One other factor that might come into play in choosing an early election date is to try to catch the opposition off-guard. The lead time between announcing the election, and the actual polling day is pretty short - certainly too short for a party in opposition to pull together a complete manifesto if they weren’t already working on it.
There was not much chance of that happening here though, since things like ‘don’t actually destroy the NHS’ and ‘don’t put more raw sewage into rivers and allow the people responsible to pay themselves enormous bonuses for doing it’ were obvious all along.
Immigration is a hot button issue everywhere, and mostly for the same reason - housing crisis. But polls never ask “do you think population growth is too high, too low, or just right?” - they ask about immigration specifically. Pressure on services and living space isn’t caused by ethnicity of the people coming into the country, but it is exacerbated by fast population growth
There’s quite a lot of wiggle room between current rates of growth and actual population reduction, but currently there’s no way for voters to express a political preference for slow growth apart from say “less immigration” in polls, or vote Reform (or equivalent). We can’t know to what extent that’s happening until pollsters start asking the right questions.
Overall, the USA would have a DECREASE in population without immigrants. (and other nations including the UK, thanks for pointing that out)
As would most countries. The US birth rate is 1.7, the UK birth rate is 1.6, Spain is 1.2.
With zero migration, sure. That’s why I said “a lot of wiggle room”
Migration rates in most places are particularly high post-COVID (this is the case in Aus and UK and I assume US too)
Thanks!
PatrickLondon has started a thread on the new Labour Government - my thanks to him: Keir Starmer tries to lead the UK
Perhaps all non-GE-related posts ought to now go there.
Since the only other component of population change other than immigration / emigration is births and deaths, voters saying “I’m fine with lotsa immigrants but we need to keep population level” would be advocating for forced licensing of births or the killing of the elderly / infirm.
There is no additional lever to pull to manage total national population: births, deaths, immigration, emigration are the only 4 inputs to the total.
This may have kind of worked, sort of, for the Reform Fascists. The way it looks, they did not find enough candidates to run for every constituency they wanted to try, so they made the candidates up, or some of them at least, probably with some AI help. Maybe true, maybe not, but particularly if not true it is a beautiful conspiracy theory. And if true, I wonder how a non existant candidate can win a seat. What happens if the person with the most votes is no person at all? Who is then sent to Westminster?
That has to be some form of fraud (if it’s what actually happened)
IIRC, formally candidates have to be nominated by ?10 registered voters in the constituency, and have to (a) sign their acceptance of the nomination, (b) register their own name and address and (c) provide the name and address of their nominated agent (who’s in charge of the campaign and all the administration).
So yes, a totally invented “candidate” would have to be a fraud.
Clearly, Reform went through their membership/supporter lists for paper candidates (i.e., they exist but weren’t expected to do anything but sign the nomination papers, just so there’s a presence on the ballot paper to raise awareness and attract new members). It’s not uncommon (at least for local government) but one has to wonder how they financed the lost deposits. Can it all have come from Tice or were the candidates suckered into stumping up the £500 (though many or most of them would be over the 5% hurdle to get it back, as it turned out).
Almost certainly fraud, since it would involve intentionally making false statements on the documents lodged for nomination.
But I think it’s far more more likely that the people named as candidates are real people, nominated with their consent on the understanding that they would not actively campaign or participate in election activities. This was done so that Reform would be on the ballot paper in as many constituencies as possible, could accumulate the largest possible vote and could deny the Tories as many seats as possible.
I don’t think the use of these nominal candidates is an expedient forced on Reform by the unexpected calling of the election. It probably emerges from the fact that Reform isn’t structured as a conventional political party with branches, members, votes, a conference that determines policy, etc. It’s a limited company, a majority of the shares in which are owned by Nigel Farage, who appoints all the corporate officers and is in a position to direct and control the affairs of the company. Registered “supporters” (rather than “members”) contribute money to Reform but have no voice in the election of officials or the formation of policy, and there are no functional branches in which they can be active. Thus there isn’t a base of interested, involved, experienced party members from which candidates could be drawn.
Reform struggles to find candidates and, when it does find them, it struggles to evaluate them since they have little or no record of involvement in party or public affairs; the party officials don’t know them well at all. Hence the relatively high proportion of racists, islamophobes, bigots and lunatics who get nominated by the party and later have to be disowned when the embarrassing truth emerges. Hence also the nomination of nominal candidates in constituencies where even the racists, islamophobes, bigots and lunatics aren’t interested in running for Reform.
I don’t suppose for one minute that their voters care.
They will always claim that they “knew what they were voting for”.
Like with B****t.
This is amazing. But I have to ask: is there any political will to follow up further and determine what actually happened here? Or since there’s no high-profile impact (none of the ghost candidates were elected), will it simply fade into the political rear-view mirror?
The Election Commission would be most interested but I’m sure @UDS1 is correct in saying they are probably real people. I think Reform got their deposits back in the vast majority of seats too.
Unless some enterprising journalist takes the trouble to check whether any of these candidates actually is registered to vote at the address they give (and how do we know that the Returning Officer(s) involved didn’t already?), it’s not going to happen. Especially since there’s a simpler and more obvious explanation than some elaborate and expensive fraud.
It’s possible that it’s a bit of both. Real people notionally standing as candidates, but fake pictures of them.
Oh that I can well believe.
Heh. What a clown show.
I am glad to see this is so evident that other people complain about it too:
Disproportionate indeed. I am afraid reform of the electoral system is the right thing to do even if it gives the Nasty Party more seats.
Still don’t think it will happen.