Seizing back control: The ILX lol brexit is how we're all gonna die thread.

Ruth Jones is pro-Remain btw.

I don't think that no-one cares about it though (unless that's editorialising from yourself?) - I think that's the result of the UKIP increase, that they have a celebrity - but he is basically their only celebrity (apart from Tommy Robinson).

That being anti-EU gets you enough votes after the last two years says a lot. more than 'lol Neil Hamilton'.

The three unambiguously pro-Europe parties got a boost in excess of UKIP, though?

NIgel Farage was on Channel 4 retro shows like whatever that 'gosh wasn't the 70s a weird time' show was called.
Found it an odd choice of people to try to normalise. Probably shouldn't have been surprised.

The point about Hamilton isn't his celebrity, it's the fact that he's got a history of corruption and that was still ok with the cabbages that voted for him.

tbf cash for questions or as Barry Sheerman would have it Professional Lobbyist is just standard practice now.

The three unambiguously pro-Europe parties got a boost in excess of UKIP, though?

Also everyone is salivating for a GE, but I’m not sure how much you can usefully deduce from a result where turnout was about half the previous rate - it wasn’t expected to change hands, complacency does play a part too.

if ppl are anti anything its bad

probably more anti-Dangerous at this point

xp No, I agree - I'm using it to muddy xyzzzz__'s tea-leaves, so to speak.

Comrade alphabet is otm here though.

an election won't *just* be fought on brexit (tho i think it will be much more salient than in 2017); obviously a 2nd ref/PV *will* just be fought on brexit

ref1 was histrocially the electoral highest turn-out ever, no? hardest thing to read from one by-election is the "staying home and grumpily sitting on their hands" vote in a GE especially

also do major parties break up before or after the make-or-break election? my guess (based as ever on hunch) is after

technically i guess the "staying home and grumpily sitting on their hands" vote is a non-vote

xxp His position (if I read him right) is that the UKIP boost is significant, but your position is that the other protest parties aren't?

Tory Peer, Lord Ridley, gives the most suitably out of touch, self entitled, made in the House of Lords speech ever.pic.twitter.com/4fEdRcKbR7

— James Melville (@JamesMelville) April 5, 2019

The UKIP vote isn't going away and will probably rise the worse things look for Brexiters, but there is minimal value either electorally or morally for Labour in trying to pander to these people, especially in a seat like Newport with a 44% Remain vote. UKIP vote is likely to be primarily at the expense of the Tories at this stage anyway - this is terrible for the country if the Tories stay in, but anyone who thinks that Brexit is a bigger driver than either austerity or general economic decline is kidding themselves.

xxp His position (if I read him right) is that the UKIP boost is significant, but your position is that the other protest parties aren't?

It's less about him being on a TV show and probably more about the fact that Hamilton was at least once a professional politician and a much better campaigner than the sort of fuckheads that UKIP usually put up.

I'm sure I can remember him being a regular yoof tv guest after the 90's scandal, or might just be basing that memory on one appearance on The Word or something.

possibly a false memory, too many bad real and metaphorical drugs doing the rounds back then.

His wife is on the telly far more than he is tbf.

he def was a regular:

On 9 May 1997 Hamilton and his wife, Christine, appeared on the current affairs satire quiz Have I Got News for You. The episode was recorded one week after Hamilton lost his seat. Angus Deayton, the presenter of the panel game, wore a white suit instead of his usual brown one. This was a humorous reference to Martin Bell, who wore just such a suit throughout the 1997 general election campaign. As a further taunt, at the end of the show, the Hamiltons were handed their "fee" in brown envelopes.[101] At one point Hamilton quipped, "I've found it's much better making political jokes than being one."[102]

Since then, the Hamiltons have appeared on chat shows. They have also appeared on programmes such as The Weakest Link and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, as well as in pantomime. In an appearance on a celebrity edition of Mastermind on Boxing Day 2004, Hamilton described himself as being "an object of professional curiosity". He appeared in Da Ali G Show in 2000.[citation needed]

In 2005, Hamilton appeared on the Johnny Vegas show, 18 Stone of Idiot, where he danced in a perspex box whilst Vegas and a member of the public poured buckets of fish over his head.[103]

(xp) She's obviously the brains of the outfit though, so fair enough.

