* 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.
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.
> Every election should have a funny absurdist person like this absorbing all the blank and null votes to give the other candidates more incentives to convince the electorate.
We have absurdist clown candidates in America, the difference is they actually win... even after failed attempts at insurrection.
Don't forget about the California recall that put Arnold in charge. There were pornstars and all sorts absurdist candidates due to the nature of how the recall works. More recently, you had some ex-reality TV personality running for mayor of LA.
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).
> 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.
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. )
Well, you linked to his registration entry but that's not donations. In fact he doesn't have any donations so maybe that's why you were confused. If you look for a political entity which does have donations, like Reform, you can see £50M over the years since it was formed (then as the "Brexit Party")
And it's not true that "anybody" can donate. People can donate if they'd be allowed to vote in the UK, which currently includes people who don't live here and so don't care what happens but that might change to some extent. Non-people such as businesses can donate if they are legitimate UK entities with UK registration or whatever as appropriate (so e.g. a UK business you own for no purpose but to fuck with UK politics wouldn't fly, but if you've got a money-losing Californian Wine Importer that's a fun hobby you can make that loss $5000 bigger by having them them donate $5000 to Reform if you like)
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.
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.
I saw a Sankey diagram from exit polls that showed that lots of Conservatives voted for Farage, but some Reform voted for Binface. Can't find it again though because Twitter sucks.
Interestingly these regions have been getting a lot more investment from central government in recent years. It hasn’t appeared to make any difference to people’s voting patterns.
I 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.
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.
> 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.
If you live in a town with eight beds and ten people, and you just 'build more' your way into building another bed...
You're still going to have someone sleeping under a bridge, but now really smart people will raise their hand, and yell: "See? Building more was stupid, it didn't work."
Brexit divided and continues to cause paralysis. Soft, hard, or no-deal? Simplistic binary vote specified no mechanism, destination, or future relationship. Leave and remain have completely incompatible visions for post-Brexit Britain.
Along with (IMHO) a polycrisis of far-right immigration agitation, post-COVID stagnation, high energy costs, NHS/social care strain, housing/planning hell, lack of infrastructure investment.
We're not in a great place and, to your point, there is no clear way out.
I think an important issue in the UK political landscape and public is the polarisation that makes people label immigration a "far-right agitation".
Immigration is a serious and key issue, which impacts everything else, too. As long as the left of centre denies that it is an issue at all (because only "far right" people have a problem with it, apparently) Nigel Farage and the like will only keep increasing their share of the vote. The other aspect of Reform UK's rise is that the Conservatives only paid lip service to the issue so lost the support of many on the right and were destroyed at the last general election (still very visible in the polls).
Perhaps this, like Brexit before, also highlights another issue in the UK/England, which is that London tends to live in its own bubble.
Xenophobia is a tool of demagogues, not a rational policy.
So while it's an issue, it's not even in the top ten of of the UK's most important practical issues.
And the racism it generates - including Brexit, and currently the collapse of income from foreign students, which was a huge earner for the university sector - does huge and lasting harm.
It's a political shiny penny used for distraction, not a realistic solution to anything. And the people who make careers out of promoting it are provably cynical, corrupt, incompetent, and disinterested in solving real problems.
> Immigration is a serious and key issue, which impacts everything else, too.
No, other things are serious and key issues, and immigration is the scapegoat that gives people someone to blame for their problems, distracting from actual solutions that don't fit in a one-sentence slogan the way the non-solution "kick out all the Xes" does. This has been an electoral tactic of right-wing populists for a long, long time.
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.
I not sure this is correct, a vote of confidence in Parliament. Will bring down the government. Hence the PM.
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.
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.
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.
Still unclear what your point was. There was nothing politically unifying about Brexit. Individual politicians weren’t even consistent in their support or opposition to it. The closest we have to a unifier now is centrist and Left politicians degrading themselves in ever more desperate attempts to vilify immigrants and trans people in an attempt to placate the Right (which as yet hasn’t unified anybody, to everyone’s surprise).
Brexit has been massively divisive, and was the beginning of the train of short-term PMs we've had over the last 10 years. I don't see how another issue like that would (or could) serve as a unifier.
