likely to open another investigation into the Posh George stuff.
You do know the other major parties didn't run a candidate right? The point was to demonstrate that this byelection was just theatrics by Farage to distract from the ethics investigation into the 5 million pounds. I think some, and maybe Farage himself, seem to think that the byelection wipes the slate clean either actually or practically because the people of Clacton have "spoken". it does neither.
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.
The US bailout paid for itself... If you consider the equivalent of 0.6% growth, not adjusted for inflation, paying for itself. In practice the US's cost of borrowing the money was substantially more than that.
> 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.
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?
Reading her Wikipedia page, she's given huge amounts to all kinds of charities. Easy to get swept up in the whole pro/anti conversation, but even the one charity that specifically serves women only rape victims is doing good things. I just can't equate her with Musk.
Is it possible that other anti democratic forces are working to instill the notion that the ideas of their ideological opponents are illegitimate and when voters hold those beliefs it’s only because they’re been propagandized and deceived? The idea in a democratic society a large proportion of voters cannot be trusted to make their own decisions seems extremely dangerous, and one that massively benefits centralizing authoritarian powers and oligarchs.
What are campaign finance laws like in the UK? Can he crowdsource this to offset his cost? I live in the US and am a citizen, with no connection to the UK, but this hand dryer situation at the Crown & Treaty really needs attention and nobody else is willing to deal with it.
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. )
No, anybody can't donate to a political party in the UK:
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.
Well, you linked to his registration entry but that's not donations. In fact he doesn't have any donations so maybe that's why you were confused. If you look for a political entity which does have donations, like Reform, you can see £50M over the years since it was formed (then as the "Brexit Party")
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)
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.
Democracies can be arranged in some majoritarian, concensus-based, or any other way that a group of peers can use to decide on something collectively. “Ha ha wolves and sheep voting for what’s for dinner.” Find another quip.
The Conservative party ran in the last election, they didn't run in this election, so more right wing voters likely moved from Conservative to Farage than he got 110% of his normal core/base.
I saw a Sankey diagram from exit polls that showed that lots of Conservatives voted for Farage, but some Reform voted for Binface. Can't find it again though because Twitter sucks.
I saw someone interviewed who said that they supported Reform but couldn't vote for Farage. Which is particularly odd as Reform is _basically_ the Nigel Farage party; it wouldn't survive losing him.
(ETA: I see you edited your post to clarify — I will leave mine because there is significant nuance about the constituency)
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.
Interestingly these regions have been getting a lot more investment from central government in recent years. It hasn’t appeared to make any difference to people’s voting patterns.
Maybe in a real election. Clearly the big parties had no need to get involved in this farce. I think they were right: Farage got publicly humiliated, all for nothing. Surely this has to be the highest score for a novelty candidate. Besides, I don’t think candidates, even from major parties, would really have a chance in the current situation.
The problem with independent candidates is that they will never be able to influence Parliament enough to make anything happen, they will just be dominated by the big parties. Short of banning people from being part of a political party (which might be a good or bad idea) it is just a sad fact of FPTP voting.
I think people voted Binface in protest but knowing that he would lose.
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.
I expect he would show up to Westminster, take the pledge and not wear the costume. Maybe they'd make a big thing out of refusing to let him enter with the Bin on and so forth but maybe it's not worth the bother.
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.
If you want to see how exactly a Westminster Parliament would stop duly elected MPs who did not follow the rules, look at the 2022 controversy about the Parti Québécois MPs who refused to pledge allegiance to the monarch. They were physically stopped by the sergeant-at-arms.
The UK has MPs who won't pledge allegiance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinn_F%C3%A9in -- they're so integral to modern parliamentary procedure that Parliament's own systems just assume they don't count for purposes of working out a majority. If your government can scrape together enough people to get Confidence and Supply unless Sinn Féin MPs turn up, you live another day. Their grand political gesture over decades is worth nothing if they ever sacrifice it to cast a vote and so Parliament's own systems assume that would never happen.
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.
I think there is some rule about not wearing hats that block the view of others or something. From the era of top hats and all that which aren'tthat far removed from the bin.
One reporter asked him about the rule that says MPs aren't allowed to cover their face while it is in session and he responded with "Oh, so now the rules matter?"
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.
Your last paragraph answers your second imo. The other parties want to highlight that the election was held with the outcome already practically decided. By not participating they are harming the "people vs. the establishment" narrative Farage is trying to spin
It costs money to campaign, it's not a seat any other party had a chance to win and it sends a clear message from the other parties that the whole stunt was a waste of everyone's time.
How are you confused? Given your US example, the only smart play for the Dems would be exactly what happened here. Sure, you could field a candidate and maybe win, but probably not and then you've lent legitimacy to his stunt. Or you could just let Trump run against Bozo the clown, and while Trump would most definitely still win, he would be made to look ridiculous.
I think there's a few things going on that make it a bit different.
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.
Never thought I’d see my home town being discussed here. I no longer live there but regularly go back.
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.
They are rationalisations: 'whatever makes a change to my situation' is a ticket that appeals to a lot of the poorer people, and it of course won't be the Tories or Labour, or their stand-ins in other countries. A huge amount of people alternate between the extremes of the spectrum.
Painting all far-right voters as evil is wrong and unproductive. Saying this as a far-left voter.
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'm not an UK citizen but as someone who lived in the UK for a while, my assessment would be that the issues that we're seeing in the UK (low trust in the politicians, ineffective of the government to address real issues, economic stagnation, etc) are actually not unique to the UK. We're seeing similar trends in The Netherlands, Germany and the Nordic countries.
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.
You can get a lot of stalemate when the majority agrees that there is a problem, and often even what the problem is, but they can't agree on what the solution is. I think that's the situation in a lot of Western European countries right now — there's a broad dissatisfaction in governments, but there's isn't really a clear mobilisation towards any one solution because nobody can agree what the solution should be. That's why you see very low approval ratings for a lot of European governments, but you also don't see any single party capitalising on that. Even Labour's success in the UK was mainly the collapse of the Conservatives rather than a clear vote of confidence in Labour.
The Western European political system mostly depends on the center-right and the center-left working together and making compromises to reduce the support for more radical parties on the other side. During the Cold War, social democrats were addressing the same issues as communists, but their policies were far more palatable to conservatives.
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.
Dutch politics is very very different from the UK. There is no concept of working together for the country in the UK. its party first, stab your leader and take their spot.
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
I partly agree with this but I don't think it addresses the root cause sufficiently. And that is (IMHO) the hoarding of land.
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.
> the UK needs to build significant stock in social housing
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
> 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.
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.
I feel like relying so much on supply is a farce if the supply is always able to be bought up by people who are already rich and able to continue owning everything by outcompeting working people. Building more has started to mean little to me if we (as in arbitrary municipalities or governing bodies) don't treat it as a special market in which people can't just buy as many as they want
The key word is just. If all the new apartments are luxury or investment properties and your economy is unequal enough then investors will buy them all up and sit on them forever (because selling would drop the value of their portfolio). That keeps them off the market so housing prices never go down.
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.
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.
If you live in a town with eight beds and ten people, and you just 'build more' your way into building another bed...
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."
Brexit divided and continues to cause paralysis. Soft, hard, or no-deal? Simplistic binary vote specified no mechanism, destination, or future relationship. Leave and remain have completely incompatible visions for post-Brexit Britain.
