British general election update:
The latest polling figures place Nigel Farage's Reform UK party consistently above the ruling Conservatives. Reform are on course to win up to 7 seats in the national parliament, which due to its US-style First Past The Post voting system, is almost unheard of for a small, independent party. The Conservatives, led by former Goldman Sachs and Theleme Partners hedge fund manager Rishi Sunak, who suddenly called the election 48 hours after Klaus Schwab announced his retirement, are set to drop from 365 seats to just 72. Highlights of the campaign include:
- Sunak announcing the election during a torrential rainstorm, despite there being a perfectly good press conference room at 10 Downing Street, or this thing called an "umbrella". Someone nearby used a boom box to play D-REAM's "Things Can Only Get Better" so loudly it nearly drowned out (lol) the press conference. That song was Tony Blair's election anthem in 1997, when he brutally crushed the Conservatives in their worst ever election showing - so far.

- Sunak claiming that he was poor growing up because he didn't have satellite TV (Sunak went to Winchester College, which has tuition fees of over £50,000 ($63,000) per year).
- Sunak's Parliamentary Private Secretary (an MP assigned to work in his office)
placing a bet on the date of the election 3 days before it was announced, he is now under investigation.
- Sunak claiming that the government had worked out that Labour would raise taxes by £2000 per year, only to get brutally fact-checked by the Treasury who said it was the first they had heard of it. Sunak to this day is still claiming it's a government figure despite the government itself denying it in writing.
- Sunak ducked out of the commemorations for the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings early to do an interview with ITV, literally walking out on Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron to do some meaningless interview. ITV released footage of Sunak apologising for arriving late, saying that
"It all just ran over" despite the commemorations being timed to the second. Given that military veterans and old people are just about the only people left who vote Conservative these days, this was a spectacular disaster even for him.
- Multiple Conservative MPs have endorsed Nigel Farage instead of their own party.
Things are not going much better for the SNP up in Scotland:
- Their former leader, Nicola Sturgeon, was arrested by Police investigating corruption and embezzlement. Her husband (who was also chairman of the party) has since been charged with fraud relating to political donations being misused to, amongst other things, buy the couple a luxury RV and illegally lending the party his own money.
- Sturgeon's successor, Humza Yousaf, resigned less than a year into his term after losing a Vote of No Confidence, after his coalition partners abandoned his government.
- Yousaf's greatest hits include:
- A hate crime bill that made it illegal to be racist in your own house, introduced a criminal offence of "unintentionally stirring up hate" and included the ability for people to be prosecuted retrospectively for things they said in the past despite them not being illegal at the time.
- Making remarks that too many white people were in positions of power in Scotland (Scotland is 97% white), resulting in thousands of complaints to Police under his own hate crime legislation
- Trying to ram the massively unpopular Gender Reform Bill (which would have allowed self-certification of gender at the age of 16 amongst other things) through the courts after Sunak blocked it from Royal Assent on the grounds that it would make some people one gender in one part of the country and another in the rest of it. Yousaf had the support of just 18% of the Scottish public for this and eventually gave up having wasted tens of millions of pounds on legal fees
- The SNP are now expected to lose over half their seats in the national parliament.
In summary:
Discuss this, and other British news stories such as the
Police deliberately running over a cow, in the
British News Megathread.