We need to talk about the size of Nigel Farage’s membership – politicalbetting.com
We need to talk about the size of Nigel Farage’s membership – politicalbetting.com
Reform UK has become Britain’s largest party by membership, overtaking Labour after it shed 100,000 members since the general election ?? https://t.co/SPOZXkFaOo
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Gaining members is great, just as long as they share the core values of the party.
A thread 🧵
Moonraker, published 70 years ago in April 1955, features a villain who's a super-rich industrialist & rocket-maker seeking to cause chaos because he's a secret Nazi.
Such a silly idea!
Gold Finger, published in March 1959, features a corpulent, super-rich gold-obsessed villain.
Such a silly idea!
https://x.com/MarksLarks/status/1999760500679409892
Echoes of the membership conversation on the last thread. As a society, we tend not to join clubs in the same way that our parents did.
Some of that is because of factors that are good things- there are better ways of obtaining food, drink and a bed than in the past, and it's harder to get sufficiently cheap staff.
But something has got lost as well.
The vast majority of Labour members are in the first category.
It's actually quite difficult to tell from that trailer how much Orwell is intact underneath the attempt to graft on wise cracking action adventure cartoon zaniness, there does seem to be an amount in there. I actually don't know if that makes things better or worse.
I don't think membership numbers matter much in a world where elections are won by keyboard warriors, including those overseas.
Just look at last years election for example where a number of candidates who did no campaigning got thousands of votes.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/08/reform-uk-under-pressure-to-prove-all-its-candidates-were-real-people?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
We saw it to at the locals where quite a few paper candidates got elected as Reform councillors.
It doesn't look efficient, but there's a lot to be said for the insights you get from talking to actual people. Social members of political parties aren't normal people, but they are less abnormal than the activists.
Women join things because of who else is included of like mind to them, and tend to join things free of ideology of any sort. Men tend to join things because of who else isn't let in. Exclusivity counts.
When it comes to politics, joining party X as opposed to generally voting for party X means a depth of commitment and a sort of personality which is atypical. This means that when the membership vote for the leader (in a sense the only interesting thing they ever do to the rest of us) they are untypical of the wishes of potential voters. The wrong brother, Jezza, Truss, whicever disaster the parties will next inflict on us and so on).
The mass of the voting public actually want prosperous social democracy really well run, with high levels of state expenditure and well regulated capitalism and peace in our time. (The question of whether this can still be done is pretty urgent, as no other options are in sight. As Reform will shortly discover.) While important, this ideology is boring and shared between all centrists. For most it isn't worth joining a party, giving up your evenings or delivering leaflets for.
https://x.com/terrychristian/status/1999476197466735021?s=46&t=fJymV-V84rexmlQMLXHHJQ
Good morning, everybody.
Connectedly I read that Shabana Mahmood has been removing pro immigration:asylum content from her website.
https://x.com/andrewfeinstein/status/1999185745660018938?s=46&t=fJymV-V84rexmlQMLXHHJQ
Reform is scarily big.
Nobody cares about Reform.
Greens have just passed 180k which may be irrelevant unless you are the treasurer and you can’t afford to post stuff direct?
The numbers might be irrelevant to Reform anyway considering a £9m donation. Their leaflets are national and posted. Though I’ve seen the odd local delivery team.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15379789/Polish-exodus-arrival-Britain-tax.html
Funny dat. No mention of Brexit. Except very obliquely: "'Visa anxiety' – the fear that they won't be able to work in Britain and visit Poland easily – is another often stated reason.'
For locals, it can sway a few results at the margins, but as we see every year, the overall change in seats just follows national opinion poll trends.
One reason why I can't be arsed door knocking.
I'm also pretty sure that on Desert Island Discs Paul Dacre chose as his luxury item an endless supply of the Guardian newspaper. Some people's lives are so sad they spend their time making themselves angry about what they disagree with.
Enjoy the Christmas spirit in town today.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62nnpez1l4o
I am sure he was right about seed cake.
Maybe it's something in the water around there.
What would be interesting is some kind of comparison with other European countries Poles have migrated to such as France and Germany.
You're from a part of the UK that has done badly economically for decades. Don't you see this?
