First breathless reporting that the husband of a backbench MP, who was herself most notable for having been sacked twice as Home Secretary in quite staggering circumstances, had joined Reform UK. And now the Candy Man. What might Reform do that could possibly not be treated as news? Thus do upper-middle-class liberals indulge their off-colour drunken uncles, especially at this time of the year.
Reform has only five MPs, and at least one of those almost never speaks in public. It has only one more seat than the Greens. It has the same number as the DUP. It has the same number as the Independent Alliance, a member of which briefly became impossible to ignore today, so has to be screamed down for attempting to "introduce" an "alien" practice rather than proposing an alternative to criminalisation as a solution to an undisputed problem arising out of something that had not been illegal since the sixteenth century and which used to be endemic. The British Empire never suppressed cousin marriage. For that matter, in 14 years, the Conservatives never banned it.
And Reform has 14 times fewer seats than the Liberal Democrats. The 121 Conservatives are also overrepresented on the airwaves. That party should have the non-Labour seat half the time, and the Lib Dems might reasonably expect it half of the rest of the time, with the remaining quarter shared out among everyone else. Reform's MPs do not "speak for four million voters". They speak for five constituencies. One in 130.
What would you say if Reform took all that money from Elon Musk?
ReplyDeleteThat voting for it was now unpatriotic to the cusp of treason.
Delete“Reform has only five MPs, and at least one of those almost never speaks in public. It has only one more seat than the Greens. It has the same number as the DUP. It has the same number as the Independent Alliance”
ReplyDeleteBut it got far more votes and a far higher vote share than any of the parties you mention, the third largest in the country, and there was no such entity as the “Independent Alliance” standing at the election-they called themselves that after it.
So what?
Delete“So what?” Your above post questions Reform’s significance by saying how few seats they got-when that’s only because we have a voting system where seats don’t reflect the level of public support each party commands. The Lib Dems, for example, got over 70 seats yet their support only went up half a point since the last election, they got far less votes than Reform and took hardly any Tory votes (just 7% of 2019 Conservative voters switched to the Lib Dems whereas 25% voted Reform).
ReplyDeleteAll the threat to the Tories comes from the Right of course, hence they picked Badenoch.
Better out than in?
Delete