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You might not want to back Reform to win the most seats even if you think Farage is going to be PM a
You might not want to back Reform to win the most seats even if you think Farage is going to be PM after the election– politicalbetting.com
Yesterday’s news about a potential pact between the Tories and Reform helped crystalise a thought I’ve had about why backing Reform to win the most seats at the next general election might not be profitable even if you are confident that Nigel Farage is going to be the Prime Minister after the next election. I’ll explain the reasons why this is plausible
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EDIT: Second, like Labour in seat numbers at the next election?
Reform are going to upend the system and likely "win", but that winning could come in multiple forms
Aggregate Result of the 185 Council By-Elections (for 190 Seats) Since the 2024 General Election:
LAB: 67 (-31)
CON: 51 (+24)
LDM: 35 (=)
RFM: 10 (+10)
IND: 9 (-2)
GRN: 8 (+2)
SNP: 6 (-1)
PLC: 2 (=)
LOC: 2 (-2)
So, Labour are losing lots of seats, but they’re still the biggest winner of by-elections. They’re not being wiped out.
Bastard Americans throwing their weight around acting like the world's policeman with their cultural, economic, and military imperialism.
Also fpt
Bastard Americans withdrawing a key instrument of aforementioned imperialism from the globe when the world needs it most and millions will die as a result.
The fantastic thing about Trump is that he is sending all the right people absolutely stark raving mad.
Glasgow to Oban by train, meanwhile (only a few hours at most), is also stunning.
These periods of low growth can be very difficult to break out of. People of a certain age will recall the “green shoots of recovery “ which so damaged the Tories in the early 90s. Labour will be in serious trouble and the Tories are still not at the races. We are going to go through a period with high leads for Reform. It’s dispiriting.
Scotland is blessed with splendid train routes. Inverness over the Highlands to Kyle is ravishing. Likewise the train to the Isles from Fort William to Mallaig, possibly the most beautiful train journey in the world in terms of view-per-mile?
If you are, then don't complain when they engage in force projection around the globe. If you are not, then don't complain when they reduce force projection around the globe.
Historically, you have been right. Now, I’m not so sure.
Actually, they’re now in charge.
They are doomed, unfortunately so are we until we can dump them
https://www.ft.com/content/ffa44bea-e5f4-403e-af62-5ccab9abbcfc
Hunt did a deal based on a text message from AZ promising investment which it reneged on. I think the Treasury are at fault for so many things but not sure this is one of them.
It’s sent you bonkers, certainly.
“The right people” ?
Twat.
A "shallow" recession lasting an eternal two quarters such as you describe can strike like a 100 metre wave in a calm sea and sweep all before it.
The terror grows exponentially: I see a small unhealthy smoking joker riding atop such a terrifying tsunami to a clean sweep of the Commons.
https://x.com/britainelects/status/1887759202753319386?s=46
TLDR somewhere in between, but largely in line with polling.
The Democrats messed up royally but the actual Harris campaign was far from the radical AOC wing would present it. It wasnt enough/believed and the economy etc was considered more important by the voters, but it would be to misremember things to act like they made literally no attempt to modulate their message
Turns out that means an extra levy on consumer electric bills.
Ed Milliband: “it does require investment”.
Oh, you want actual policies? Why do they need them? Voting Reform at local authority level is voting to express that the community and local economy is broken and no other party has demonstrated they can fix it - or even that they understand that its broken.
Reform's policies? Fix things. Hopefully.
Similar sentiment seen on the left in the 20th century about the rise of communism.
They might do something about social care and the NHS... after a report in 2028
Immigration, who knows. The EU, shrug. Environment yes no Heathrow maybe no yes
The only solid policy Labour has is to give £18bn to Mauritius for no reason, so that British grannies can die of hypothermia
So, this isn't quite the own you think it is
Putin played a blinder.
Whilst Reform does attract a fringe of 'fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists", it's chief concern - immigration - is shared by a significant percentage of voters.
For me, the main drawback of Reform is that they have no serious economic policy and have done no serious thinking on how to cut net migration.
It's the benign and paternalistic end of Imperialism, and one that has now been delivered to rivals such as China.
No way we have the will to back tough decisions to change that, so no party will try. Reform would see support evaporate if they took hard choices.
(I dont know what changes might work, but i know we the voters would not reward any short term pain it would probably require)
As America Firsters, one would hope that they would not want to ensure that their country is not trusted for the next 50 years. But - no.