The reality is tosspots who can’t see a window without wanting to smash it.
The shift can be generalised as one from the general national political good, to the specific and identifiable and especially local good, where the effect and impact is clear.
One big reason for the modern difficulties is that when I was young the local voluntary world was run by middle class mothers who didn't work.
On a slightly different point (but still supporting your view) is the problem in becoming a volunteer these days. I cannot help out in my Church creche on Sunday mornings unless I have a DBS check, I can't help in the local charity shop unless I go on a training course first, and I am told that the rules and regulations for being a treasurer or chair of a political party branch are significant nowadays. It's generally easier to nominally subscribe as a supporter of any initiative, and then let other people get on with the work.
My youngest daughter was in the first class of a new primary school. Two classes of 25.
The PTA was incredibly active. Nearly every parent was active in some way. The fund raising was astonishing.
By the time she’d left, the PTA had turned into a much smaller sub group of the parents. Dominated by the I-want-to-be-in-charge types.
“Before I retired we had two construction job openings at my company. We had 200 people put in for them. First was a drug test. That eliminated about half of the applicants. Next was a credit report. That eliminated some more. (We didn't want creditors dunning money and having us to take it out of their checks). Next was police record. More eliminated. Next was driving record, sense they would be driving company vehicles. We ended up with 5 people out of 200 to interview. The two we hired were college grads for construction jobs. 40 years ago, we could pick from a much larger group with only a high school degree.”
There’s also a bad tendency for voluntary organisations to be captured by self-serving and venial “management”, who drive away the volunteers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3eb5b5DOZs
I was quite surprised by those who are members or interested in London Clubs. I don't know a soul who is a member of a London Club and it wouldn't cross my mind to join one. The only clubs I have joined are ones where it has a purpose eg Squash, Sailing, etc. Not sure I get it and I certainly wouldn't join one where you are vetted to get in or need to be proposed. That all sounds a bit snobbish to me.
LOL - selling Russian gas with a touch of hydrogen. Marketed as “Green Fuel”
As a founding member of the association, Greenpeace e.V. holds only five shares at €55 in the cooperative, otherwise the environmental group and the company are financially and legally independent, although they share the same office building in Hamburg.[2] The former use of the Greenpeace name was licensed under the condition that the energy cooperative met the Greenpeace e.V. quality criteria for "clean energy".
An interesting layered structure, as we say in banking.
I joined the Phoenix Theatre Club when it was a pub in a basement with 1am last orders and it cost a few pounds a year - great for a drink or 2 after the play/film. Haven’t been back in years - since the owner keeled over in Le Beaujolais* on Lichfield Street.
I joined Home House at the start. It cost me about the same a gym membership - and had a gym. The place was full of interesting people, the interior is one of the few places where you can see Robert Adams work as a coherent set of rooms. Sadly, they got bought out, prices doubled and the worthwhile people moved on.
*Le Beaujolais used to have a dining room downstairs for members. Not a posh place, but the food was very good. The cheese trolley was to die for…
The infinitesimally slow Russian advance has become a bloodbath for the attacking forces.
The seizure of frozen Russian assets is on track and British bolstering of the coalition of the willing seems to be working as wavering countries are presented with the detailed British view of the current situation.
A far better week for Ukraine. Especially as there is growing uproar in the US Congress about Trump's pro Russian strategy.
But my favourite was a very pukka retired RAF fighter pilot named Valentine, born 14th Feb. A certain nominitative determinism there I think.
He also makes a strong distinction between proprietary clubs (Groucho, SohoHouse etc) and member-owned clubs (Garrick, Reform, Travellers etc). The former are really just a specific manifestation of the hospitality industry, with profits going to proprietors (such as the Carings) rather than being used to defray costs for the membership.
See the ending of the old asylums and the concomitant rise in people visibly* sleeping on the streets.
*in the Goode Olde Dayz, anyone sleeping rough in a visible location would be “moved on” by the police. “Moved on” could vary from willing movement to requiring hospital treatment for physical injury. Depending on the mood of the policeman.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/12/13/dick-van-dyke-100th-birthday/
https://x.com/SanderRegter/status/1999562032157209015
Mirnograd
Ukraine waited until enemy troops entered the city, then the F-16s unleashed hell. In a matter of hours, Mirnograd changed from a weak point on the front line to Ukraine's most carefully planned trap...