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.
> Leave and remain have completely incompatible visions for post-Brexit Britain.
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.
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.
Xenophobia is a tool of demagogues, not a rational policy.
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.
The problem with this argument is that for essentially my entire lifetime, the UK population has wanted less migration. And what they have got instead is gross migration running at 1 million per year. If they are just fundamentally wrong on this and have been for 50 years, it seems like democracy is a bad idea. Alternatively, if you feel you have to accept democracy, then maybe it would be good to give people what they consistently say they want on this issue.
> And what they have got instead is gross migration running at 1 million per year.
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.
Yes most immigration is legal, so a policy choice. That's exactly why the Conservatives lost the last general election as voters shunned them and voted Reform UK. Why? Because for years they say they wanted lower immigration but actually did the opposite.
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.
> That's exactly why the Conservatives lost the last general election
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.
Labour got in because people voted for Reform instead of the Tories for the reasons you mention but also because of the handling of immigration (remember it was just after largest net immigration on records) so Tories dropped and first-past-the-post did the rest. Corbyn got more votes nationally than Starmer.
Brexit, Torie implosion, Reform polling in first place or just about...
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.
Labour pivoted way to the right on immigration and it didn't get them any more votes. There's nothing they can do to get that part of the electorate and it's a waste of time to try to cater to them.
Hmm, their manifesto said "A fair and properly managed immigration system"... That's the absolute minimum lip service and a platitude, not any sort of pivot, which they cannot do considering the various power groups within the party.
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.
> Immigration is a serious and key issue, which impacts everything else, too.
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.
It's just amazing how simple people can be when things like economic inequality, lack of affordable healthcare and housing, climate change, social security, public services etc. can all be labeled as leftist (and thus bad) issues, and focus turned just to immigration (which itself is also a complex topic).
"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.
Brexit essentially created the short-term PM thing in the first place. Thatcher was 11 years, Major was 7, Blair was 10, Cameron was 6, even Brown managed 3. The new-PM-every-five-minutes thing is mostly a Brexit phenomenon.
It’s very difficult for anyone person to say because we all see our slice.
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.
> 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.
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 has no constitutional method to remove a PM.
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 UK has no constitutional method to remove a PM.
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 has no constitutional method to remove a PM.
I not sure this is correct, a vote of confidence in Parliament. Will bring down the government. Hence the PM.
What do you mean "personally" ? Are you expecting a process to behead the Prime Minister or something ?
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.
>What do you mean "personally" ? Are you expecting a process to behead the Prime Minister or something ?
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".
I presume Congress, like Parliament, cannot bind its future self, so "barring" a leader is just a pinky swear because any future Congress can just "unbar" them. The thing about beheading is that you can't undo it, cos that's not Man's law keeping them dead.
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.
You do have to be in Parliament, you just don't need to be an elected MP in the Commons.
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.
Parliament can also impeach ministers. It hasn't bothered trying for about 180 years because a vote of no confidence is simpler, but it hasn't given up the power (and it's hard to argue that it's somehow fallen into abeyance through lack of use, as there's precedent for a gap of a couple of centuries between impeachments).
Sorry but today anyone can shit on the USA. Compare the UK to working democracies. Italy has clearly a written constitution and has seen way more Prime Ministers than the UK.
It's the natural state of the UK political system. The PM has a (figurative) gun on his head constantly, and has to fight and defend his actions in parliament almost every day of the week. Keeps him on his toes and ensures that he gets replaced if things go down.
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.
> 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 charismatic bumbling idiot thing was always pure stagecraft. he deliberately messes up his hair before going in front of cameras.
Yea I’m not in the UK but Boris’s schtick reminded me of George W Bush’s ridiculous “hard workin’ folksy swagger” routine. The guy was from Connecticut, went to Harvard, and never worked a hard day in his life.
Brexit has been massively divisive, and was the beginning of the train of short-term PMs we've had over the last 10 years. I don't see how another issue like that would (or could) serve as a unifier.
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 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.
Still unclear what your point was. There was nothing politically unifying about Brexit. Individual politicians weren’t even consistent in their support or opposition to it. The closest we have to a unifier now is centrist and Left politicians degrading themselves in ever more desperate attempts to vilify immigrants and trans people in an attempt to placate the Right (which as yet hasn’t unified anybody, to everyone’s surprise).
Multiple PMs since Cameron. In fact the last PM to win a GE and see out a whole term was Tony Blair. (Cameron's first term was a coalition - even in the midst of a deeply unpopular PM and a financial crises he failed to win a parliamentary majority).
The instability means paralysis. No-one believes any policy will last the 5 years+ it needs to be implemented, so very little happens.
IMHO it comes down to the Housing Theory of Everything [1].
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.
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.
“Kier Starmer seemed to actually be doing OK” as someone who voted for his Labour I was immediately regretting it when they tried to force Apple to open a backdoor and they are still trying!
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/uk-still-trying-backdo...
I’m not a single issue voter but the sheer incompetence of this particular decision is just too damning. It rightly caused friction with our 5 eyes partners. I would expect readers of hackernews to appreciate how dumb and impossible the request was.
That is the entire point of FiveEyes. That is a feature.
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
Then why (and I'm not saying I like the guy) did JD Vance come out so publicly against it? I mean you could certainly argue that was all theater and the UK was indeed doing the US's bidding but at some point you have to apply Occam's razor. The end result is Apple don't offer Advanced Data Protection (encryption) to UK users iCloud backups so its not like that "feature" has worked out.
And what are you reading and listening to? It's the fifth-largest economy on Earth. Considering the ridiculous self-harm incident that was Brexit, that's not exactly a bad position to be in. The rest is governance (and debt payments).
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 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.
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.
I long for the days when voting for outsiders was a fun way to fill out a ballot, back when election outcomes didn’t matter very much because the probable winners were all qualified to hold office.
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.
Treating joke parties like one bloc with similar motivations is a mistake. The person behind Binface strikes me as intelligent, quick-witted and knowledgeable on modern issues. I have little doubt that he'd rule well had he actually been elected.
If he was so, why is the spectacle needed? It's pandering to a certain preconceived notion that the bad thing about politicians is that they are that politician sort of people, wearing suits and doing politician things, instead of like the normal sort of guy who likes joking and is fun.
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.
He's said multiple times that the point is to celebrate democracy itself. I highly doubt his goal has ever been a political position of power.
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".
You're just trying to equate humour to populism, but I'm not buying it. You're doing it so much that you inadvertently are giving his direct opposition - Nigel Farage, an actual extreme populist - a pass, just because he's wearing a suit and tie.
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?
It's not automatically horrible. But it's not a feature and it's suspicious. Hiding behind irony is very easy. It lets you puff platitudes and get cheap wins with the audience.
If you have real proposals, it will be interesting enough without the "ha-ha, I'm so quirky, I'm so random" costume.
Thing is, this is just another type of populism. The thought that if only we'd put normal people in charge, everything would be easy. All problems are simple, the elites just choose to press the big red button every day when the big green button is next to it but they refuse to press it because they are evil. If we could get a bunch or normal guys in who, like, read Reddit and stuff and follow memes and do gags and smoke weed and are just chill guys in general, they'd press the big green button every day and everything would go nicely.