From the thread:
We already see the shutdown's cost. Kids with drug-resistant TB, turned away from clinics, are not just dying - they're spreading the disease. People around the world w HIV, denied their medicine, will soon start transmitting virus. The damage is global.
https://bsky.app/profile/agawande.bsky.social/post/3lhjy3l4npk2e.
One emblematic example: The stop-work order on U.S.A.I.D.-funded research has left thousands of people with experimental drugs and devices in their bodies, with no access to monitoring or care.
https://archive.is/20250206231120/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/health/usaid-clinical-trials-funding-trump.html
https://bsky.app/profile/agawande.bsky.social/post/3lhjy3l4npk2e
USAID is now extinct.
https://x.com/braidengb/status/1887778943303840090?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
We're now reaching the point of who does the Left want to face at the next election. Because if they don't want it to be Farage, with all that would mean if he wins, they need to change something now - and perhaps not just their own performance.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/kings-speech-2024-background-briefing-notes
Calling it a “key instrument of imperialism” is obvious bollocks.
It would help if you give an example of an 'absolutely stark raving mad' post from the previous thread.
So Reform may have no specific plans for local government but none of them do - they just try to manage things competently in the small areas they have wiggle room.
I mean yes, that's pretty nuanced, but also unrealistic, dontcha think?
But let me help you.
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=USAID+cultural+imperialism
OTOH if you expect the likes of Farage and Tice to transform the country into anything other than a vast wealth transfer system that robs most of the population daily, so as to keep rentier capitalists and wealthy crusties in million pounds houses in the lifestyles to which they have become accustomed, then you're in for a bloody long wait.
And recall this is a feature not a bug. Skyr Toolmakersson was apparently appalled to discover, when entering Number 10, that there "was no plan"
Farage would have to be really really shite to be worse than that
Even a small child could see the complete failure of logic in the second paragraph.
I would hesitate anyway to back anything which involves the success of a group other than Labour - which I think will still exist - under a specific name. Names and identities and substantive realities are different. For all I know by 2029 Farage and friends will stand as Conreform or Farageists, or Conservativemark2. If current trends continue Tories will be a fading memory of an eccentric group subsumed into the Holy Roman Empire under Frederick Barbarossa in 1160.
"Since its establishment during the height of the Cold War, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has served as a key institutional site for the promotion of US interests abroad. Despite the agency’s centrality as a US foreign policy tool, however, as Jamey Essex (2013) observes, relatively scant attention has been paid to the logics and frameworks that shape USAID’s inner workings and external relations. Essex’s book is a considerable contribution on this score. Development, Security, and Aid: Geopolitics and Geoeconomics at the U.S. Agency for International Development offers an incisive account of the ways in which the entwined but distinct geostrategic discourses of geopolitics and geoeconomics shape the internal workings of USAID and, in turn, its..."
From the very first wiki article. Knock yourself out (as they want us to say) with further information about it.
What to do?
Later on today I face another cruel dilemma when I have to decide between eating fresh watermelon or mango as I read THE RINGS OF SATURN (probably on the balcony)
Worth a listen. His backstory is very Rishi, and he got himself a little skewered on Nigel Farage's "free at the point of delivery, except when I say something else" hokey-cokey.
He's imo more of a real Thatcherite than Rupert, and has a real go at Boris Johnson, whilst praising Braverman.
One nugget is that he says he was brought up being compelled to read an article, with his mum, four days a week from the Childrens' Encyclopaedia, to make sure he was educated. Interesting because he was born in ~1986, and the CE stopped being published around 1970 - I wonder if he drinks Camp Coffee.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0027sy1
I can't offhand think of the circumstances whereby people would not eat fresh watermelon. I don't think they tin it, do they?
Think of me as a pioneer for when the robots take over and we all have nothing to do with our pointless empty lives, except choose between fruits (fresh)
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/280992/japanese-pickled-watermelon-rind/
Also, Farage used UKIP as a lever to force a referendum on EU membership - which he then won, changing history
The idea he is some fly-by-night chancer who doesn't get much done is belied by the facts
They couldn't (even if they wanted to, which they didn't) un-destroy the things they have already destroyed - such as all the clinical trials they instructed to be stopped mid-stream denying the volunteers the care they need for the duration in case eg of complications as a result of the experimental medicines.
This is on a walking into an ICU and unplugging all the machines level of vandalism, then thinking you can turn the dead patients back on after they have expired.
