The article is behind a paywall but you can see the first two paragraphs. The headline alone is something I agree with, regardless of the article. This quote is good:
Nigel Farage has called a referendum on whether he should be allowed to accept millions of pounds from a secretive donor based in Thailand without declaring it properly, and it looks as if the only person who is prepared to have this argument with him is a man with a bin on his head.
I mean, anything to humiliate the crypto-funded multi-millionaire self proclaimed ‘Man of the People’, sure.
But isn’t this a bit shit for non-reform people in Clacton who actually want to be represented by something other than a vessel full of rubbish or Binface?
Yeah I did think that. But if I were such a person, I think I would quite enthusiastically support the bin, since it is clearly the lesser of two evils.
The problem the other parties have if that Clapton voted for Farage. At least in Clacton there is some appetite for what reform or pushing, obviously they are being sold on a lie but that’s not important.
Farage has obviously done his homework and concluded that there is still support for him in Clacton. So given the outcome of this election is a foregone conclusion, and is basically just a media circus, isn’t the better option simply not to engage. If the people of Clacton have already spoken, and said they don’t want to be represented by the conservatives, or labour, or the greens, or the liberal democrats, they want to be represented by reform, what is the point in relitigating that?
What will be meaningful is if he is recalled, that will indicate to the parties that there is some appetite in Clapton for change. Farage just announcing that he’s resigning for his own personal reasons doesn’t indicate a desire for change on behalf of the constituents.
To be honest I get the sense that if Binface genuinely is elected, he’d at least give the job a fair shake until the next general election. I have no hard evidence for this, but he’s clearly someone who cares about politics and is willing to stick to doing something about it. He wouldn’t have to do a full term, and maybe his comedy writing can still be done from Clacton as well
You can thank First Past The Post for that.
More democratic countries have electoral systems were electoral circles are bigger and have multiple representatives and were this shit will simply not happen (there is no such thing as a byelection in such a system - if a party’s MP for a circle drops, the next on in the list for that party in that electoral circle gets the seat).
More in general, because all electoral circles have multiple representatives, it’s far more likely for somebody there to have at least one MP that represents them than when an electoral circle only elects a single person to Parliament and were even counting a “tactical vote” choice (i.e. vote for the least disliked, rather than for the one you actually like) as being “represented” you can have 49.9(9)% of people not being at all represented.
That shit is shit exactly because it’s the product of a shit system designed to be the least Democratic as possible whilst still being multi-party.