Populism would imply catering to popular demands. This is just aesthetic bullshit—far closer to liberalism/maga than populism. The interesting part is that they don't even try to be taken seriously.
> The real question: is this behavior any worse than the "super serious" parties?
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.
I mean, you've got to imagine that even if Binface somehow won, he'd at least be a better MP than Farage. Like, it would not be hard. Turning up for work occasionally would do it.
This whole debacle was kicked off by Farage accepting and not declaring a £5m gift from a crypto billionaire living in Thailand, with Farage having engaged in meetings with the Bank of England over cryptocurrencies, and specifically promoting the coin the crypto billionaire invested in. Really, I'm not sure you can get worse.
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. "
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!
"But you see, this guy wears a quirky costume! Finally a non-politician politician! This is so random, haha, guys, he's just like a regular funny guy finally! It's a funny caricature of the state of the world right now. You know, politicians bad! They don't care about us, they ignore this state of society gesturing around, but this guy is different, haha, look, he literally got a bin on his face, lol, this is really sticking it up to the man. This is no longer just boring old boomer politics, this is like fun millennial politics, you know, he's like a meme, haha, you guys gotta see this, look."
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.
Farage was always going to win, but he also ended up losing, as this showed Reform to be weaker than it looked before the election. His vote count was basically the same as the last election with 22,239 yesterday compared to 21,225 in the 2024 election, even though he had no competition from the major parties. Count Binface was able to get 27% of the vote, similar to what the Conservative Party candidate received in 2024.
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.
The BBC has had Nigel Farage on constantly. He is one of the most frequent guests on BBC Questiontime, their flagship political programme for at least fifteen years. He is partly of their creation.
Wait, so you are saying that Farage did not receive an undisclosed £5 million personal gift from a cryptocurrency billionaire? Or he did, but any reporting on it is obviously the deep state ganging up on him?
> What happened to all the Internet energy, likes, shares, and blog and social media posts?
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.
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.
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
Which is... quite weird, really, because the former opt-outs were mostly fairly minor. I assume they'd be allowed stay out of Schengen in practice; Ireland's not in it and they have an essentially un-closeable border with Ireland (this is, incidentally, the main reason Ireland's not in Schengen in the first place). And realistically the EU has shown no appetite for dragging countries who don't want it into the eurozone; see Poland.
> 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!
I voted Remain, and hoped the EU would get its house in order if the UK stayed in it. Unfortunately neither of these things happened. Both the EU and the UK have become increasingly authoritarian, including on internet matters.
Farage engineered this situation to try to take control of the narrative about the investigation into £5m of undeclared income/gifts.
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.
A "serious" by-election is what Farage wanted. You don't protest by playing along. You protest by doing your best to express how much of a farce it is.
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.
They plan to eject Farage from Parliament after their investigation concludes. Farage was trying to delay the investigation, or perhaps prove a point that his voters don't care.
In a 1:1, Count Binface would absolutely demolish Nigel Farage. By the way, have his voters never wondered why Nigel got so much money? Technically Nigel should be forced to give up all his money to the UK taxpayers for having helped yield the BREXIT disaster - which factually did cost the UK taxpayers a LOT of money. Nigel should not have any money for himself, other than a miniscule amount.
I imagine that money can buy elections in some districts in the world like this:
- 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.)
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.
It's Clacton, farage chose it for a reason. It's full of retirees and Brexit voters
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
>It's Clacton, farage chose it for a reason. It's full of retirees and Brexit voters
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.
Let’s be real. John Oliver‘s sketch writer under neath that costume is probably not really enjoying the scenario of actually running as an opposition candidate against Farage in a nationwide MP race. He could probably win, but really who’s the joke on then?
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
I understand that seaside towns are basically open space retiree homes - it’s the same in Germany.
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.
Yeah but that is a boat name, I don't think I've ever heard of a joke candidate in an election even do as close to as well as this against a high profile opponent.
The other parties boycotted the election, because unlike in America, they don't want to normalize letting someone win a legitimate election as a means to avoid serious sanction.
(Any country in which that sort of thing works is fucking insane.)
No, he was either going to lose to a bin or get back in the commons and have the investigation continue. Now it will continue. So no, playing along at his stupid games is what would normalise it. They will run at the next election in a few months.
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.
In the previous (2024) Clacton election, Conservative + Reform got a combined 74.1% of the vote, with Labour + Liberal Democrats + Greens getting a combined 24.8%.
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.
Some Conservative activists were campaigning for the joke candidate in the constituency. Although none of the parties officially endorsed him obviously, they have all been gushing about him on social media.
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 )
> you'd have expected the whole opposition to converge on him
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.
More votes in an absolute sense but nowhere near as large as a proportion — he got 24000 votes when he stood for London Mayor but that is a tiny, tiny proportion of the vote — the two leading candidates between them got two million.
So he has never, until now, kept his deposit. This win was large and it is politically significant.
- 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)
Hah! Not usually, to be honest. I may have strayed into Gish galloping with the first one, though.
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.
It was a given that Farage was going to win the by-election. The major parties didn't even run candidates, since they all agreed it was a farce. The goal wasn't to beat him, it was to not let him control the narrative of the whole thing.
It seems to have become a given since he won the election, before this, the coverage of binface in the run up to this election has been endkess. If no one in the BBC or elsewhere thought he had a chance of winning, no one would have bothered reporting it.
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.
FWIW, Farage owes _most_ of his cultural visibility to the BBC's tendency to interview him, feature him on Question Time. He's been on that show nearly forty times!
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.
Again, the coverage was to prevent Farage from controlling the narrative, not to win. And because there was only 1 "serious" candidate running, what else are they going to air about the election? What other election has binface been involved in where there was only one "serious" candidate in to put coverage toward? Literally nobody seriously involved before or after actually believed binface would win outside of some technical possibility. Seriously, find even a single forecast that he could realistically win the election.
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.
> the bbc's natural bias against any anything right of soft left
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.
Not surprising given how many prime ministers UK have had in last 10 decades. Quite sad to see the state of one the oldest democracies in the world.
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.
It’s clear from your comments you know nothing of this election, Farage or the UK.
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.
Some of his planks:
I see the attraction.Please don't forget one of his longest standing and most important planks:
* 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’m not even from the UK and I know it need to be fixed before the situation gets worse.
We spoke earlier to local chancer Elliot Plunge who told us "this is the one thing we did not want to happen"
Like it gets moved to in the urinal itself? Indeed, that could kick off a world war.
Oh he's left handed? Ma man!
Some of the winner's planks:
Yeah, Binface jokes are more attractive to me too.Do we have any English lawyers here who can comment on whether it may actually be legal to nationalise Adele (the person) under English law? ChatGPT says it may be possible through an act of parliament, but I’m unsure whether I can trust ChatGPT in this case.
Yes, Parliament has absolute and unlimited power (except binding future Parliaments, and maybe arguably some matters relating to Scotland): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty_in_t...
(not a lawyer)
Indeed which is why "taking back sovereignty" as an argument by the pro-Brexit folks was a bit disingenuous (if I'm been kind).
It would also require us leaving a whole bunch of international treaties though since "Nationalising a pop singer" kinda breaches a few of them.
Not a Brit, not a lawyer...