Just the clinical trials cancellations are in violation of all the principles and standards of medical ethics. They will never be trusted again, and have put a captive bullet into their soft power.
2. You haven't given a single example of a stark raving mad post from the previous thread, so it's impossible to know what you are talking about.
I haven't read every post, but I saw posts implying it's a bad thing if people are losing life saving treatment from one day to the next, posts saying Marco Rubio was lying when he said this wouldn't happen, and posts saying it's not in America's interest for this to happen. So where were the absolutely stark raving mad posts oh master of the subtleties of rhetoric?
<<< checks app >>>
5C, grey, and windy, with cold rain expected
Here in Klong Theoi, Bangkok, it is
33C, with a pure blue sky, soft breeze, and a prospect of fresh watermelon, or mango, around 7pm
USAID has, to quote the wiki scholar article, "served as a key institutional site for the promotion of US interests abroad". People are now upset that they are reining back their operations (or at least have announced something to that effect).
So not liking US cultural imperialism, and at the same time moaning about the restriction of a key tool which was designed to promote US interests abroad is stark raving mad.
Your welcome.
But the thing about looking at Reform's history and their groundgame and so on is that yes, that would be a big red flag if their strategy was a LibDem like third party one where you target your resources in particular areas, build trust where you run councils, and expand gradually. Reform is much flatter in their level of support across most of the country, and concentrating on being nationally known and on the "air war" of politics. That looks like they're nowhere, right up until their support gets to a level above what you need to win seats, and then suddenly they're everywhere. They might not be able to do it -- the probability that a Farage led party has a low support ceiling seems quite high -- but I don't think you can look at last year's general election results and say what they're doing isn't changing the minds and votes of quite a lot of people.
But hey, it’s almost G&T o’clock.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289337/elon-musk-doge-treasury
I find anything above 30c hard work. Now granted air con works but I do prefer to be outside if I can
Seriously. Musk, Trump and the GOP are uninterested in what is right; or morality. They are only interested in money. More accurately, getting as much money to themselves as possible. You seem to think that's a-okay.
It isn't.
Politics is all relative. If voters decide that Lab/Con is are not competent or serious enough to govern, then something else will happen.
Perhaps the most sensible thing the total electorate can do is decide that the next contest should be between LDs representing the centre left and Reform representing the right/centre right.
But to say that of now is to deliberately deny reality.
Reform are just about leading in the polls. At the very least they're in something of a three-way tie. FON might have house effects that help Reform but all records will be outliers of some nature. Their 29% for Reform published yesterday is not only the highest ever UKIP/BxP/RefUK poll share but also the highest for any party in the last 16 national polls, the joint highest for any party in a poll conducted this year, the highest share for any right-of-centre party since November, and the highest share for any party other than Con/Lab since before the 2010 general election.
And it's not just polls. Local by-elections are always a bit scattergun in what they throw up, and not always representative given local factors (which should even out over time), and disproportionate attention given them by parties (which shouldn't - but should actually work against Reform), but of yesterday's six seats up for grabs, admittedly in a relatively Reform-friendly bunch, Reform won three and finished a strong second in the other two they contested (failing to stand a candidate in the sixth). Yes, these are low-turnout elections but there's loads of evidence that they do tend to be broadly representative.
All the data from many other similar countries, and from what's going on now in our own, point to the conclusion that Reform should absolutely be taken seriously as potential candidates to lead the next government, and that forming it outright is not out of the question.
I'm loving that wiki paper btw. Here's some more for all you US hegemony-lovers distraught at the potential (though of course likely not complete) demise of USAID:
"As Essex rightly contends, USAID is one of the more deeply internationalized institutions within the US state and thus offers a key site through which to examine the historical and evolving nature of US hegemony. In detailing the various forces that have shaped this agency and its work abroad, Essex provides insight into how the United States has sought to remake developing states and ‘bring them under the umbrella of American hegemony’ (Essex, 2013: 86)."
They went so far as to instruct medical teams doing clinical trials not to do any more work, which left patients with medical devices installed which staff were instructed not to remove, or having treatment stopped half way through which leaves risks of pathogens developing immunity far more likely. One was a trial with a inoculation related to a standard aids treatment, which places the standard treatment at risk of having immunity develop when the trial was stopped in its tracks.
https://archive.is/20250206231120/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/health/usaid-clinical-trials-funding-trump.html
If Labour or the Conservatives win most seats then Starmer or Badenoch not Farage would almost certainly end up PM anyway