There are various factors at play, some of which are by no means unique to the UK like the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment. But IMO one aspect which is somewhat UK-specific is the first past the post system, which doesn't really work that well in situations where there are more than two parties seriously challenging for power. Starmer won in a "landslide" when you look at seats gained, but actually a lot of that was due to the right wing vote being split between the Tories and Reform. And on the other side you have left or centre-left parties like the Greens and Lib Dems which are now threatening to split the left wing vote. It's a pretty nonsensical and undemocratic system and I do think it plays a large part in the fact that no government ever seems very safe, even when they get a large surplus of seats in Parliament.
(I am not a UK citizen but I have lived here for years.)
The UK's real issue is that it is a corrupt hollowed-out plutocracy run for the benefit of corporations and privileged opportunists, many of whom live abroad. They control the media, they buy politicians, they own much of the land and property market, and key companies and resources, and they set the narrative.
They have no ethics beyond power and money, and their signature attitude is contempt for voters.
The result is PR politics where major issues are ignored - climate catastrophe, the dire state of many utilities, lack of investment, lack of national strategy - and the media concentrate on fear-mongering and distractions, including racism (esp. Brexit and Islamophobia), punching down at the weak, and aggressively disproportionate punishment of very mild public dissent.
A series of comically incompetent and personally grotesque figurehead prime ministers - who can be talked up on installation and trashed when minor release is needed - is just another of the distractions. It simultaneously enrages the population, forces them into apathy (because nothing fundamental can ever change), and reassures the country's owners that money and resources can keep being extracted while the government "can't afford" more spending on healthcare, education, and critical infrastructure.
If you're thinking "That sounds like the US" - yes, it does, and that's not a coincidence.
The Tory saga was mostly caused by Brexit and poor handling of Covid. Theresa May was ousted by Boris Johnson over Brexit, Johnson was ousted for hosting parties at number 10, whilst Covid lockdowns were in-place, and poor party management (ironically). Liz Truss tanked the UK bond market by thinking she could present an unfunded budget full of tax cuts for the rich, she didn't last as long as a lettuce. Rishi Sunak only had a short time before the next election, so didn't really get a chance to bed in, but he was seen to be grossly out-of-touch.
Now we're into the Labour saga: Kier Starmer seemed to actually be doing OK, but he didn't tell anybody about it. Then had a number of U-turns that made him look weak to the country and especially his back-benchers. He was a decent technocrat, but it's clear someone like that can't exist in this modern fast-comms world. The online vitriol against him was unbelievably disproportionate to his performance.
Now we have Andy Burnham, who seems to know how to flood-the-zone (Trump style) without being a bigoted, corrupt, criminal, paedophile. So his communications seem to be carrying a honeymoon period, for now. But the press in the Uk is mostly right-wing biased, so you can expect the attacks to start soon.
In many ways you could argue all of those prime ministers deserved to go and it actually shows 'The UK' will get rid of you if it's not working. They weren't good enough and our main parties have mechanisms to get rid of you if it's not working out.
Outside of that, the UK's biggest problem is its debt and the fact we left the EU. Which is tightening the budget and making it difficult for any government to put money into things that are visible to the average voter. This makes governing especially hard right now.
Oh, and the clear targeted propaganda from hard right-wing organisations, Elon Musk, Russia, and Iran are clearly trying to destabalise the UK on the beloved free-speech platforms of America. It's absolute poison day-in, day-out. And unfortunately, some people fall for it, and end up voting for assets like Nigel Farage. But that isn't real life. Or, at least, the beloved free-speech platforms of America don't represent the the UK in any true form.
“Kier Starmer seemed to actually be doing OK” as someone who voted for his Labour I was immediately regretting it when they tried to force Apple to open a backdoor and they are still trying!
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/uk-still-trying-backdo...
I’m not a single issue voter but the sheer incompetence of this particular decision is just too damning. It rightly caused friction with our 5 eyes partners. I would expect readers of hackernews to appreciate how dumb and impossible the request was.
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.
Instead the 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 ongoing investigation into Farage that would resume if elected).