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/
Parliament theoretically has unlimited power, practically I think this stops short of reintroducing actual slavery. Lawyers would be busy arguing in international courts; but hopefully 50℅ of the electorate might actually bother to vote.
(Obviously the MP for Clacton has the power to talk sturnly to someone with actual power in the councel over the bin collection schedule; the is no plausable way to deliver any of their pledges)
What is 50c/o? That “℅” is not a percent sign.
It appears to be a high percentage of one though.
A simple bill of attainder would do it, but she'd have recourse to the ECHR to appeal it, which would in practice bind the UK. If we thought she wasn't going to be chill with it, we'd first need to withdraw from the ECHR. As it happens, withdrawing from the the ECHR is a prime Farage objective.
Lawyer here.[0] Definitely possible.[1]
[0] not a lawyer [1] what does “nationalise” even mean?
Typically, the government takes over a company.
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.
Yes, exactly, yes.
A joke on the goverment nationalising the railways and the debate around whether we should nationalise water companies.
Can water even be nationalised? Do you own the rain that falls on my roof? Can you charge me money if I use it to water my garden?
Generally water nationalisation means nationalising the companies which supply water to homes and businesses. Not, er, literally nationalising water as in the substance.
Take into public ownership.
What does “take into public ownership” even mean?
Etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosioi , presumably.
Every Briton is entitled to one lunch with Adele.
If we project her lifespan as 50 more years and assume the UK population stays stable at 70 millions, that works out at 3835 and a half lunches per day.
I seriously doubt as a public servant she'd be a beacon of efficiency so I don't think she'll do more than 2k a day if this happens.
Maybe she skips the main on every other lunch?
The most lunches I’ve ever eaten in a day was 7.
You’re paying…
Long list here: https://meettheuk.substack.com/p/a-complete-list-of-count-bi...
I could get behind most of them, actually ... were I to live in the UK.
i like that he ironically hedges this one
> A promise not to accept £5 million gifts from crypto billionaires (on Earth).
I liked this one:
- European countries to be invited to join the United Kingdom, creating a new ‘union of Europe’, if you will. (2024)
> Nationalize Adele
I'm old and out of touch, my brain confused Adele with Alizée and thought that was a little aggressive for a foreign policy.
>nationalise Adele
Well it would certainly make her less productive
Your brain is spot on. This would make much more sense.
I've been trying to think of a UK musical act that works as well for "Nationalize Adele" and I've got nothing.
Back in the day, maybe "Nationalize Freddie Mercury".
"Nationalize Queen" might have been more confusing...
It still works; he's one of the most lucrative dead artist!
Surely his post popular policy has to be :
* capping the price of a 99 flake ice cream at 99p
He was challenged on this by Alastair Campbell who asked him how much this will cost the exchequer
His immediate response.
“Well, if the exchequer wants a 99 flake, it’ll cost them 99p.”
Yes. Unless you're a male resident of Uxbridge of drinking age.
Some discussion about the manifesto pledges in this interview, which is utter binface gold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRBh7uGwxmU
some extras
The history of ceefax is worth reading when you have a spare moment. If you want to go further down the rabbit hole, there's Prestel with its 1980s "electronic mailbox".
I kind of miss teletext. It was by far the fastest way to get a quick weather forecast.
Apply MP wages to nurses is actually a solid idea I recon.
aye, i've always thought tying an MP wages to the national average was a good call. but nurses makes sense too.
Every election should have a funny absurdist person like this absorbing all the blank and null votes to give the other candidates more incentives to convince the electorate.
Back when I was in college, student union elections had a candidate called RON on each vote. RON was Re—Open Nominations. Basically “none of the above”, which would cause a restart of the election for than role if it got the most votes.
It's mostly negative polarization driving things these days, so I don't think that idea makes as much sense as it once did.
In this particular case, the main stream parties did not take part (i.e. field candidates) because the current MP (Farage) resigned just to retake his own seat - basically trying to distract from his dodgy dealings with crypto bros and convicted fraudsters.
I would have voted Count Binface too (as the least absurd candidate).
> basically trying to distract from his dodgy dealings with crypto bros and convicted fraudsters.
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.
> Every election should have a funny absurdist person like this absorbing all the blank and null votes to give the other candidates more incentives to convince the electorate.
We have absurdist clown candidates in America, the difference is they actually win... even after failed attempts at insurrection.
Here in Brazil we once had an actual clown on a representative election, with a slogan that translates to "I literally can't make it worse!" (but was a pun in Portuguese.)
He was the most voted candidate, and is now a professional politician. He failed to make good on his slogan...
Don't forget about the California recall that put Arnold in charge. There were pornstars and all sorts absurdist candidates due to the nature of how the recall works. More recently, you had some ex-reality TV personality running for mayor of LA.
Gary Coleman and Mary Carey both ran. There's always Vermin Supreme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermin_Supreme
Cap the price of Wigan kebabs at £2
Ich bin ein binliner
Binface's most important non-platform items are:
honestly he should have won on his main if unstated plank, "not be nigel farage"
You missed the biggest one:
> Binface received 26.9% of the vote
> 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...
And this time he got enough votes that if they were to be signatures in any recall petition if triggered by the standards investigation, Farage will lose his seat and have to fight it again if he wants it.
Here's a prediction. The standards committee won't do a recall. The reason, Farage won this election despite the accusation over the £5 million. Having another byelection would get the same result so it would be a complete waste of public money.
They don't decide on a recall. They can sanction an MP, such as suspension from the House of Commons.
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.
This has happened e.g. in 2023 to Margaret Farrier - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-663...
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)
Notably, Binface got about 1500 more actual votes than that petition would need signatures, on a hot August day.
The petition is published for six weeks!
Farage must be very uncomfortable now.
Farage won an election in which no other major party participated.
The standards committee doesn't make decisions based on what they think is best. They make decisions based on the rules.
I don't think the committee will be swayed by this stunt at all, especially since Farage has essentially admitted that he started all this to make them look silly.
And they are highly likely to open another investigation into the Posh George stuff.
Unless the other major parties show up for the next by election.
You do know the other major parties didn't run a candidate right? The point was to demonstrate that this byelection was just theatrics by Farage to distract from the ethics investigation into the 5 million pounds. I think some, and maybe Farage himself, seem to think that the byelection wipes the slate clean either actually or practically because the people of Clacton have "spoken". it does neither.
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...
how come the UK bailout was an expense? the US one paid for itself.
The US bailout paid for itself... If you consider the equivalent of 0.6% growth, not adjusted for inflation, paying for itself. In practice the US's cost of borrowing the money was substantially more than that.
> 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.
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?
Reading her Wikipedia page, she's given huge amounts to all kinds of charities. Easy to get swept up in the whole pro/anti conversation, but even the one charity that specifically serves women only rape victims is doing good things. I just can't equate her with Musk.
Is it possible that other anti democratic forces are working to instill the notion that the ideas of their ideological opponents are illegitimate and when voters hold those beliefs it’s only because they’re been propagandized and deceived? The idea in a democratic society a large proportion of voters cannot be trusted to make their own decisions seems extremely dangerous, and one that massively benefits centralizing authoritarian powers and oligarchs.
What are campaign finance laws like in the UK? Can he crowdsource this to offset his cost? I live in the US and am a citizen, with no connection to the UK, but this hand dryer situation at the Crown & Treaty really needs attention and nobody else is willing to deal with it.
