[Fultonius]

Helen Burns in Glasgow North doesn't seem to exist, even on the reform website!

[tomtom]

Ours, Kaine Keith Williams (quite a distinctive name) doesn't exist out side of any voting info websites:

https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/person/117818/kaine-keith-williams

Quite a distinctive / googleable name.... nada.

[spidermonkey09]

I guess what I'm getting at is that lack of an online presence is not indicative of being a made up candidate. I agree its worth looking into further, just thought there was quite a heat and not a lot of light in that article.

[lukeyboy]

I guess what I'm getting at is that lack of an online presence is not indicative of being a made up candidate. I agree its worth looking into further, just thought there was quite a heat and not a lot of light in that article.

That's true, though it's hard to prove a negative isn't it. Given these are electoral candidates, the fact they've found no online presence or witnesses to confirm they exist, is fair evidence to write a piece like that (IMO).

[tomtom]

Indeed - scrutiny is important.

Were any candidates called Spanish John? 😀

In other reform news apparently Farage didn’t turn up for his parliamentary induction today.

[galpinos]

Pretty mad it seems you are scrutinised more for voting than to stand as a candidate…….

[lukeyboy]

And in other news, Lord Cameron has resigned - a nice gig really, get made a Lord to cover a role for a few months then piss off into the sunset

[spidermonkey09]

https://x.com/tomhfh/status/1810436299205038145?t=PNHoZvN9irXl2KLlgxXfSQ&s=19

Hands up if you're a member of the low IQ, pro EU left!

[galpinos]

And in other news, Lord Cameron has resigned - a nice gig really, get made a Lord to cover a role for a few months then piss off into the sunset

What has he resigned from?

[Will Hunt]

Shadow Secretary of state for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs. But, to be fair, when you're a crack political agent brought out of retirement for one last job, what else are you supposed to do when the job is done?

[galpinos]

How can he resign from a position he didn't hold? They were out of government and Rishi had not announced a shadow cabinet, as far as I am aware?

Pretty self aggrandising imho!

[lukeyboy]

Yes... Here's the beeb article for reference

[galpinos]

https://x.com/tomhfh/status/1810436299205038145?t=PNHoZvN9irXl2KLlgxXfSQ&s=19

Hands up if you're a member of the low IQ, pro EU left!

Peter Walker of the Guardian clarifies that Reform have NOT supplied details of the queried candidates requested.

https://x.com/peterwalker99/status/1810593187364286586?s=46&t=6hl_me58b2dI9vA-4fh0dw

[spidermonkey09]

I don't like agreeing with Reform but I think the reporting on this has been poor from the Guardian. Illustrating the article with a photo which people said "looked like AI" but turned out to be of a real person is misleading. If I'm wrong and it's a conspiracy and many candidates don't exist ill hold my hands up but as it stands I think people are getting very upset over palpable nonsense. Considerably more likely that it's just a load of paper candidates who are normal people, probably older, with minimal online presence. Personally think the Guardian should be doing better.

https://x.com/sundersays/status/1810576485637386724?t=k_NbN-oyXx7gZ_TF9YR5fQ&s=19

"no credible basis"
 

[lukeyboy]

I just find it hard to believe that it would be anything other than completely straightforward to confirm the existence of someone who is standing for public office, days after a general election. You'd expect them to have been on people's doorsteps, at hustings, here there and everywhere getting their face in the media and putting out their message, for the past 6 weeks.

Simply the fact that there's not obvious proof against this raises major suspicions for me.

[edshakey]

You'd expect them to have been on people's doorsteps, at hustings, here there and everywhere getting their face in the media and putting out their message, for the past 6 weeks.

This is why people are suggesting they might be paper candidates. If so, none of the above would apply.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_candidate

[spidermonkey09]

You'd expect them to have been on people's doorsteps, at hustings, here there and everywhere getting their face in the media and putting out their message, for the past 6 weeks.

This is why people are suggesting they might be paper candidates. If so, none of the above would apply.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_candidate

Not even suggesting, thats been confirmed. There was no expectation to campaign for loads of these candidates, they were there to increase vote share rather than win.

[Will Hunt]

But, applying Occam's Razor, why would they choose to break electoral law when they could just get a handful of their members to stand as paper candidates? Most of these knew full well that they didn't stand a chance of being elected so why would they bother with the time and expense (not to mention the emotional toll of knocking on people's doors as a Reform candidate and getting an earful from anybody who disagrees with you*) of campaigning? Reform's purpose of standing candidates in every seat is to a) deliver on being a credible threat to the Tories (who's voters wouldn't necessarily have had anywhere else they felt they could swing to), and b) to maximise vote share to increase party credibility and agitate for their agenda and electoral reform.

And when challenged by the Guardian, who hate you, why would you then serve up the names and addresses of those who agreed to stand for you as paper candidates so that they can be harrassed by hacks looking for a scoop? That would be a betrayal of your candidates and provide ample reason for volunteers not to stand for you in the future.

