Comment by dofm
13 days ago
In what possible context is this a Reform win?
A win in a fight
- that Nigel personally picked himself because his own personally dubious way of living and coming into money caused Parliament to investigate him
- where a novelty candidate won more (a greater share of the vote) than most novelty candidates ever have
- that Farage fought explicitly (he has said so) to attempt to discredit any legitimate recall election triggered by his standards investigation
- that has only cost Reform money campaigning for a race he'd already won.
- that only caused more scrutiny on Posh George, his mother, the money, Tice, on the fact that their crypto-based funding is so shady, banks and the police are investigating it
- where Farage decided not to turn up to the count, claiming the police had told him not to, which turns out not to be the truth
- that took effectively took Reform's party leader off the national media stage because of impartiality regulations on reporting
- that possibly caused them to lose the Manchester mayoral election (or at least lose worse than they could have) because the entire party abandoned campaigning in favour of Clacton
Farage "won" but he lost. Reform only lost.
ETA: Count Binface won by more votes than any recall petition would need to force Farage out of his seat and to fight it again. That is a huge deal.
The real question is whether his gambit to neutralize the investigation against him actually works. At this point it's too early to say.
OK so:
- it won't stop the investigation, which has restarted
- it won't stop the investigation triggering a recall petition if the findings are serious enough
- the recall petition needs 10% of the electorate to sign it to trigger a recall
- if it gets ten per cent of the electorate, Farage loses his seat and has to fight another election
- Count Binface got more than 12% of the electorate to vote for him, many of whom, perhaps the majority, will have voted for him in person (because it's effing hilarious)
- So if the standards commission finds Farage broke the rules in a way significant enough to trigger a recall petition, it seems likely Farage will lose his seat
- And then have to fight it again, this time against other candidates
- There are surely going to be more stories that come out about exactly how Posh George's money reached the party (which is the second investigation that will almost certainly start)
You like lists
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Buried in the 3rd paragraph of the BBC report, is a minor detail, farage won the election.
It was a given that Farage was going to win the by-election. The major parties didn't even run candidates, since they all agreed it was a farce. The goal wasn't to beat him, it was to not let him control the narrative of the whole thing.
It seems to have become a given since he won the election, before this, the coverage of binface in the run up to this election has been endkess. If no one in the BBC or elsewhere thought he had a chance of winning, no one would have bothered reporting it.
Binface has been around for years, he never received this level of coverage before. Its pretty obvious that the bbc's natural bias against any anything right of soft left is why he got this much coverage from them.
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Believe it or not, the BBC has published multiple articles about the by-election, and most of them mention Farage's win in the headline.
This is facetious and silly.
He was always going to win this election. Nobody practically-minded ever thought Binface winning was anything more than technically possible.
What is your understanding about why the election happened?