> Can he crowdsource this to offset his cost
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.
He's clearly getting his £500's worth even when he was losing it. I wouldn't worry too much about it.
Well he's clearly getting funding from somewhere. Look at how his bin has improved over the years!
In theory quite strict, in practice multiple parties have been caught breaking them and nothing really gets done.
A rule is only a rule if it's enforced.
> What are campaign finance laws like in the UK? Can he crowdsource this to offset his cost?
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...
No, anybody can't donate to a political party in the UK:
See https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/rules-fu...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.
So you're telling me that < £500 won't be a problem...
Perhaps there's an intergalactic mixing service that can be used here to assist in finally solving this hand dryer situation.
Distributed yak shaving to solve a problem that shouldn't exist.
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.
Well, you linked to his registration entry but that's not donations. In fact he doesn't have any donations so maybe that's why you were confused. If you look for a political entity which does have donations, like Reform, you can see £50M over the years since it was formed (then as the "Brexit Party")
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)
Not quite. The problem is that rich people can find ways around the laws.
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/political-registratio...
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.
> […] I was extrapolating that Count Binface had a real chance.
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."
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zn1pGRgEoo
All of Farage’s supporters turned out - more votes for him this time than last time.
They get what they deserve.
And all the rest also get what Farage's voters deserve. Such is the power of Democracy.
Kein Mehrheit Für Die Mitleid
And if the standards committee sees fit he will be doing it again soon.
Democracies can be arranged in some majoritarian, concensus-based, or any other way that a group of peers can use to decide on something collectively. “Ha ha wolves and sheep voting for what’s for dinner.” Find another quip.
Such is especially the power of first-past-the-post.
> They get what they deserve.
another expensive byelection. Farage has just wasted public funds to justify taking a big bribe
The Conservative party ran in the last election, they didn't run in this election, so more right wing voters likely moved from Conservative to Farage than he got 110% of his normal core/base.
I saw a Sankey diagram from exit polls that showed that lots of Conservatives voted for Farage, but some Reform voted for Binface. Can't find it again though because Twitter sucks.
I saw someone interviewed who said that they supported Reform but couldn't vote for Farage. Which is particularly odd as Reform is _basically_ the Nigel Farage party; it wouldn't survive losing him.
I thought there wasn’t exit polls in this particular by-election?
They was one opinion poll pf about 250 people.
Jaywick next door to clacton on sea was the most deprived place in the UK before he came along. He can hardly make it worse.
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.
You want attention and an mp who cares and delivers then vote for Binface.
Farage has barely been in Clacton for the last 2 years.
(ETA: I see you edited your post to clarify — I will leave mine because there is significant nuance about the constituency)
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.
Interestingly these regions have been getting a lot more investment from central government in recent years. It hasn’t appeared to make any difference to people’s voting patterns.
i doubt it would until that investment actually starts creating jobs and a better standard of living.
jaywick is still the most deprived area of the UK.
Jaywick is possibly the area in the UK most dependent on benefits handouts.
Good luck with the guy who wants to slash your benefits, people.
Maybe in a real election. Clearly the big parties had no need to get involved in this farce. I think they were right: Farage got publicly humiliated, all for nothing. Surely this has to be the highest score for a novelty candidate. Besides, I don’t think candidates, even from major parties, would really have a chance in the current situation.
Perhaps people in the constituency like Farage and want a Reform government.
Or maybe they want to see the rest of the investigation!
The problem with independent candidates is that they will never be able to influence Parliament enough to make anything happen, they will just be dominated by the big parties. Short of banning people from being part of a political party (which might be a good or bad idea) it is just a sad fact of FPTP voting.
I think people voted Binface in protest but knowing that he would lose.
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.
I expect he would show up to Westminster, take the pledge and not wear the costume. Maybe they'd make a big thing out of refusing to let him enter with the Bin on and so forth but maybe it's not worth the bother.
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.
If you want to see how exactly a Westminster Parliament would stop duly elected MPs who did not follow the rules, look at the 2022 controversy about the Parti Québécois MPs who refused to pledge allegiance to the monarch. They were physically stopped by the sergeant-at-arms.
The UK has MPs who won't pledge allegiance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinn_F%C3%A9in -- they're so integral to modern parliamentary procedure that Parliament's own systems just assume they don't count for purposes of working out a majority. If your government can scrape together enough people to get Confidence and Supply unless Sinn Féin MPs turn up, you live another day. Their grand political gesture over decades is worth nothing if they ever sacrifice it to cast a vote and so Parliament's own systems assume that would never happen.
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.
I think there is some rule about not wearing hats that block the view of others or something. From the era of top hats and all that which aren'tthat far removed from the bin.
It's not a hat, it's a helmet!
One reporter asked him about the rule that says MPs aren't allowed to cover their face while it is in session and he responded with "Oh, so now the rules matter?"
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.
Your last paragraph answers your second imo. The other parties want to highlight that the election was held with the outcome already practically decided. By not participating they are harming the "people vs. the establishment" narrative Farage is trying to spin
It costs money to campaign, it's not a seat any other party had a chance to win and it sends a clear message from the other parties that the whole stunt was a waste of everyone's time.
How are you confused? Given your US example, the only smart play for the Dems would be exactly what happened here. Sure, you could field a candidate and maybe win, but probably not and then you've lent legitimacy to his stunt. Or you could just let Trump run against Bozo the clown, and while Trump would most definitely still win, he would be made to look ridiculous.
I think there's a few things going on that make it a bit different.
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.
Never thought I’d see my home town being discussed here. I no longer live there but regularly go back.
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.
Has he held a surgery, though?
Photo ops are all vey well.
Far right is not a change toward more or better jobs. The economic or "just change" arguments are rationalizations, not explanations.
They are rationalisations: 'whatever makes a change to my situation' is a ticket that appeals to a lot of the poorer people, and it of course won't be the Tories or Labour, or their stand-ins in other countries. A huge amount of people alternate between the extremes of the spectrum.
Painting all far-right voters as evil is wrong and unproductive. Saying this as a far-left voter.
Agree. People are lashing out and aligning with view that makes them feel important again I think.
Really appreciate the pictures showing the evolution of the costume over the years. He's put some real solid work into it.
Also, Monty Python's own take on the phenomenon, for those who haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVI5ZOT5QEM
Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode in which a blue animated bear named Waldo nearly wins a by-election:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waldo_Moment
Reality these days sometimes feels as strange as fiction.
I mean that one came true in 2016.
Yes!
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'm not an UK citizen but as someone who lived in the UK for a while, my assessment would be that the issues that we're seeing in the UK (low trust in the politicians, ineffective of the government to address real issues, economic stagnation, etc) are actually not unique to the UK. We're seeing similar trends in The Netherlands, Germany and the Nordic countries.
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.
> Everyone agrees that this is crazy, seemingly very little changes.
Well I don't.
Respectfully, when it appears everyone agrees but nothing happens, usually that means not everyone agrees.
You can get a lot of stalemate when the majority agrees that there is a problem, and often even what the problem is, but they can't agree on what the solution is. I think that's the situation in a lot of Western European countries right now — there's a broad dissatisfaction in governments, but there's isn't really a clear mobilisation towards any one solution because nobody can agree what the solution should be. That's why you see very low approval ratings for a lot of European governments, but you also don't see any single party capitalising on that. Even Labour's success in the UK was mainly the collapse of the Conservatives rather than a clear vote of confidence in Labour.
