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Notes -
Nigel Farage, the UK MP and leader of the right wing Reform party has trigged a by-election in his local constituency - the faded seaside town of Clacton-on-Sea. This is an attempt to seize back the initiative after a series of revelations about his personal finances. Farage is accused of taking cash gifts from dodgy crypto businessmen in exchange for promises to influence government policy.
Farage won by a sizeable plurality in the last general election. His supporters skew older and poorly educated, he’s unlikely to have lost much of their support over the scandal.
In a coordinated move, all the other major political parties have indicated that they will boycott the election, they have nothing to gain by legitimising his publicity stunt. Farage will be entering the by-election as the sole mainstream candidate.
Fascinatingly there is still a small but real risk he might lose with a coordinated protest vote - to the UK’s premier joke candidate Count Binface.
Fraser Nelson has posted an entertaining writeup on his substack, but the political fallout of Farage being defeated would have far reaching effects. UKIP (his previous project) withered and died without his name recognition; a similar fate may befall Reform should he be defeated.
From the analysis I heard, Farage pulled this stunt because he is probably going to be censured by Parliament, and that censure would trigger an automatic by-election. His goal was to trigger a by-election of his own, win it, and thus moot the censure. Now, though, he has a slim chance of actually losing this election to a joke candidate, and even if he wins it, his opponents in parliament can credibly claim that it wasn't a "real" election anyway since he ran "unopposed", and thus proceed with the censure and a second by-election that they can actually contest in a serious manner. The miscalculation on Farage's part seems quite severe.
Restore, the insurgent party running to Farage's right, seem disinclined to come to his aid, percieving him to be an obstacle between themselves and mainstream legitimacy on the Right.
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