Apparently sometimes they are not thinly-hidden facists. Just facists. https://hopenothate.org.uk/2026/05/02/reform-uk-essex-white-supremacist/
Yeah, the numbers in this post have actually opened my eyes a bit, to be honest . I've never really sat and put it into real terms. Expertly (and politely) done. I fundamentally disagree with IHT on principle - that is just greed on the govt's part, but I wholeheartedly agree with these bits. And would now like an answer to the question posed as well. So if nothing else, this thread has served to educate one person . And if any results are forthcoming here, I'd be interested as well. This is also a very god point. If you don't live here, aren't affected and can't vote, why should you be able to influence an election otherwise?
A separate issue, but what I also found particularly odd, when the last Tory leadership election happened, was the realisation that some non-UK nationals living abroad could vote as to who led the party. They have a friend's of the Tory party or Tory's abroad or something or other you can pay to be a member of and vote in Tory elections. The conservatives were in power at the time so non-Brits, living abroad who may have never been here could effectively vote on who ran the country. But yeah, Reform recriving millions in donations from a non-UK taxpayer living in Thailand stinks. That nonsense has to stop.
Good question... Those who would be suitable to govern does not appear to be found among those who end up in the drivers seat, and therein lies part of the problem. IMO. Sounds like your version of AIPAC. But with less money and less influence.
Chaps - I found our marching-along anthem for when heading to the polling stations this week: Pop Will Eat Itself - Ich Bin Ein Auslander Been using it to relieve some tension in recent years as well as soundtracking popping front 1s off cruisy side hits last month and attempting (and failing) butter spins. Good times. (A point if you can spot the older track it's apparently cribbed from, but for which whosampled appears to give no credit, oddly. It's normally pretty good, that site).
Full disclosure: I'm a single-issue voter on this - tax wealth not work - so I'll be voting Green, and that goes for locals too. If an issue matters enough to organise my national vote around, it'd be incoherent to drop it the moment the ballot's for a council seat. Local results get read as a barometer - vote share builds, councillors become a base for MPs, and the Overton window shifts on the back of municipal numbers nobody outside politics pays attention to. The right has just done this. A decade ago the harder-edge position was "curb illegal immigration." Now Reform is polling competitively while proposing to abolish Indefinite Leave to Remain and revoke it from people who already hold it - i.e. people who came through the legal route, met the requirements, and were told their status was permanent. That didn't happen because anyone won a landslide. It happened because Reform kept racking up vote share in local and European elections, and the Tories drifted right to compete. Same mechanism, opposite direction: every Green vote is a data point that moves "tax wealth not work" from fringe to mainstream. A Green vote in a ward they can't win still does work. EDIT: One way I vote differently from most people is that I'm not really selecting for governance competence. Having spent too much time around Westminster civil service types, my honest read is that all the major parties - Greens, Labour, Lib Dems, Conservatives - sit at roughly the same baseline competence level. No party has a secret sauce for selecting smarter people - they're all drawing candidates from the same pool of ambitious mid-career politics-adjacent crowd, run through selection processes that filter much harder for loyalty and stamina than for ability. They just dress it up differently depending on their socioeconomic makeup. Tory incompetence reads as smug Oxbridge entitlement; Labour's as managerial blandness; the Greens come across as earnest amateurs because they don't have the polish. But the underlying hit rate on actually-good-vs-actually-bad decisions isn't that different, and you're going to be run by largely the same pool of technocratic advisors regardless of who wins. What matters is that the people in the driving seat register what policies are in and what's out - the Overton window thing again - which is why you should always vote for the issues you care about. The right has already figured this out.
Yup. After a point, an entire country is ‘too big to fail’. Bad policies can be bad and we can be worse off, like Brexit was a monumental ****-up and things are rippling down the years after it. But it happened. And we are largely still existing. Even if the Remain vote had won it, other **** might’ve happened to still end up largely where we are right now. Systems the size of a country adapt to large events with the minimum shift possible in the smallest increments possible.
I have a problem this morning that I need help with. I have just been told I need to be elsewhere for voting day, which is a hurdle. From reading the card, it seems the window for postal votes closed in April (obviously - I wasn't expecting that to be open still) but I haven't found anything else regarding proxy or "my mate can do it for me if I somehow fill out a form" voting. What are my options given it's this late in the day? I know it's open early and late but I won't be around for that, apparently. @Valo - your last EDIT on your post reminded me of The Thick Of It.... Quality series. In The Loop was very sharp as well and Veep gets an honourable mention.
Continued austerity, for one - we voted to leave and it still didn’t stop austerity. Even a Labour government is continuing it. I don’t think there are any options, to be honest, not at this stage. We’re already past the deadline to apply for proxy voting. At least, I don’t think there are any options that don’t involve potential electoral fraud.
AND let us know the outcome. Can I vote in someone else's area if I take my ID and letterbox polling card thing?
You might be able to vote from other polling stations, instead of your nearest, not sure how that works. But your poll card specifies which ward and set of councillors your vote applies to, so applies to your location no matter what.
I feel for you, Squid, but if it helps, you can always fall back on the mathematical reality that one vote doesn't matter. The real meta strategy is persuading others to change their votes, as that has a dramatically greater impact. You could convince me, I'm a flip-flop politically. But to do that first you have to decide who to vote for, and you're waiting for me to read the manifestos, so it's all gettting messy. I'll figure out whose stated goals make the most sense, I'll post back here, you take my word for it, evangelise strongly for it, that'll persuade me to actually vote, I'll go vote. Between us we'll have gotten one vote in. Which, again, doesn't matter, but without encouragement I wouldn't vote, and you were never gonna be able to this time, so we'll be one vote up.
Everybody’s vote, is just one vote but, if everybody takes the view, that their one vote doesn’t matter, nobody votes and democracy fails. It is with our votes that we hold politicians to account, the alternative is either dictatorship or, sham democracy like China. Every vote counts.
Our voter turnout is terrible, wonder how much it would increase if 'none of the above' was an option?
It already is: You could also spoil your ballot by childishly drawing a big comedy willy on it, but you might end up giving some poor old dear at a counting station a bit of a surprise. Even if you don’t want any of the available choices, spoiled ballots are still counted. A high turnout with a large percentage of spoiled ballots may send a stronger message than overturning a “safe seat”.
There was a ballot a few year back where reportedly the person had written '****' next to every name except one. iirc it was deemed a valid vote for the person without '****' next to it.
