Nigel Farage's UK Reform Party won new majorities in ten regional councils across England in the May 1 elections, stunning Labour and the Conservatives

 ... The races were local. But Reform UK’s unprecedented surge has recast political trends nationwide, sparking panic in Britain’s two major parties while drawing comparisons to the rise of populist movements that have come to power in Europe and the United States.

Reform’s breakthrough included wins in two of four mayoral races the party contested, and the poaching of an open parliamentary seat previously held by the Labour Party. The Conservative Party fared far worse, losing control of 15 county councils and, with them, almost 700 councillors. In all, the two long-dominant parties lost about two-thirds of the 1,600 offices on the ballot, most of them to Reform UK. 

“Both parties were wiped out in places where it would have been unimaginable before,” said Tony Travers, a professor of government at the London School of Economics. “This could mark a major shift in the electoral dynamic.” ...

More.

I won 4.1 million votes and all I got was a lousy 0.6% of The House of Commons

 

Labour sweeps to UK victory on minor improvement to support as disaffected pro-Brexit and anti-immigration voters abandon feckless Conservatives for Nigel Farage's Reform Party

Keir Starmer to become PM. Have fun stormin' the castle!

Liberal Democrats and Greens made relatively huge gains while the Scottish National Party took it up the kilt. Sinn Fein utterly collapsed lol.

Turnout was low at 60%, the post-war low being 59.4% in 2001.

It's ludicrous. The UK Reform Party got all of four seats for all that damage done to Conservatives. Nigel Farage, 60, is gearing up to make his next big impact in 2029, when he'll be 65. Whoop-dee-doo. 

 

The UK Guardian

British conservatives are still blind to Nigel Farage's truth, which is identical with Henry Kissinger's long-held position that Ukraine should not join NATO

 Western civilisation is being destroyed by its own decadence

Zoe Strimpel, UK Telegraph

Last week, Nigel Farage outed himself as deeply unfit for leadership by piping the same line as other populists in Europe and the United States: that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is effectively our fault because, through Nato expansion, we had “poked” the Russian bear . . ..

Henry Kissinger was US Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford.

This position has nothing to do with populism, except by the accident of thinking correctly.

Nigel Farage: the most farcical general election launch in history

 

 Rishi Sunak calls July 4 UK general election

Prime minister gambles by triggering vote when polls suggest heavy defeat

Like NPR's Maher, the totalitarian Brussels Belgium mayor is trying to shut down speech at the National Conservatism Conference as we speak

 What a coincidence these stories break the same day.

The disturbance is being caused by Antifa, not by the people at this catered event.  

Rod Dreher is there, tweeting away:

Today's ridiculous neologism is "mediatized" in a story about old-fashioned stock collapse of the bank which canceled Nigel Farage

Trading suspended apparently at 4.21 USD

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trading in NatWest shares was briefly suspended on Friday morning as the stock slid after a combination of lacklustre earnings and regulators flagging possible rule-breaking in a highly mediatized case. ...

A scandal erupted over the summer over the closure of the Coutts account of Brexit figurehead Nigel Farage, for which the politician said the lender did not initially provide a reason. Farage filed a subject access request to obtain a dossier that the bank held on him, which addressed his political views.

NatWest CEO Alison Rose then admitted to discussing Farage’s bank account with a BBC reporter, supplying information that was used in a story and later proved to be inaccurate. She eventually resigned in July, amid heavy criticism.

More.

In Nigel Farage's mind the rioters in France are the Tommy Robinsonites who co-opted his UKIP

Feelings of bitterness can overpower reason and cause one to engage in false equivalencies, as in blaming the American Revolution on the Presbyterians.

Things haven't changed much.

BREXIT is the new chartered right of Englishmen. Unfortunately for them the result of the democratic process matters as little to the duly elected government of Britain as colonial representation mattered to George III.

Nigel is nothing if not a loyalist.

 

Brexiters Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage both back Andrea Leadsom for UK PM

Story here.

In defeat Nigel Farage realizes the problem is representation, as the American founding generation understood

Here:

"There is also the question of what is fair and reasonable. For so many millions of voters to have just one representative simply cannot be right – and I believe that whomever is the next Ukip leader has a major campaign to fight on this issue."

--------------------------------------------

He's referring, of course, to the fact that about 4 million Brits voted for UKIP yesterday but got only 1 MP out of it.

This coming from a country with much better representation than in the United States.

Here we have one representative in our parliament, the US House, for every 737,000 citizens. There they have what amounts to one MP for every 98,000 British citizens. That's seven and a half times better representation in Britain than in the US. Yet Nigel Farage complains.

Well.

The American libertarian P. J. O'Rourke visited South Thanet, evidently twice before the election and didn't find Farage there to interview, and today good ole Nigel is surprised that he lost in his own backyard. All politics is local, as we used to say. You have to work for it. Evidently Nigel Farage didn't work hard enough. 

In the US the people own not one such solitary seat as UKIP now owns in the UK, and never will until representation matters to them again as it did at the American nation's founding.

The system in Britain is more friendly to UKIP than Nigel Farage knows.

Nigel Farage: The West is encroaching on Mr. Putin's space

"We should be viewing Ukraine as a buffer between East and West."

Interviewed here.

Freedom for me, but not for thee?

Globe and Mail columnist forgets to lump in Henry Kissinger with Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders as Putin's 5th column in the West

Doug Saunders, here:

In words widely reported in the Russian media, [Farage] added that the EU has “blood on its hands” for supporting the democracy movement in Ukraine. Rather than posing a threat to Europe, Mr. Farage said, Russia has fallen prey to Europe’s “activist, militarist and expansionist foreign policy.”

Henry Kissinger, here:

The European Union must recognize that its bureaucratic dilatoriness and subordination of the strategic element to domestic politics in negotiating Ukraine’s relationship to Europe contributed to turning a negotiation into a crisis. Foreign policy is the art of establishing priorities. ... Ukraine should not join NATO, a position I took seven years ago, when it last came up.