https://thenationalpulse.com/2026/06/23/farage-blasts-politi...
https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2016/06/how-the-united-kingdom...
They immediately regretted it once my partner explained how it would fuck up her/our future.
They have subsequently both died.
It was even said on HN/Twitter during Covid 2021, how Trump supporters were dying in great numbers from refusing face masks and it was again Game OVER for Republicans, only for him to get elected again in 2024.
It’s telling that Farage is polling around 25%. So much for mass Brexit aupoort. Maybe Johnson didn’t hold it the right way.
But I'm very distracted by Germany - what happened/is happening there that they're faring so much worse than, say, France? (And in several of the cited measures, worse than the UK too?)
One factor I think is the early EU days German growth was artificially high, juiced by cheap credit from German banks to peripheral countries which was then cycled into purchasing German industrial goods.
Previously peripheral countries had more indigenous industries protected by FX rate as well as some trade barriers.
The GFC broke this cycle, though it couldn't have gone on forever with or without the GFC.
Then Germany also kneecapped themselves in terms of energy policy, shutting down cheap nuclear power supplies and becoming dependent on Russian energy exports.
The only thin about this I wonder is when they'll turn around on that decision. It WILL happen, it's only a question of when. Nuclear is vital to the human future, even if environmentalists don't understand that yet.
About 18 years ago now the Tories thought, incorrectly, that budgetary austerity was the prescription for responding to the global financial crisis. Eight years of indulging conspiracist nonsense later, their PM decided to hold the Brexit referendum as a means of jangling some keys in front of their voting base and then, perhaps even more dumbly, the party decided to treat the result of a 52-48 referendum as more than advisory.
This 1-2 punch has locked in two lost decades in which the UK's GDP will have stagnated in real terms. Most of their politics in the last decade has been make-believe that what obviously happened somehow didn't, with various scapegoating and culture-war distraction attempts tossed in. Not helping is that they have first-past-the-post individual districts (and way too many parties to be sustainable in that electoral system) that result in their self-defeating hinterlands being over-represented.
Democracy is having really rough days with finding candidates that are willing to represent their constituents.