The Western European political system mostly depends on the center-right and the center-left working together and making compromises to reduce the support for more radical parties on the other side. During the Cold War, social democrats were addressing the same issues as communists, but their policies were far more palatable to conservatives.
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.
Dutch politics is very very different from the UK. There is no concept of working together for the country in the UK. its party first, stab your leader and take their spot.
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
I partly agree with this but I don't think it addresses the root cause sufficiently. And that is (IMHO) the hoarding of land.
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.
> the UK needs to build significant stock in social housing
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
> 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.
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.
It is my understanding that they didn't in fact "Just build more" so how would they know it was or wasn't working?
They did build more they just didn't build that.
What did they build more of then?
They built at least one house. That's more housing.
So they did not in fact build more, by any definition that a reasonable person would use.
They did. The Netherlands added more than 1 million new units between 2012 (8,425,398 units) and 2025 (9,486,933 units). Source: https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/en/dataset/81955ENG/table
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".
I feel like relying so much on supply is a farce if the supply is always able to be bought up by people who are already rich and able to continue owning everything by outcompeting working people. Building more has started to mean little to me if we (as in arbitrary municipalities or governing bodies) don't treat it as a special market in which people can't just buy as many as they want
>People understand instinctively that "just building more" is not working and never will.
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?
The key word is just. If all the new apartments are luxury or investment properties and your economy is unequal enough then investors will buy them all up and sit on them forever (because selling would drop the value of their portfolio). That keeps them off the market so housing prices never go down.
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.
A third of new construction in Amsterdam is social housing (subsidized housing for poor people).
Does this seem to you like it's working?
> If the problem is the lack of housing.
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.
I agree. Which is a problem, considering that it absolutely would work if only they actually did it.
but isn't the story that they did build more?
If you live in a town with eight beds and ten people, and you just 'build more' your way into building another bed...
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."
Brexit divided and continues to cause paralysis. Soft, hard, or no-deal? Simplistic binary vote specified no mechanism, destination, or future relationship. Leave and remain have completely incompatible visions for post-Brexit Britain.
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.
> Leave and remain have completely incompatible visions for post-Brexit Britain.
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.
There is no "far right" in the UK -- it's a label that is used to smear people to excuse state failure.
* Right - Conservatives
* 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.
> a polycrisis of far-right immigration agitation
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.
Xenophobia is a tool of demagogues, not a rational policy.
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.
The problem with this argument is that for essentially my entire lifetime, the UK population has wanted less migration. And what they have got instead is gross migration running at 1 million per year. If they are just fundamentally wrong on this and have been for 50 years, it seems like democracy is a bad idea. Alternatively, if you feel you have to accept democracy, then maybe it would be good to give people what they consistently say they want on this issue.
> And what they have got instead is gross migration running at 1 million per year.
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.
Yes most immigration is legal, so a policy choice. That's exactly why the Conservatives lost the last general election as voters shunned them and voted Reform UK. Why? Because for years they say they wanted lower immigration but actually did the opposite.
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.
> That's exactly why the Conservatives lost the last general election
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.
Labour got in because people voted for Reform instead of the Tories for the reasons you mention but also because of the handling of immigration (remember it was just after largest net immigration on records) so Tories dropped and first-past-the-post did the rest. Corbyn got more votes nationally than Starmer.
Brexit, Torie implosion, Reform polling in first place or just about...
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.
You're tied up in centuries of empire-building consequences and think "no brown people please" is a legitimate point of view?
No we haven't.
Labour pivoted way to the right on immigration and it didn't get them any more votes. There's nothing they can do to get that part of the electorate and it's a waste of time to try to cater to them.
Hmm, their manifesto said "A fair and properly managed immigration system"... That's the absolute minimum lip service and a platitude, not any sort of pivot, which they cannot do considering the various power groups within the party.
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.
> Immigration is a serious and key issue, which impacts everything else, too.
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.
It's just amazing how simple people can be when things like economic inequality, lack of affordable healthcare and housing, climate change, social security, public services etc. can all be labeled as leftist (and thus bad) issues, and focus turned just to immigration (which itself is also a complex topic).
"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.
Brexit essentially created the short-term PM thing in the first place. Thatcher was 11 years, Major was 7, Blair was 10, Cameron was 6, even Brown managed 3. The new-PM-every-five-minutes thing is mostly a Brexit phenomenon.
It’s very difficult for anyone person to say because we all see our slice.
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.
> 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.
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 has no constitutional method to remove a PM.
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 UK has no constitutional method to remove a PM.
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.
A PM can be removed by a vote of no confidence.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/votes-of-no-confidence/
>The UK has no constitutional method to remove a PM. I not sure this is correct, a vote of confidence in Parliament. Will bring down the government. Hence the PM.
But that doesn't bring down the PM personally.
The last VONC to pass was in 1979, and Callaghan continued to lead Labour (albeit to defeat) in the General Election.
What do you mean "personally" ? Are you expecting a process to behead the Prime Minister or something ?
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.
>What do you mean "personally" ? Are you expecting a process to behead the Prime Minister or something ?
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".
I presume Congress, like Parliament, cannot bind its future self, so "barring" a leader is just a pinky swear because any future Congress can just "unbar" them. The thing about beheading is that you can't undo it, cos that's not Man's law keeping them dead.
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.
Because the PM technically isn't anything but the leader the majority party has chosen for itself, they don't even have to be an MP.
This is muddied a bit in modern times with press and overseas engagements and higher salaries for PMs than MPs.
You do have to be in Parliament, you just don't need to be an elected MP in the Commons.
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.
Parliament can also impeach ministers. It hasn't bothered trying for about 180 years because a vote of no confidence is simpler, but it hasn't given up the power (and it's hard to argue that it's somehow fallen into abeyance through lack of use, as there's precedent for a gap of a couple of centuries between impeachments).
Sorry but today anyone can shit on the USA. Compare the UK to working democracies. Italy has clearly a written constitution and has seen way more Prime Ministers than the UK.
It's the natural state of the UK political system. The PM has a (figurative) gun on his head constantly, and has to fight and defend his actions in parliament almost every day of the week. Keeps him on his toes and ensures that he gets replaced if things go down.
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.
Not optimistic.
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.
> 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 charismatic bumbling idiot thing was always pure stagecraft. he deliberately messes up his hair before going in front of cameras.
I have no opinion on the man at all, but rather, what politician doesn't participate in stagecraft?
Yea I’m not in the UK but Boris’s schtick reminded me of George W Bush’s ridiculous “hard workin’ folksy swagger” routine. The guy was from Connecticut, went to Harvard, and never worked a hard day in his life.
Brexit has been massively divisive, and was the beginning of the train of short-term PMs we've had over the last 10 years. I don't see how another issue like that would (or could) serve as a unifier.
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.)
Why do you think changing PM's is a bad thing?
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.
brexit did not create any kind of unifier...
more of a political unifier vs social one, I should clarify on that.
But... it didn't. It essentially destroyed the Tories, and did Labour no favours either. That's why there were all those PMs.
