The British are as stupid as we are

[edhopper]

they are on their way to elect the Putin Pawns who gave them the disastrous Brexit.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/farage-s-reform-uk-wins-big-in-local-elections-splintering-two-party-system-and-piling-pressure-on-starmer/ar-AA22HUii

[mr715]

1. Scotland, Wales, and N. Ireland probably take issue.

We just assume they are smart because of their accent. Well known phenomenon. All the IQ points we subtract from southern accents we apply to British accents.

Unless they are from the North.

[B.See]

2. Farage is Britain's

version Trump ('fascists of a feather flock together') and anti immigrant sentiment was a driving force behind Britain's Brexit. And yes it was disastrous. But apparently not disastrous enough.

[yaesu]

3. The tree doesn't fall far from the apple ;o) nt

[mr715]

4. Love it. nt

[Emrys]

5. By "British", you presumably mean "English"

Scotland and Wales haven't fallen for it. Northern Ireland votes next year.

[TomSlick]

6. Exactly.

The Sassanach (damned English) are intent on forcing Scotland and Northern Ireland to leave the UK.

Scotland and Northern Ireland should form a new Celtic Union. They can join the Commonwealth and keep the King (if that's what they want to do).

[roamer65]

13. Scotland will be a quick EU admission.

They will go right in at Eurozone level.

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. Well, not quite, but the increase in Reform votes in Wales is worrying

Vote like that in a general election, and they'll pick up some Westminster seats. 5 out of the 16 areas put Reform first.

[Emrys]

10. That's proportional representation for you, unfortunately.

Nevertheless, nowhere near the scope of gains in England's councils.

In Scotland, Reform didn't win any constituency seats, and their leader Lord Offord was soundly beaten in his birthplace constituency. They ended up tying with Labour for distant second place with 17 regional list seats. The Scottish Greens got 15, including two constituency wins, which is a breakthrough.

I haven't looked closely at the Welsh results, but Reform's track record (like UKIP before it) is that they fall on their faces once entrusted with any degree of power.

We'll have to see how things play out in the next couple of years, but gaining seats could be the worst thing to happen to them! People also tend to vote differently in Westminster elections compared to devolved elections.

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. It's not about the proportional representation - Reform were first in those five areas

which indicates they'd win at least 5 Welsh seats, probably several more, in the equivalent Westminster election (should be 2 Westminster seats to each Senedd area, and Wikipedia says that's how they were drawn). Yes, there may be enough time for them to show themselves to be useless/racist/otherwise undesirable, but the Welsh voted Leave in 2016, so I don't see the electorate as especially blessed with common sense.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2026/wales/results

Reform got 29.3% of the Welsh vote by voter. That's actually above their 26% of the GB national share that the BBC projected yesterday: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c1428pev1n0t?post=asset%3A917c45ad-601c-4c78-a2ba-e3c146efeeac#post . But in Wales, Plaid took the majority of the non-RW vote, so came out ahead.

[Emrys]

15. That's a leap.

To win a seat, first past the post requires a concentration of votes in a particular constituency, full stop.

Under that system, you get nothing, except maybe some heartache and a whole bunch of fruitless bellyaching, for a mass of votes in a region if you don't have that, and Reform's regional placings in this latest election do nothing to illuminate how that might pan out. Otherwise, how come Reform didn't win any directly elected seats?

Pundits have gone mad trying to map PR results onto FPTP makeups. If that wasn't the case, successive elections in Scotland would have turned out very differently, and more folks would have gotten rich on the betting markets.

The dynamic also changes when you come to constituency voting, when there's more focus on individual candidates and campaigns. In Scotland, at least, Reform fell into the trap of campaigning on issues that are reserved to Westminster. It may have fooled some, but it's plain dumb (which hasn't stopped Labour and the Tories, not to mention the Lib Dems, trying to pull the same trick, in this election and previous ones).

[muriel_volestrangler]

17. Here's how it works - remember, this is about Wales, with its 6-member areas

"Reform didn't win any directly elected seats" - this is not the Scottish AMS system any more. This is only a closed list multi-member constituency - 16 areas, each electing 6 members using the D'Hondt formula (like EU elections used to be in GB). They won the seats in the only way they can win seats - if you want to use the word "direct", I would say this was "direct".

Each area consists of 2 of the Westminster constituencies.

If Reform beat Plaid in a combined double constituency, then it would have to beat it in at least one of the two constituencies. It's very unlikely that any third party (Conservatives, Green, Lib Dem or Labour) did well enough to come first in one constituency, but only third when that is combined with a neighbouring one.

It's more likely that Reform came first in both of the paired constituencies, though quite possible that it was in only one of them. But that also applies to the 11 areas in which Plaid came first - in all of those, it was Reform that came second. So while the figures may well not mean 5 more Reform seats for the 5 out of 16 areas they won, Reform may well make up for that by taking a few "2nd constituencies" from the 11 double constituencies it came second in.

[Emrys]

18. OK, you're right, I was assuming more overlap with the Scottish system than there is.

(I've just been checking this out, and you saved me the bother.)

We'll still have to wait and see how everything pans out, otherwise there'd be no point in having another election!

I'd still argue that Westminster elections are radically different beasts to devolved elections.

Labour walked it in Scotland in the last General Election (with a lot of luck - 100-vote or so margins over the SNP in a number of constituencies, practically a throw of the dice), and got comprehensively trounced this time. There was more at play than Labour's unfulfilled promises and evidently useless leadership in the latest election.

BTW, I think the modified D'Hondt system as applied in Scotland leaves a lot to be desired as a PR system. and not just because it was deliberately stacked in Scotland to prevent one party, most particularly the SNP, gaining an outright majority.

[Orrex]

7. You've set a high bar

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. The Banksy statue is the best commentary on the English election results

[EdmondDantes_]

12. Unfortunately there's a lot of that going around.

Meloni in Italy, Bolsonaro in Brazil (his son is running for president this year) and others. Trump is a symptom not the root cause of the world and our increasing problems with racism and nationalism.

[fujiyamasan]

14. Likely going to get worse

A lot of the white collar work that the elite pushed people to gravitate toward, often taking out loans (sure student loans aren’t as big elsewhere in the world but it’s still a problem), are on the way out.

We’ve created a fragile global economy based on pushing paper and numbers around. These are more ripe to be automated than many jobs requiring physical labor.

[EdmondDantes_]

16. Very true

I think that's a big part of the growth of racism because people are looking around and seeing they aren't getting ahead and blaming minorities/immigrants.