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In a headline that say a lot more about modern society than I would like: Public-Health Officials Should Have Been Talking About Their Sex Parties the Whole Time
The article itself is quite fascinating, as is the original recording. Once again, we have a right wing partisan recording footage of a public health official saying things that should ostensibly be remarkably damning to both the speaker and the political bloc that installed him. Instead, the reaction seems to be quite muted.
Is this COVID fatigue? Narrative control in a friendly media? Is it really a nothing burger? What do you personally think is going on here?
Whatever it is, it is US-specific. In the UK, officials who broke their own lockdown rules and got caught consistently suffered career-ending consequences. Partygate broke after COVID was "over" for us, but was still the multi-month-long all-consuming scandal that brought down a Prime Minister.
The full list of notorious fired lockdown-breakers includes:
I don't know why US figures survived this kind of stuff. I think the British approach to elites breaking their own lockdowns was a lot healthier, and is part of the reason that we don't have a substantial libertarian movement trying to relitigate COVID.
Reform UK wants to relitigate COVID and just won 14.3% of the vote. If anything the movement would be stronger if the state did not violently suppress it.
Reform UK Party Ltd is a private limited company with a single controlling shareholder, not a substantial movement. By the time Reform was polling above 5%, Farage had resigned as leader and it had gone back to running a standard-issue right populist campaign based around dubiously-funded tax cuts and reduced immigration. COVID wasn't mentioned in Reform's 2024 election campaign, at least as far as a random voter who was paying attention could see.
Right populism in the UK is fundamentally about Islamic immigration. The attempt to make US-style public health skepticism part of the movement failed.
Most small political parties are organised as companies because there's no other coherent legal structure for managing the finances of a political party. What else would they be? State owned? Not in a democracy. Charities? By law, they can't be tied to a political party. This talking point about Reform is intended to misinform someone with (admittedly typical) ignorance about what companies are. It's not a serious argument.
I know exactly what a company is - my day job involves managing a regulated Group with separately licensed legal entities.
I also know why the entities registered with the Electoral Commission for the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats are unincorporated associations, with the company set up to hold the asset being a company limited by guarantee whose members are certain elected officers of the unincorporated association.
The fact that Reform is set up as a company limited by shares is linked to something important about the internal democratic processes of Reform, namely that there are none, and that Nigel Farage retained (literal and figurative) ownership even during the period where Richard Tice was leader and Farage held no party office. There is a reason why non-profit companies (whether or not they are charities) are usually limited by guarantee - the Koch-Crane feud at Cato being an example that was briefly famous in US right-wing circles of what can go wrong if they are shareholder-owned. Reform (and Cato back in 1977) chose to do the weird thing for a reason.
If a normal political party with Reform's level of support decided through its internal democratic processes to campaign on COVID lockdown blame, that would be a sign that a substantial movement was doing so. If Reform's owner decides that Reform should campaign on COVID lockdown blame, it is a sign that one man is doing so. Given that one man's primary source of income is his appearances on foreign media, it is more likely than not that the "substantial movement" he is representing is the one paying him - he certainly didn't find himself leading a substantial movement of still-salty-about-lockdown libertarians in the UK given Reform's anemic poll performance at the time.
If this is what you were going for, your first comment was an extremely confusing way of going about it, and this is literally the last thing that would come to my mind from the way you phrased it.
If the lack of internal democratic processes bother you so much, you can just not vote for them.
It's still a sign of a substantial movement doing so, unless you're saying he has the power of forcing people to work for him, and to vote for him.
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