5th seat for Reform

[equisetum]

Excellent

Wonderful news for democracy. British people are voicing their opinions.

Yawn 🥱

"British people are voicing their opinions".

Yes indeed. Some British people have certainly made it clear what they are.

Whahoo - eat your hearts out folks and look at the stats - gave all 3 a good kicking - don't listen to the common man at your peril

Farage is an opportunist who has exploited people’s genuine fear and ignorance and turned it into something ugly and potentially dangerous, mainly for his own amusement. I have zero faith he gives a toss about the interests of the public and especially those who vote for him. But I agree he is to be ignored at our peril. A huge proportion of the blame lies with 14 years of disastrous Tory rule that has driven down living standards, crushed public services, delivered quote ‘the will of the people’ in Brexit, which has cost billions, made a fuck hash mess of the pandemic by paying their mates off and let’s not even mention the last few years of sheer fuck wittery and chaos. So enter into this vacuum the likes of Reform. You won’t ‘stop the boats’ by voting for Reform, but there’s a pretty good chance you’ll make the UK even more of a shit hole then it currently is and then even people in the boats won’t want to come here.

Is "the common man" a misogynistic xenophobe? What about the common woman then?

It depends on whether the woman has a penis or not?

Well I think the GE has produced a great result for the UK - I'm just a bit gutted that the couldn't 'give a shit about my town' tory MP has been re-elected. I'd even take a tory who gave a shit, like the unelected one representing the nearest constuency - even my staunch Labour neighb says at least she's present.

So what if Reform got a few (5) seats? For all those doom and gloom posters alerting us to Armageddon, The Apocollapse, etc - ain't going to happen as Fascists, Nazis, Racists, etc haven't been allowed to flourish since these Islands got a bit civilized kzonks ago.

Richard Tice is actually quite smart and has some very good, thought out plans and policies. He's the actual guy in charge, not Nige - who came in to help really.

Fear not those pesky little Reformers, they're not near so bad as your collectiv imaginations extend and will have very few opportunities to speak and influence.

Sleep well my friends, those self-serving Btards are oot.

If he thought he had won he would. There are very few seats ever close enough to warrant a recount. They’ve already had far more coverage than the Greens who, until this was announced, had the same number of seats. Stop with the conspiracy nonsense and Trump inspired ‘it was a fix’ ridiculousness.

👍😂

What I want to know is how come Reform had more votes yet Liberal Democrats got more seats?

Actually it's better, with this result it's glaringly obvious that first past the post is undemocratic, it also gives them the opportunity to build a nationwide network for the next election. Epic.

Nooooh not misogynistic just means common people - anyway I'm a fully paid up member of POW

Because of First Past The Post. It’s pretty simple.
Let’s work with three hypothetical constituencies of 100 voters.
In A, Reform and LD are the only candidates. LD get 6 votes and Reform only 4.
In B, Reform, LD and Labour are standing. LD get 4 votes, Reform 3 and Labour 3
In C, LD and Reform slug it out again. This time, Reform get 9 votes and LD 1

Reform got 16 votes and 1 seat
LD got 11 votes and 2 seats

coming second gets you nothing, even if you got lots of votes. LD this time ruthlessly targeted seats they could win.

How do 5 blokes, most with no experience, build a ‘nationwide network’ while also representing their constituencies properly?

cardibach thank you 😊

No worries @D3LAN3Y
It’s something that always confuses people if they haven’t thought about it before. Glad you didn’t think it was condescending - it wasn’t and I have to make the numbers stupidly simple because I’m dyscalculic and my brain fries otherwise!

😂Brilliant!!

Social media has additionally allowed for some very clever tactical voting campaigns running in tandem with the canny targeting of seats from the Lib Dems and the Greens.

You explained it very well, @cardibach. Better than Jeremy Vine when he in full flow late last night / early hours!

Saying what, exactly? Because I replied to a post referring to "going back years" to unpick things that the Tories and Labour were saying (that presumably would be unpalatable today) and you came out with a vague accusation. Frankly, I think you're full of it. You want to support fascists, go ahead, but don't expect everyone to believe that they're respectable.

Five seats might not sound like a big story, but that's because the FPTP system has delivered a very skewed result for Reform, and indeed a very skewed vote for the Lib Dems.

Reform is barely a fully formed party yet, and it's had the media on both the mainstream left and right gunning for it, and doing their damnedest to scare people off from voting Reform, yet it still got more votes in total than the Lib Dems with their 70 odd seats. You should not underestimate how significant that is. Pride comes before a fall and five years really isn't very long. Especially when you consider that Labour managed to win a landslide despite getting the lowest vote share of any winning party in modern history.

If I were in the Labour government I'd be not feeling too smug about how they got there. The end result very much reflects how people feel about the outgoing Tory and SNP governments, not how they feel about the incoming Labour one. This is no Tony Blair moment. Even Jeremy Corbyn managed more votes than Keir Starmer, and he was well and truly trounced, then laughed out of town. It's all about perspective and the wider picture.

Labour should be very mindful of that. They've got an awful lot to do if they are to win the cynics round, and if they screw up or fail to deliver on their promises they will be exposed very quickly. A few key bi-elections is all it will take to increase Reform's presence.

Plus, you can expect to see Kemi Badenoch heading up the Tory party very soon and that will be a total game changer.

But you don't find the name-calling hecklers at all embarrassing or problematic? He won and he should have his moment to make a speech about it, just like any other democratically elected MP.

How do you feel about the men who booed and heckled Jess Phillips, saying 'shame on you' and 'free Palestine' or are you going to tell me that that is entirely different?

I'm sure both sets of hecklers feel morally justified in their actions and both sets feel they are on the 'right side of history' as the Left wing progressives love to say. So why should it be disgraceful behaviour when it happens to Jess Phillips but not when it happens to Nigel Farage?

UKIP got just under 4 million votes (one seat) in 2015. I guess Johnson scooped up those votes in 2019 to 'get Brexit done' and given his failure to do so, those same votes have gone to Reform.

I don't know that Reform are a new or growing threat. Their vote count and share hasn't increased since those 2015 results. It got them more seats this time around but in terms of numbers, it seems to have stayed the same

But in 2015 we hadn't yet had a referendum. And in 2019 Brexit was not yet delivered.

UKIP (latterly the Brexit Party) was essentially a single issue party, a bit like the SNP. Once that issue was achieved there was no further use for it and people could go about voting either Tory or Labour as they saw fit.

And yet we have Reform, which got over 4 million votes, which is 14% of the vote share. When you consider that Labour managed to win with only 34% I don't think it's wise to write Reform off as insignificant.