Post
Before we take at face value much of the commentary this weekend on the continuing political ascendance of the Facist Frog & ReformUK Ltd, its worth just putting their vote in the local elections in some context.
As many have noted even with their success ReformUK Ltd still on control a very small proportion of *all* local councils, but its also worth noting than less than 10% of eligible voters cast a vote from the Frog & his associates.
h/t Dan Södergren/LinkenIn
I always tend towards optimism - but with regard to the rise of RefomUK (and other extreme right parties across Europe) I see lots of hard evidence for optimism...
Not only, as you point out, did relatively few people vote extreme right, they did better, in general, the lower the turnout
Their voting percentage now seems to be falling - they may have passed their peak, whereas the Greens are still rising, both in terms of membership and voters
In any case, Reform's supporters are predominantly elderly (as are Tories) - Green supporters tend to be much younger - so Reform's decline is pretty inevitable
Reform will mess up in local government - as with Trump, and every previous fascist experiment, the more people see what extreme right government amounts to, the less they'll like it.
But more important than any of these considerations: what pessimists always forget is what most hard-pressed people's lives are like. I'm quite a political person, but there's a whole stretch of my life when I was working lots of hours, raising 4 children, and trying to do up our house, when both national and local politics shrank to nothing in my life. This is how most hard-pressed- people - the left's natural constituency - actually live. They know things are bad, and they want change, but they don't have the time or energy for much beyond hurried reading/viewing of headlines. If some mistakenly express the wish for change in a vote for Reform it evidences nothing other than the headlines' bias.
Yes I'd agree.... we're on the same page (as so often)
Incidentally, I think all of these considerations also point to the poor interpretation that is dominating the mainstream media - and must be avoided by the Greens.
The most important lesson Farage has to teach other parties is not about electoral success - he's never really had much - but precisely the opposite: that you can move the overton window, dominate media coverage, influence the whole way in which people think about politics, even get the most fundamental change policies implemented (however ludicrous, like brexit) WITHOUT electoral success.
Farage is living proof that those Labour right-wingers, who thought winning power was all that really mattered, and policies had to be subject to that imperative, had it all wrong.
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