It is of note that Reform's popularity 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 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
> I'm not sure if the EU would really go along with it again.
Sounds like Project Fear to me! The EU needs Britain more than Britain needs them! The German car/French wine/etc. industry will beg the European Commission to give Britain all their opt-outs back to secure a rejoin!
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.
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 )
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.
> you'd have expected the whole opposition to converge on him
This is such a ridiculous take. In his last by-election result he got 95 votes, which up until last night's result was this highest he'd ever achieved. So getting nearly 10,000 votes is ridiculously good for a 'novelty' candidate. Your expectations of how every single voter who was for the other parties is instantly not for Nigel Farage doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The Conservative bloc, for example, wouldn't necessarily have skin in this game, whereas liberal and left leaning voters would.
More votes in an absolute sense but nowhere near as large as a proportion — he got 24000 votes when he stood for London Mayor but that is a tiny, tiny proportion of the vote — the two leading candidates between them got two million.
So he has never, until now, kept his deposit. This win was large and it is politically significant.
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.
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 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
Farage "won" but he lost. Reform only lost.
ETA: Count Binface won by more votes than any recall petition would need to force Farage out of his seat and to fight it again. That is a huge deal.
- it won't stop the investigation, which has restarted
- it won't stop the investigation triggering a recall petition if the findings are serious enough
- the recall petition needs 10% of the electorate to sign it to trigger a recall
- if it gets ten per cent of the electorate, Farage loses his seat and has to fight another election
- Count Binface got more than 12% of the electorate to vote for him, many of whom, perhaps the majority, will have voted for him in person (because it's effing hilarious)
- So if the standards commission finds Farage broke the rules in a way significant enough to trigger a recall petition, it seems likely Farage will lose his seat
- And then have to fight it again, this time against other candidates
- There are surely going to be more stories that come out about exactly how Posh George's money reached the party (which is the second investigation that will almost certainly start)
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.
You missed the biggest one:
Cap the price of Wigan kebabs at £2
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.
It's mostly negative polarization driving things these days, so I don't think that idea makes as much sense as it once did.
No, leftist policies are just absurd.
> Every election should have a funny absurdist person like this absorbing all the blank and null votes to give the other candidates more incentives to convince the electorate.
We have absurdist clown candidates in America, the difference is they actually win... even after failed attempts at insurrection.
Don't forget about the California recall that put Arnold in charge. There were pornstars and all sorts absurdist candidates due to the nature of how the recall works. More recently, you had some ex-reality TV personality running for mayor of LA.
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).
> 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.
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.
Well he's clearly getting funding from somewhere. Look at how his bin has improved over the years!
> 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...
Well, you linked to his registration entry but that's not donations. In fact he doesn't have any donations so maybe that's why you were confused. If you look for a political entity which does have donations, like Reform, you can see £50M over the years since it was formed (then as the "Brexit Party")
And it's not true that "anybody" can donate. People can donate if they'd be allowed to vote in the UK, which currently includes people who don't live here and so don't care what happens but that might change to some extent. Non-people such as businesses can donate if they are legitimate UK entities with UK registration or whatever as appropriate (so e.g. a UK business you own for no purpose but to fuck with UK politics wouldn't fly, but if you've got a money-losing Californian Wine Importer that's a fun hobby you can make that loss $5000 bigger by having them them donate $5000 to Reform if you like)
Not quite. The problem is that rich people can find ways around the laws.
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/political-registratio...
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.
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.
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.
> They get what they deserve.
another expensive byelection. Farage has just wasted public funds to justify taking a big bribe
And all the rest also get what Farage's voters deserve. Such is the power of Democracy.
Kein Mehrheit Für Die Mitleid
And if the standards committee sees fit he will be doing it again soon.
Such is especially the power of first-past-the-post.
The Conservative party ran in the last election, they didn't run in this election, so more right wing voters likely moved from Conservative to Farage than he got 110% of his normal core/base.
I saw a Sankey diagram from exit polls that showed that lots of Conservatives voted for Farage, but some Reform voted for Binface. Can't find it again though because Twitter sucks.
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 if the attention is for all the wrong reasons.
You want attention and an mp who cares and delivers then vote for Binface.
