pics

It's literally right there smh

No, no, no. Farage is Count Buttface. Not Binface.

It does sort of suck that he won, but it also doesn't really matter. It's exactly as if he'd never done the political stunt to begin with. Literally nothing has changed, he's just as much under investigation now as he was before the whole farce began.

Also they lost the Manchester mayoral vote because he wasted campaigning resources on this pointless by-election.

Who in their right mind voted for Farage!?!

He lost a third of his votes to a trash can from space.

I do believe that in England, you guys call that 'bloody embarrassing.'

This is also a really big stepping point for independents. Almost 30% of the votes for an effective independent shows that while some people may have considered Binface a joke, it's pretty clear that his claims and asks are important to people. And those are claims and asks that other potential candidates are going to need to address if they want those voters.

'Redneck boomers' isn't quite the right stereotype, 'gammons' would be the rough British equivalent stereotype (ie they're bright pink with Facebook-induced rage) but it's not the same thing because it doesn't really have anything to do with the rural/urban divide like rednecks in the US do, their grievances with the government are different too. A more apt comparison to the US would be the tourism version of small towns throughout the Rust Belt; ie the major industry everyone else depended on had its arse cave in due to superior foreign competition, everyone who could leave already got out years ago, and you're left with what's euphemistically called 'managed decline' but in reality is the state abandoning a place to its fate. Add in phenomena like cities dumping people with social needs they're responsible for in cash-strapped seaside towns to save money, people with social issues themselves often looking to return there due to happy childhood memories, the general economic kick in the balls these places got from the 1960s continuing indefinitely, and you can see why there's a lot of grievance there.

Believe it or not Clacton was once a fairly cool place to live, before dirt-cheap flights to Europe seaside towns tended to be pretty wealthy in the summer and Clacton in particular would have been a trendy place to be in the 1960s because of the mods and rockers, and to a lesser extent the pirate radio boom; you'd go there and listen to your transistor radios in the sun in sight of the ships with massive aerials casually undermining the government's stuffy monopoly on radio. The problem was (until climate change made them insufferably hot and humid anyway) British summers are generally pretty grey and rainy on a lot of days. As soon as you could get on a plane for the same cost as a train ticket and go to Spain, Portugal, Greece and so many other places Clacton starts to look about as appealing as the seagull kebabs everyone jokes about when they're in a seaside town. I'm absolutely not defending Nigel Farage or the populist right in general, but there's a reason they stick their flag in places like Clacton in particular and in my view the left needs to reflect on why that is and improve its messaging in seaside towns to address the specific form of declinism more directly.