Still unclear what your point was. There was nothing politically unifying about Brexit. Individual politicians weren’t even consistent in their support or opposition to it. The closest we have to a unifier now is centrist and Left politicians degrading themselves in ever more desperate attempts to vilify immigrants and trans people in an attempt to placate the Right (which as yet hasn’t unified anybody, to everyone’s surprise).
It didn't even unify the side that won, considering there were _two_ leave campaigns.
Multiple PMs since Cameron. In fact the last PM to win a GE and see out a whole term was Tony Blair. (Cameron's first term was a coalition - even in the midst of a deeply unpopular PM and a financial crises he failed to win a parliamentary majority).
The instability means paralysis. No-one believes any policy will last the 5 years+ it needs to be implemented, so very little happens.
Brexit hardly caused unity. It split the country almost exactly down the middle. And nobody on either side seems happy with the result.
The chaos arguably starts with the Coalition and Cameron, and the Brexit vote and tuition fees reversal.
It started with the Global Financial Crisis. The cost of that is still ongoing.
IMHO it comes down to the Housing Theory of Everything [1].
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
The UK is fine, honestly.
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.
“Kier Starmer seemed to actually be doing OK” as someone who voted for his Labour I was immediately regretting it when they tried to force Apple to open a backdoor and they are still trying! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/uk-still-trying-backdo...
Privacy concerns have pretty broad opposition in the UK, unfortunately.
Your single-issue concerns are valid, but most people view an executive office's performance as a holistic union of their stances on issues.
I’m not a single issue voter but the sheer incompetence of this particular decision is just too damning. It rightly caused friction with our 5 eyes partners. I would expect readers of hackernews to appreciate how dumb and impossible the request was.
> "It rightly caused friction with our 5 eyes partners"
That is such a weird take. "It rightly caused friction with Privacy International" might be a better position to take ;)
We were demanding the ability to spy on the citizens of our closest allies.
That is the entire point of FiveEyes. That is a feature.
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
Then why (and I'm not saying I like the guy) did JD Vance come out so publicly against it? I mean you could certainly argue that was all theater and the UK was indeed doing the US's bidding but at some point you have to apply Occam's razor. The end result is Apple don't offer Advanced Data Protection (encryption) to UK users iCloud backups so its not like that "feature" has worked out.
> I mean you could certainly argue that was all theater
It was all theatre.
Is the UK actually doing fine? as far as ive read and heard the quality of life has been on the decline since 2014 at least
And what are you reading and listening to? It's the fifth-largest economy on Earth. Considering the ridiculous self-harm incident that was Brexit, that's not exactly a bad position to be in. The rest is governance (and debt payments).
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.
Brexit was not a unifier. Just the opposite.
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.
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.
That is a program.
Bumper sticker with a picture of Count Binface: "Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy!"
Seems funnier if it was a picture of Farage...
I long for the days when voting for outsiders was a fun way to fill out a ballot, back when election outcomes didn’t matter very much because the probable winners were all qualified to hold office.
Amd the winner of the by-election didn't even attended the announcement of the results.
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.
Treating joke parties like one bloc with similar motivations is a mistake. The person behind Binface strikes me as intelligent, quick-witted and knowledgeable on modern issues. I have little doubt that he'd rule well had he actually been elected.
If he was so, why is the spectacle needed? It's pandering to a certain preconceived notion that the bad thing about politicians is that they are that politician sort of people, wearing suits and doing politician things, instead of like the normal sort of guy who likes joking and is fun.
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.
He's said multiple times that the point is to celebrate democracy itself. I highly doubt his goal has ever been a political position of power.
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".
You're just trying to equate humour to populism, but I'm not buying it. You're doing it so much that you inadvertently are giving his direct opposition - Nigel Farage, an actual extreme populist - a pass, just because he's wearing a suit and tie.
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?
It's not automatically horrible. But it's not a feature and it's suspicious. Hiding behind irony is very easy. It lets you puff platitudes and get cheap wins with the audience.
If you have real proposals, it will be interesting enough without the "ha-ha, I'm so quirky, I'm so random" costume.
The real question: is this behavior any worse than the "super serious" parties? That just sounds like normal behavior.
Thing is, this is just another type of populism. The thought that if only we'd put normal people in charge, everything would be easy. All problems are simple, the elites just choose to press the big red button every day when the big green button is next to it but they refuse to press it because they are evil. If we could get a bunch or normal guys in who, like, read Reddit and stuff and follow memes and do gags and smoke weed and are just chill guys in general, they'd press the big green button every day and everything would go nicely.
Populism would imply catering to popular demands. This is just aesthetic bullshit—far closer to liberalism/maga than populism. The interesting part is that they don't even try to be taken seriously.
> The real question: is this behavior any worse than the "super serious" parties?
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.
I mean, you've got to imagine that even if Binface somehow won, he'd at least be a better MP than Farage. Like, it would not be hard. Turning up for work occasionally would do it.
This whole debacle was kicked off by Farage accepting and not declaring a £5m gift from a crypto billionaire living in Thailand, with Farage having engaged in meetings with the Bank of England over cryptocurrencies, and specifically promoting the coin the crypto billionaire invested in. Really, I'm not sure you can get worse.
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. "
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!
"But you see, this guy wears a quirky costume! Finally a non-politician politician! This is so random, haha, guys, he's just like a regular funny guy finally! It's a funny caricature of the state of the world right now. You know, politicians bad! They don't care about us, they ignore this state of society gesturing around, but this guy is different, haha, look, he literally got a bin on his face, lol, this is really sticking it up to the man. This is no longer just boring old boomer politics, this is like fun millennial politics, you know, he's like a meme, haha, you guys gotta see this, look."
"most"
Vote difference: 22,239 (Farage) - 9,455 (Binface) = 12,784 votes. 12,784 / 2 = 6,392
If Count Binface took just 6,393 more votes from Farage he would have won!
This isn't as it seems.
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.
He has nerves of steel and an iron will.
I can't believe people chose the joke candidate over Count Binface!
Best response yet!
My favourite was vote for the count, not the c....
Really really hilarious. I commend and ask all centrist parties to continue sending failed comedians as their provincial vassals
So Binface lost? What happened to all the Internet energy, likes, shares, and blog and social media posts?
Maybe Farage was always destined to win.
Farage was always going to win, but he also ended up losing, as this showed Reform to be weaker than it looked before the election. His vote count was basically the same as the last election with 22,239 yesterday compared to 21,225 in the 2024 election, even though he had no competition from the major parties. Count Binface was able to get 27% of the vote, similar to what the Conservative Party candidate received in 2024.
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.
He was, that is solid Reform territory.
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.
BBC’s the State media, run by British Intel. THEY create the narrative, and we know what they think of Farage and Reform.
The BBC has had Nigel Farage on constantly. He is one of the most frequent guests on BBC Questiontime, their flagship political programme for at least fifteen years. He is partly of their creation.
Wait, so you are saying that Farage did not receive an undisclosed £5 million personal gift from a cryptocurrency billionaire? Or he did, but any reporting on it is obviously the deep state ganging up on him?
Uh, so you Brits have this kind of chaps too?
> What happened to all the Internet energy, likes, shares, and blog and social media posts?
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.
Seems like he was a writer for The Thick of It. Fitting.
I think the UK has their vermin supreme
I just say this guy is funny!