There was also a big Louis Theroux show on the Hamiltons xp

their musical was a big deal iirc

badumtss.gif

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3YkBzxWAAA-2y9?format=jpg&name=900x900

hamilton fucked over a presentation i did at the eisteddfod. they don’t normally allow english speakers but i was doing something on helping sensorially impaired welsh speakers, and it was felt to be a legitimate exception.

but the day before hamilton had just crashed through the normal rules, insisting on both appearing and speaking english. it created a reasonably well-publicised fuss.

it meant the next day i had to stand on a stage and whisper my presentation to a welsh speaker, who then relayed it through the microphone to the gathered hordes*.

*small group of elderly people and two academics.

xp Google Image Search suggests - Businessperson?

(xp) LOL, I remember that story from a FAP.

like a boris mini-me, hamilton is a professional politician with a foot in the haw-haw-what-larks HIGNFY psuedo-satirical realm -- which allows him to be seen (by locals that so choose) as a kind of marker of how the rest the political and the media establishments still refuse the revealed anti-establishment truths of brexit, precisely because here's someone boldly breaking with both to tell the truth blah blah. a perverse echo of martin bell when he ran against hamilton, in fact.

this kind of stuff is amplified in by-elections though, and usually irrelevant in GEs

I had to go into BBC London to record an item one afternoon in the late ‘90s and had to wait in reception to be called, so went to take the available seat next to John Cooper Clarke, also there to record an item (rule: always sit next to the other person wearing black in reception). We chatted politely for a few minutes and suddenly realised we were being observed/stared at by the couple opposite - Neil and Christine Hamilton, dressed like the golf Nazis they are.

there was a Twitter account that reported UK events in the same sort of language that Western media use to report on Africa, S America etc but i guess no one would now recognise it as satire
― Lil' Brexit (Tracer Hand), Thursday, 4 April 2019 22:25 (yesterday)

bit late here but if this is @jsphctrl aka FT Southern Africa correspondent Joseph Cotterill he's still going, intermittently

Subdued, abandoning the hardline attacks on legislators of only a few days earlier yet still defiantly refusing to countenance elections, the ex-security chief gambled on the opposition agreeing to talks.

— Joseph Cotterill (@jsphctrl) April 2, 2019

if there's another one, please do link!

golf Nazis *yes* xp.

that's the one :)

xpost

How a General Election would look if 18-24's only were allowed to vote:

Seats || Votes

LAB: 541 || 55.0%
SNP: 56 || 4.5%
LDM: 25 || 14.0%
SF: 10 || 0.9%
PLC: 4 || 0.7%
DUP: 4 || 0.4%
CON: 3 || 14.5%
IND: 2
GRN: 1 || 2.0%
UUP: 1 || 0.4%
ALL: 1 || 0.4%
SDLP: 1 || 0.3% pic.twitter.com/yIkpL8OUhC

— Election Maps UK (@ElectionMapsUK) April 5, 2019

logan's run this shithole country now

Age group least likely to vote still?

turnout is less of an issue if everyone over 30 is dead tbf

a good heatwave coupled with a summer flu epidemic wouldn't quite be Logan's Run, but some of them dead tory bastards wouldn't be voting again - although they'd still retain party membership of course.

it might take me out as well like!

it's for the good of the country, thx for your service

Would be interesting to see an equivalent map from decades past.

Lol @ Wales, Conservatism's last bastion.

yeah EK i guess that's most of the point - how unprecedented are those kind of figures?

Lol @ Wales, Conservatism's last bastion.

Struggling to find this funny tbh.

I can't believe some of these young 'uns aren't bowled over by Liz Truss' dazzling rhetoric equating users of precarious employment/gig-economy services as "freedom fighters".

% of Tory seats in Wales: 20%
% of Tory seats in Scotland: 22%

dunno about the electorate totals per Tory seats in either rn tho

It's funny in that my Welsh friends get very huffy about the fact that they joined England in voting to leave - I saw Simon Price spout some Manics Lexit shite at a house party once - so having Wales be more Tory than England is funny, is how.

I mean this is all under FPTP, worst of all systems.

Hello, welcome to Britain's Brexit challenge pic.twitter.com/GonG3Z84Dg

— Ireland Simpsons Fans (@iresimpsonsfans) April 5, 2019

in the worst of all unions xp