Percentage wise which is meaningless really.
1 Like
Trump completely took over the republicans and turned it into the loony brigade party. There’s no reason that can’t happen in the UK with reform and or Tories. The Tories are most of the way there already.
1 Like
I don’t disagree.
You were querying polling percentages. My point is simply that regardless of percentages Reform would be absolutely delighted to get about five seats in this election.
Not enough mad people in the uk
Reform will poll almost nothing in Scotland whereas Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems will gather varyingly significant shares of their vote in Scotland and Wales.
Reform will probably do a bit better in Wales than in Scotland but I imagine their vote there will be well under their UK-wide average.
Opinion polls are based on the whole of the UK, so it’s probable Reform’s support in England is being underplayed by the polls.
UKIP’s share of the UK-wide vote was slightly underplayed by the final polls in 2015. Most polls had them on 11%, some on 12%, but they got 12.9%. That was in an election with a strong Tory performance, which won’t be the case this time.
Whether it’s 11% or 13%, they got one seat.
And their platform in 2015 was a major reason for the referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU being called, which the Leave side won.
People can ignore the fact that these headbangers are getting a significant share of the vote if they want, but it seems head in the sand stuff to do that, because such a vote share and the nature of it has a major effect on the policies implemented by those in power, as we have seen.
The headbangers in Britain have been massively successful in driving politics as a whole way off to the right, and in dragging public discourse down the toilet.
1 Like
Some eerie warning signs for the Tories here. Canada’s electoral system is also first past the post. The country is quite regional, with certain parties like the Bloc Quebecois only standing in certain provinces, which is loosely analogous to the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Northern Ireland parties.
In the 1988 Canadian election the Canadian Tories won 169 of the 295 seats on a 43.02% national vote share.
In 1993 the Canadian Tories won (two) seats on a 16.04% national vote share, and Prime Minister Kim Campbell, who had been in office for only four months, lost her seat.
The 1993 election saw the emergence of a right-wing “populist” party called, wait for it, the Reform party, led by a charismatic charlatan named Preston Manning, who had founded the party six years earlier and styled himself as an “outsider”. In the months preceding the calling of the election, the Reform party were routinely polling single figures in the polls. When the election was called, they suddenly started to rise.
The Reform party decimated the Tory vote and won 52 seats on a national vote share of 18.69%, having won 0 seats in 1988.
I love the “get 1 million people back to work” line.
And the "take illegal immigrants back to France ".
1 Like
I love the 70% of food production to be farmed here. Exactly who is going to pick the produce, you’ve just banned the only likely candidates. It certainly isn’t going to be some imbecile racist from Burnley.
5 Likes
Unfortunately not.
What’s your take on the faragists? An empty vessel or a genuine shift?
That manifesto is cleverly put together.
Sunak is in trouble now because he left the D-Day ceremonies early to fly back to London to do an interview with ITV. He missed the opportunity to hang out with Biden, Macron etc. That lad can’t read a room at all.
1 Like
An interview that won’t even be broadcast until the middle of next week.
He insulted the veterans and their families.
He was toast already but now he is even more toasted.
The right-wing headbangers in the US love their politicians doing that.
Nigel Falange loves it.
Farage has played a blinder here in fairness.
Holly Valance in talks to stand for Reform UK in Basildon and Billericay.
At this stage I’m half expecting Home And Away’s Dani Sutherland to pop up as a Green Party candidate in Kensington and Chelsea.