While being a sketch-action, there is for sure a lot of preassure in playing this role for month?
Canonical Monty Python sketch => https://youtu.be/dVI5ZOT5QEM?is=bf1E43oA05Q3S0zI
idk this seems like a very rose-tinted title considering the results
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.
The average tenure of leadership in the UK is reliably measured in produce and it’s gotten no better.
Brexit needs to be reversed already.
> 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.
Which is... quite weird, really, because the former opt-outs were mostly fairly minor. I assume they'd be allowed stay out of Schengen in practice; Ireland's not in it and they have an essentially un-closeable border with Ireland (this is, incidentally, the main reason Ireland's not in Schengen in the first place). And realistically the EU has shown no appetite for dragging countries who don't want it into the eurozone; see Poland.
The Economist wrote a few articles on the topic, e.g. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/12/30/britain-and-the...
> 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!
> 58% of French people and 63% of Germans support the UK rejoining the EU
> 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-...
Brexit cannot be reversed if people dont get their act together. And that will take a good amount of time and effort.
In the meantime…meet our next “PM of the month”!
I voted Remain, and hoped the EU would get its house in order if the UK stayed in it. Unfortunately neither of these things happened. Both the EU and the UK have become increasingly authoritarian, including on internet matters.
All of the major parties except for Reform withdrew their candidates in protest of Farage.
Obviously. Everyone know this. The vote predictions knew this too.
I think it was a major tactical mistake for them to withdraw. Binface is the only thing which turned it into a proper contest.
They will run for the next election in a few months - the investigation has just resumed.
> All of the major parties except for Reform withdrew their candidates in protest of Farage.
This doesn't make sense. If they wanted to protest Farage, wouldn't they be better off running a serious candidate against him?
Farage engineered this situation to try to take control of the narrative about the investigation into £5m of undeclared income/gifts.
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.
A "serious" by-election is what Farage wanted. You don't protest by playing along. You protest by doing your best to express how much of a farce it is.
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.
They plan to eject Farage from Parliament after their investigation concludes. Farage was trying to delay the investigation, or perhaps prove a point that his voters don't care.
It's bin a wild ride for sure.
In a 1:1, Count Binface would absolutely demolish Nigel Farage. By the way, have his voters never wondered why Nigel got so much money? Technically Nigel should be forced to give up all his money to the UK taxpayers for having helped yield the BREXIT disaster - which factually did cost the UK taxpayers a LOT of money. Nigel should not have any money for himself, other than a miniscule amount.
I imagine that money can buy elections in some districts in the world like this:
- 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.)
How long before an AI runs for election?
What's stopping it?
Can a human be the "frontend" to skirt around age and citizenship requirements?
So they took the existing clown show called "elections" and cranked it to 11.
would have been awesome if he won
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.
It's Clacton, farage chose it for a reason. It's full of retirees and Brexit voters
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
>It's Clacton, farage chose it for a reason. It's full of retirees and Brexit voters
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
Let’s be real. John Oliver‘s sketch writer under neath that costume is probably not really enjoying the scenario of actually running as an opposition candidate against Farage in a nationwide MP race. He could probably win, but really who’s the joke on then?
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
I understand that seaside towns are basically open space retiree homes - it’s the same in Germany.
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.
28% of people voted for an alien trashcan helmet guy over Farage that's insanely embarrassing for him there is no positive way to spin this.
People also voted for Boaty McBoatface which shows just how passionate people can be when theres a silly choice they can make.
Yeah but that is a boat name, I don't think I've ever heard of a joke candidate in an election even do as close to as well as this against a high profile opponent.
The other main parties boycotted the election.
So his results should be much higher
Other parties did not support Binface
backed by every other party?
did they endorse and fund him?
are they running him for the next PM?
They didn't though. The other parties didn't run, so most of their supporters didn't vote. They got a lot more votes in total at the general election.
The other parties boycotted the election, because unlike in America, they don't want to normalize letting someone win a legitimate election as a means to avoid serious sanction.
(Any country in which that sort of thing works is fucking insane.)
They did normalise it by not standing.
No, he was either going to lose to a bin or get back in the commons and have the investigation continue. Now it will continue. So no, playing along at his stupid games is what would normalise it. They will run at the next election in a few months.
It’s interesting they would let an alien from outer space run in these elections.
Especially against count binface.
I, for one, welcome our new metallic receptacle nearly-elected overlord.
(better than the elected one, that's for sure.)
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.
You're totally right, at this moment he must be seriously reconsidering his career as a politician.
In the previous (2024) Clacton election, Conservative + Reform got a combined 74.1% of the vote, with Labour + Liberal Democrats + Greens getting a combined 24.8%.
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...
Some Conservative activists were campaigning for the joke candidate in the constituency. Although none of the parties officially endorsed him obviously, they have all been gushing about him on social media.
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.
>but many non-reform didn't vote at all
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 )
> you'd have expected the whole opposition to converge on him
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.
if I remember correctly in one election as he was still Lord Buckethead he got more votes
More votes in an absolute sense but nowhere near as large as a proportion — he got 24000 votes when he stood for London Mayor but that is a tiny, tiny proportion of the vote — the two leading candidates between them got two million.
So he has never, until now, kept his deposit. This win was large and it is politically significant.
I meant more than those 95
This is an absurd take.
BBC spin on a Reform win.
In what possible context is this a Reform win?
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.
The real question is whether his gambit to neutralize the investigation against him actually works. At this point it's too early to say.
OK so:
- 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)
You like lists
Hah! Not usually, to be honest. I may have strayed into Gish galloping with the first one, though.
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.
Buried in the 3rd paragraph of the BBC report, is a minor detail, farage won the election.
It was a given that Farage was going to win the by-election. The major parties didn't even run candidates, since they all agreed it was a farce. The goal wasn't to beat him, it was to not let him control the narrative of the whole thing.
It seems to have become a given since he won the election, before this, the coverage of binface in the run up to this election has been endkess. If no one in the BBC or elsewhere thought he had a chance of winning, no one would have bothered reporting it.
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.
FWIW, Farage owes _most_ of his cultural visibility to the BBC's tendency to interview him, feature him on Question Time. He's been on that show nearly forty times!
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.
Again, the coverage was to prevent Farage from controlling the narrative, not to win. And because there was only 1 "serious" candidate running, what else are they going to air about the election? What other election has binface been involved in where there was only one "serious" candidate in to put coverage toward? Literally nobody seriously involved before or after actually believed binface would win outside of some technical possibility. Seriously, find even a single forecast that he could realistically win the election.
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.
> the bbc's natural bias against any anything right of soft left
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.
Believe it or not, the BBC has published multiple articles about the by-election, and most of them mention Farage's win in the headline.
This is facetious and silly.
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?
I'd call it a win for Sinn Fein honestly, given Farage's public support for the IRA.
Hahahaha — doesn't that story just tell you who he is, deep down. A shallow, transactional grifter.
Hey, he made his £87.
Not surprising given how many prime ministers UK have had in last 10 decades. Quite sad to see the state of one the oldest democracies in the world.
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.
It’s clear from your comments you know nothing of this election, Farage or the UK.
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.
Exactly my point. UK deserves these kind of people to lead them to oblivion
By "candidates like this" and "these types of candidates" I assume you mean Nigel Farage.
I meant both Farage and the trash can