Farage has barely been in Clacton for the last 2 years.
Interestingly these regions have been getting a lot more investment from central government in recent years. It hasn’t appeared to make any difference to people’s voting patterns.
I 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.
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.
> To give an concrete example. The Netherlands has a severe housing crisis. Despite being a relatively rich country it's not uncommon for people (sometimes even couples) to live with their parents untill they're well in their 30ies.
I'm now writing a book provisionally called "How Democracy Got Strangled by Bike Lanes".
> Everyone agrees that this is crazy, seemingly very little changes.
People understand instinctively that "just building more" is not working and never will.
It is my understanding that they didn't in fact "Just build more" so how would they know it was or wasn't working?
They did build more they just didn't build that.
>People understand instinctively that "just building more" is not working and never will.
Wait. Why? Do they?
If the problem is the lack of housing. Why wouldn't building more be a solution?
Or are you refering that the phrase itself is dismissive of existing issues?
but isn't the story that they did build more?
If you live in a town with eight beds and ten people, and you just 'build more' your way into building another bed...
You're still going to have someone sleeping under a bridge, but now really smart people will raise their hand, and yell: "See? Building more was stupid, it didn't work."
Brexit divided and continues to cause paralysis. Soft, hard, or no-deal? Simplistic binary vote specified no mechanism, destination, or future relationship. Leave and remain have completely incompatible visions for post-Brexit Britain.
Along with (IMHO) a polycrisis of far-right immigration agitation, post-COVID stagnation, high energy costs, NHS/social care strain, housing/planning hell, lack of infrastructure investment.
We're not in a great place and, to your point, there is no clear way out.
> a polycrisis of far-right immigration agitation
I think an important issue in the UK political landscape and public is the polarisation that makes people label immigration a "far-right agitation".
Immigration is a serious and key issue, which impacts everything else, too. As long as the left of centre denies that it is an issue at all (because only "far right" people have a problem with it, apparently) Nigel Farage and the like will only keep increasing their share of the vote. The other aspect of Reform UK's rise is that the Conservatives only paid lip service to the issue so lost the support of many on the right and were destroyed at the last general election (still very visible in the polls).
Perhaps this, like Brexit before, also highlights another issue in the UK/England, which is that London tends to live in its own bubble.
Xenophobia is a tool of demagogues, not a rational policy.
So while it's an issue, it's not even in the top ten of of the UK's most important practical issues.
And the racism it generates - including Brexit, and currently the collapse of income from foreign students, which was a huge earner for the university sector - does huge and lasting harm.
It's a political shiny penny used for distraction, not a realistic solution to anything. And the people who make careers out of promoting it are provably cynical, corrupt, incompetent, and disinterested in solving real problems.
> Immigration is a serious and key issue, which impacts everything else, too.
No, other things are serious and key issues, and immigration is the scapegoat that gives people someone to blame for their problems, distracting from actual solutions that don't fit in a one-sentence slogan the way the non-solution "kick out all the Xes" does. This has been an electoral tactic of right-wing populists for a long, long time.
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. I not sure this is correct, a vote of confidence in Parliament. Will bring down the government. Hence the PM.
But that doesn't bring down the PM personally.
The last VONC to pass was in 1979, and Callaghan continued to lead Labour (albeit to defeat) in the General Election.
The chaos arguably starts with the Coalition and Cameron, and the Brexit vote and tuition fees reversal.
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.
[delayed]
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.
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.
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 did not create any kind of unifier...
more of a political unifier vs social one, I should clarify on that.
Still unclear what your point was. There was nothing politically unifying about Brexit. Individual politicians weren’t even consistent in their support or opposition to it. The closest we have to a unifier now is centrist and Left politicians degrading themselves in ever more desperate attempts to vilify immigrants and trans people in an attempt to placate the Right (which as yet hasn’t unified anybody, to everyone’s surprise).
It didn't even unify the side that won, considering there were _two_ leave campaigns.
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.)
Brexit hardly caused unity. It split the country almost exactly down the middle. And nobody on either side seems happy with the result.
Brexit was not a unifier. Just the opposite.
