* 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.
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.
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.
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).
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".
> 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.
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. )
Britain has a first-past-the-post election system so the candidate with the most votes wins in each constituency.
As Farage didn’t get an absolute majority last time, and as a majority of voters didn’t even vote last time, I was extrapolating that Count Binface had a real chance. Not just as a protest vote, but a magnet for everyone not supporting Farage as well as everyone wanting a laugh (in a British boaty-mcboatface way).
Perhaps a serious clean-up-politics neutral candidate would have done better, like Martin Bell - a very well known war correspondent - who stood on an anti corruption ticket against the scandal riddled Conservative Neil Hamilton in Tatton in 1997.
The 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> another brexit exit (a singular, definable political question that can cleanly classified in a binary label)
Yes, the referendum was a binary choice, but I think it was flawed in that Brexit covered many different, incompatible options (e.g. soft, hard, in-between). If the referendum had depicted the situation more accurately, then we wouldn't have wasted so much time and money going through the whole charade (mainly because "remain" would have won).
I like to think of an analogy where people are asked what they want to eat for dinner and they're given a choice of "meat" or "vegetarian". If 40% want vegetarian, 30% want beef and 30% want pork, then the "meat" option will win, but then someone has to choose whether it's beef or pork. That ends up with a choice that only suits 30% of the voters.
Also, it makes sense for a referendum to specify the required margin for whether the choice is carried through and I think the vote was too close to lead to such a destructive change.
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.
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.)
I've lived here. My take is it's been mildly depressing. Economically tearing up our trade agreements hasn't been good, immigration wise having european immigrants replaced but a bunch of dark skinned immigrants hasn't made the anti immigration folk happy. We have large amounts of debt which makes it hard for governments to do much. As a result people get pissed off, try changing the leader, it doesn't actually change anything, and repeat.
I'm not quite sure what the answer is. In a few decades it will have blown over.
We're probably more united in that both leavers and remainers are getting more in agreement that Brexit didn't work very well.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I wonder how many people who wouldn't normally vote for Farage did so because they knew voting him back in would re-open the investigation against him.
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.
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.
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.)
- 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.
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.
"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."
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.
2 replies →
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)
1 reply →
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/
1 reply →
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.
1 reply →
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.
5 replies →
Lawyer here.[0] Definitely possible.[1]
[0] not a lawyer [1] what does “nationalise” even mean?
20 replies →
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)
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.
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.
1 reply →
In one general election back in the 90s, there was a candidate called "Nun of the Above".
They put them at the bottom of the candidate list on the voting slip. Good to see the election officials had a sense of humor.
1 reply →
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).
3 replies →
[flagged]
12 replies →
> 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".
2 replies →
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".
1 reply →
Apply MP wages to nurses is actually a solid idea I recon.
1 reply →
Cap the price of Wigan kebabs at £2
You missed the biggest one:
Binface's most important non-platform items are:
Ich bin ein binliner
honestly he should have won on his main if unstated plank, "not be nigel farage"
> 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.
18 replies →
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.
1 reply →
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.
1 reply →
> 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...
6 replies →
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.
3 replies →
> They get what they deserve.
another expensive byelection. Farage has just wasted public funds to justify taking a big bribe
1 reply →
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.
5 replies →
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.
4 replies →
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!
> I was extrapolating that Count Binface had a real chance.
At winning? No. Count Binface got 26.9% of the vote (1), and overperformed expectations at that. He was not expected to win outright.
At being funny, and making Farage look weak, petty and silly? Yes, he overperformed at that too.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Clacton_by-election
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.
5 replies →
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.
4 replies →
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.
The interesting question is not how Farage could win. He chose that town for his high rate of supporters.
The interesting question is: would a “real” candidate have beaten him?
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.
Has he held a surgery, though?
Photo ops are all vey well.
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
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.
1 reply →
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
2 replies →
> 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.
19 replies →
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.