FWIW. Dura seems to have been wrong, way back when, with doubts about the utility of F-16s.
Standing by his war-criminal Hegseth has surely blown his chances of the Peace Prize, so I expect he will get bored and move on to his next crypto scam instead.
Poor old John fell off his stool (reserved for him as a regular) at Le B. Was a great place, faded a bit, but still going. But living in a bar has an inevitable result.
The cheese trolley was about 50 cheeses - including a Corsican cheese that was kept submerged in olive oil. Exposing it to the atmosphere was a Class A warcrime under the Chemical Weapons treaties.
Without any smart bomb stuff, he and his contemporaries found them could lob a dumb bomb, using the digital targeting computer and reliably hit targets from miles away, without flying over the target. They would attack at low level, pull up to lob the bomb, and instantly duck back down to the ground.
However not sure it is going to be straightforward to use Russian assets as explained by the BBC
BBC News - Belgium urges Europe to drop plan for frozen Russian assets to aid Ukraine
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7n95wzl9lo
And (sadly) there's nothing in all this to bring Donald Trump down. It looks like he did sever contact when he said he did. We know he's a bone deep misogynist with zero respect for women. More to the point the American electorate knew that (or should have done) when they voted him into the WH, not once but twice.
People should be prosecuted for any crimes committed if there's enough evidence. The men involved in the exploitation whether criminal or not should be named and shamed. Thus far there's been more progress on the second of these than the first.
And all that slaughter to lose ground in both Pokrovsk and Kupyansk. Merry Christmas, Putin.
Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother,
and in His name all oppression shall cease.
Don’t know that Tommy will be too keen on those words!
Why would Trump destroy the DofJ if there was nothing to show?
Let's talk ONLY facts. Here are true statements only: Donna Hughes Brown is a legal resident of the United States of America. She came here legally almost 50 years ago and stayed here legally. She married a US Navy vet, and raised a son who became a United States Marine. Her brother was a Colonel in the US Army. This is a family that has given and given and given to the United States.
ICE grabbed her at the O'hare airport in Chicago in July, sent her to a detention facility in Kentucky, a detention facility which has been widely criticized for unsanitary conditions and medical neglect of detainees, and she has been there ever since.
The reason ICE gives? She wrote two bad checks by accident for a total of less than $80 over a decade ago. It was immediately caught, and she paid the difference in full. She's now looking at deportation.
If you support this, and I want to be abundantly clear here, you are not a patriot, you're a poser. Meanwhile a man defrauded the American public by pretending to raise money for veterans and then used the donations to fund his campaign and pay off legal debts to the damages of $2million and we elected him to be our president...
https://x.com/TheTrueVanguard/status/1999194391672750521
They US has overzealous policing and the increasing criminalisation of behaviours. The proportion of Americans who have a police record has greatly increased. It’s now just under a third of adults: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/just-facts-many-americans-have-criminal-records-college-diplomas
Meanwhile, the number of people in debt has also increased significantly. One unlucky bout of ill health can leave the average American being pursued by creditors. Wealth inequality has increased.
40 years ago, there were fewer Americans with a police record or bad credit report. Moreover, it was harder to check those things. So a company like this would not be filtering them out in the same way. Now, a bit of bad luck, a minor infringement with the law, those now follow you, you can’t get a job, you can’t improve your situation.
So they popped into the European scene with a well educated and skilled population, under employed, with very low cost of living and wages to match.
This resulted in the kind of growth we saw previously from Japan and South Korea .
Think of it is a deep hole, dug on the beach. When the tide comes in, the water will fill the hole very rapidly. Until it reaches the level of the rest of the beach.
What we are seeing now, is that Poland is still cheaper than the UK. But the differential is approaching parity. The state of infrastructure etc has massively improved.
So, if you have made your pile here, you can sell up a flat in London and build yourself a huge house back home in Poland, live like a king etc. But the hospitals now work and the roads are not made of holes, as they used to be.
There is the additional element - if you are not especially fond of people with sun tans, then suburban Poland is very, very white.