The UK's real issue is that it is a corrupt hollowed-out plutocracy run for the benefit of corporations and privileged opportunists, many of whom live abroad. They control the media, they buy politicians, they own much of the land and property market, and key companies and resources, and they set the narrative.
They have no ethics beyond power and money, and their signature attitude is contempt for voters.
The result is PR politics where major issues are ignored - climate catastrophe, the dire state of many utilities, lack of investment, lack of national strategy - and the media concentrate on fear-mongering and distractions, including racism (esp. Brexit and Islamophobia), punching down at the weak, and aggressively disproportionate punishment of very mild public dissent.
A series of comically incompetent and personally grotesque figurehead prime ministers - who can be talked up on installation and trashed when minor release is needed - is just another of the distractions. It simultaneously enrages the population, forces them into apathy (because nothing fundamental can ever change), and reassures the country's owners that money and resources can keep being extracted while the government "can't afford" more spending on healthcare, education, and critical infrastructure.
If you're thinking "That sounds like the US" - yes, it does, and that's not a coincidence.
The 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.
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
“Kier Starmer seemed to actually be doing OK” as someone who voted for his Labour I was immediately regretting it when they tried to force Apple to open a backdoor and they are still trying! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/uk-still-trying-backdo...
Privacy concerns have pretty broad opposition in the UK, unfortunately.
Your single-issue concerns are valid, but most people view an executive office's performance as a holistic union of their stances on issues.
I’m not a single issue voter but the sheer incompetence of this particular decision is just too damning. It rightly caused friction with our 5 eyes partners. I would expect readers of hackernews to appreciate how dumb and impossible the request was.
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.
Instead the 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 ongoing investigation into Farage that would resume if elected).
It is of note that Reform's popularity 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.
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 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?
Amd the winner of the by-election didn't even attended the announcement of the results.
He has nerves of steel and an iron will.
Seems like he was a writer for The Thick of It. Fitting.
So they took the existing clown show called "elections" and cranked it to 11.
It’s interesting they would let an alien from outer space run in these elections.
Especially against count binface.
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.
> I'm not sure if the EU would really go along with it again.
Sounds like Project Fear to me! The EU needs Britain more than Britain needs them! The German car/French wine/etc. industry will beg the European Commission to give Britain all their opt-outs back to secure a rejoin!
Brexit cannot be reversed if people dont get their act together. And that will take a good amount of time and effort.
In the meantime…meet our next “PM of the month”!
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?
would have been awesome if he won
I can't believe people chose the joke candidate over Count Binface!
Best response yet!
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.
>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'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...
> you'd have expected the whole opposition to converge on him
This is such a ridiculous take. In his last by-election result he got 95 votes, which up until last night's result was this highest he'd ever achieved. So getting nearly 10,000 votes is ridiculously good for a 'novelty' candidate. Your expectations of how every single voter who was for the other parties is instantly not for Nigel Farage doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The Conservative bloc, for example, wouldn't necessarily have skin in this game, whereas liberal and left leaning voters would.
if I remember correctly in one election as he was still Lord Buckethead he got more votes
More votes in an absolute sense but nowhere near as large as a proportion — he got 24000 votes when he stood for London Mayor but that is a tiny, tiny proportion of the vote — the two leading candidates between them got two million.
So he has never, until now, kept his deposit. This win was large and it is politically significant.
This is an absurd take.
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
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.
The other main parties boycotted the election.
So his results should be much higher
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.)
Other parties did not support Binface
Count Binface was recorded pronouncing Jeffery Epstein's name in a disgustingly antisemitic fashion. He needs to be jailed.
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 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
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)
Buried in the 3rd paragraph of the BBC report, is a minor detail, farage won the election.
Believe it or not, the BBC has published multiple articles about the by-election, and most of them mention Farage's win in the headline.
This is facetious and silly.
He was always going to win this election. Nobody practically-minded ever thought Binface winning was anything more than technically possible.
What is your understanding about why the election happened?
I'd call it a win for Sinn Fein honestly, given Farage's public support for the IRA.
Hahahaha — doesn't that story just tell you who he is, deep down. A shallow, transactional grifter.