*When you canvass for Labour you use their Doorstep app. This holds basic information about who is registered to vote at each address, whether they're a postal voter, and information about voting intention previously given to canvassers. You can record information from the conversations you have about what issues are important to these voters. As the election draws closer the system will push you towards one set of people or another (often it will select just one or two voters at an address that it wants you to contact - how or why it does this I don't know, but it's likely that as you get closer to polling day you're doing less persuasion and more getting out the vote). Basically, when you knock on a door you might find any opinion behind it but you are at least forearmed with some information about whether they're likely to be friendly or not. Even so it surprised me just how many local party members really didn't want to do this, saying their skin wasn't thick enough for it - maybe it's bad memories of 2019, in some areas we had people coming out of their houses into the street to proclaim their support. I doubt Reform have any of these tools and door-to-door canvassing would be very inefficient for candidates with little or no local party infrastructure. They might very well end up knocking on doors with no registered voters, or spend lots of time getting into arguments with unpersuadable people. In terms of letter drops, it's one thing to put unaddressed flyers into the postie's mailbag but quite another to do targeted letters to named voters. It costs real money. In Shipley we had loads of volunteers who distributed these and it surprised me how much groundwork is behind it. You get given a stack of letters in the same "road group" which includes a map showing you where the streets are and specific instructions to locate difficult-to-find streets and individual addresses (when you start going off the main residential roads it is honestly incredible how many houses there are out there that are impossible to locate using simple logic!)

Sorry to waffle. I thought I'd write all that because it's really interesting how much goes on at a grassroots level and how much difference this makes. If you're a small party you won't have any of this. This is why Reform got a similar vote share to the Lib Dems but couldn't convert it into seats. They don't know how to campaign beyond getting Farage on the telly.

[spidermonkey09]

I'd also suggest that if it was the Mail taking this approach to Green candidates, who would have similar motivations to boost their vote share and enhance the case for PR, we'd be seeing the Guardian oppose it as shit, pot stirring journalism, with no actual facts to back it up.

[seankenny]

Great post Will and really highlights how important the relatively unseen aspects of campaigning are.

Reminded me of this piece out today by thoughtful Tory John Oxley:

“The dilapidated state of many constituencies' Conservative associations only worsens this risk. As expected, the general election was a revelation of just how poorly many safe seats had worked their patch for decades. Candidates in seats with historic majorities of fifteen or twenty thousand turned up to find no work had been done on the ground for years. The system might have a few hundred voter intentions, some of them dating back to 2001. For context, with just one decent canvassing session a week, you should be adding a thousand a year…

“CCHQ has had a bad election campaign. Candidates felt unsupported, volunteers felt under-appreciated, and most of the central output, in both strategy and content was awful. In many ways, this has been a problem for years, but fighting a retreat intensified the effect. Rebuilding, however, will be tricky. It’s easy to write an op-ed saying it's time to raze it – but opposition, especially grim, low three-digit opposition – makes the whole thing harder. It's going to be a struggle to attract both the funding and the talent to turn it around. An insider tells me clearing out the deadwood alone would cost millions in compensation for gold-plated employment terms of senior figures.”

Who’d have thought that mostly appealing to old people caused deep structural problems?

https://open.substack.com/pub/joxleywrites/p/the-post-mortem-part-i?r=5v9r&utm_medium=ios

[lukeyboy]

That's a really interesting insight, thanks Will

[lukeyboy]

You'd expect them to have been on people's doorsteps, at hustings, here there and everywhere getting their face in the media and putting out their message, for the past 6 weeks.

This is why people are suggesting they might be paper candidates. If so, none of the above would apply.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_candidate

Ah thanks, I hadn't fully appreciated that.

[spidermonkey09]

Great post Will and really highlights how important the relatively unseen aspects of campaigning are.

Reminded me of this piece out today by thoughtful Tory John Oxley:

“The dilapidated state of many constituencies' Conservative associations only worsens this risk. As expected, the general election was a revelation of just how poorly many safe seats had worked their patch for decades. Candidates in seats with historic majorities of fifteen or twenty thousand turned up to find no work had been done on the ground for years. The system might have a few hundred voter intentions, some of them dating back to 2001. For context, with just one decent canvassing session a week, you should be adding a thousand a year…

“CCHQ has had a bad election campaign. Candidates felt unsupported, volunteers felt under-appreciated, and most of the central output, in both strategy and content was awful. In many ways, this has been a problem for years, but fighting a retreat intensified the effect. Rebuilding, however, will be tricky. It’s easy to write an op-ed saying it's time to raze it – but opposition, especially grim, low three-digit opposition – makes the whole thing harder. It's going to be a struggle to attract both the funding and the talent to turn it around. An insider tells me clearing out the deadwood alone would cost millions in compensation for gold-plated employment terms of senior figures.”

Who’d have thought that mostly appealing to old people caused deep structural problems?

https://open.substack.com/pub/joxleywrites/p/the-post-mortem-part-i?r=5v9r&utm_medium=ios

Read that this morning, that's a really good read; recommended.

[tomtom]

I think it’s important to make the point that Reform doesn’t have members. It is a private company owned by Farage.

It has donors or contributors- which I suppose could be similar to Members but there is no meritocracy, voting or selection like other parties.


As per Galpinos post it does amaze me that there seem to be no checks on who could stand.

[tomtom]

https://bylinetimes.com/2024/07/09/if-it-looks-like-the-law-was-broken-police-investigations-must-follow-elections-watchdog-receives-flood-of-complaints-over-phantom-reform-party-candidates/

So it appears the electoral commission had their powers to prosecute or even check details of candidates removed by the last govt.

Each vote equates to c.22p for the party - so that’s a cool £1m Reform got from all their votes…

Lots of interesting details in this article.