> 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.
20 replies →
[flagged]
2 replies →
There is no "far right" in the UK -- it's a label that is used to smear people to excuse state failure.
3 replies →
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.
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.
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.
7 replies →
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 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.
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
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.
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.
> another brexit exit (a singular, definable political question that can cleanly classified in a binary label)
Yes, the referendum was a binary choice, but I think it was flawed in that Brexit covered many different, incompatible options (e.g. soft, hard, in-between). If the referendum had depicted the situation more accurately, then we wouldn't have wasted so much time and money going through the whole charade (mainly because "remain" would have won).
I like to think of an analogy where people are asked what they want to eat for dinner and they're given a choice of "meat" or "vegetarian". If 40% want vegetarian, 30% want beef and 30% want pork, then the "meat" option will win, but then someone has to choose whether it's beef or pork. That ends up with a choice that only suits 30% of the voters.
Also, it makes sense for a referendum to specify the required margin for whether the choice is carried through and I think the vote was too close to lead to such a destructive change.
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.
2 replies →
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.)
I've lived here. My take is it's been mildly depressing. Economically tearing up our trade agreements hasn't been good, immigration wise having european immigrants replaced but a bunch of dark skinned immigrants hasn't made the anti immigration folk happy. We have large amounts of debt which makes it hard for governments to do much. As a result people get pissed off, try changing the leader, it doesn't actually change anything, and repeat.
I'm not quite sure what the answer is. In a few decades it will have blown over.
We're probably more united in that both leavers and remainers are getting more in agreement that Brexit didn't work very well.
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.
3 replies →
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.
1 reply →
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...
8 replies →
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
1 reply →
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.
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.
Yes!
I mean that one came true in 2016.
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.
5 replies →
The real question: is this behavior any worse than the "super serious" parties? That just sounds like normal behavior.
> 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.
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.
1 reply →
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.)
Amd the winner of the by-election didn't even attended the announcement of 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.
7 replies →
Brexit cannot be reversed if people dont get their act together. And that will take a good amount of time and effort.
2 replies →
All of the major parties except for Reform withdrew their candidates in protest of Farage.
> 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?
7 replies →
I think it was a major tactical mistake for them to withdraw. Binface is the only thing which turned it into a proper contest.
5 replies →
Obviously. Everyone know this. The vote predictions knew this too.
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.
Seems like he was a writer for The Thick of It. Fitting.
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!
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.
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.
3 replies →
> 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.
Canonical Monty Python sketch => https://youtu.be/dVI5ZOT5QEM?is=bf1E43oA05Q3S0zI
I wonder how many people who wouldn't normally vote for Farage did so because they knew voting him back in would re-open the investigation against him.
Really really hilarious. I commend and ask all centrist parties to continue sending failed comedians as their provincial vassals
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?
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?
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
1 reply →
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.
2 replies →
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.
3 replies →
The other main parties boycotted the election.
So his results should be much higher
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.
backed by every other party?
did they endorse and fund him?
are they running him for the next PM?
Other parties did not support Binface
I think the UK has their vermin supreme
It's bin a wild ride for sure.
It’s interesting they would let an alien from outer space run in these elections.
Especially against count binface.
idk this seems like a very rose-tinted title considering the results
would have been awesome if he won
I, for one, welcome our new metallic receptacle nearly-elected overlord.
(better than the elected one, that's for sure.)
So they took the existing clown show called "elections" and cranked it to 11.
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.
3 replies →
Buried in the 3rd paragraph of the BBC report, is a minor detail, farage won the election.
7 replies →
[flagged]
Hahahaha — doesn't that story just tell you who he is, deep down. A shallow, transactional grifter.
1 reply →
[flagged]
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
2 replies →
This is an absurd take.
"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"
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
1 reply →
By "candidates like this" and "these types of candidates" I assume you mean Nigel Farage.
I meant both Farage and the trash can