By: Simon Brooke :: 11 July 2026
I'm not a great fan of representative democracy, but I'm not persuaded that there's any obvious strategy for getting to anywhere better without unacceptable violence. I'm also not persuaded there's time to do so before the whole system explodes anyway in the face of all the many crises it is building in the world and not addressing.
But I do still want a better world. So what do we need to do to get there?
Hope
We need hope.
To hope, you have to believe that things can change. More: that you have agency to change things. Westminster exists to deny us agency.
Vote once every five years, they say. From a narrow choice of candidates, only two or three of whom has any chance of winning. Who even if they win, has only a little more than a 50% chance of being in the governing party. And who will vote, in the vast majority of votes, strictly along party lines, which will be determined by a small 'leadership', irrespective of what the majority of the electors, or the activists of the party, or even its members of parliament, want.
- Privatise the water.
- Start a foreign war.
- Bail out the bankers.
- Sell off the council houses.
- Arrest pensioners with placards.
- Be cruel to refugees.
Did we vote for these things? Did our MPs truly support them?
No.
Vote, they say. Once every five years, they say. That's democracy, they say. You've had your choice, they say. It won't change anything. They'll do what the donors, the lobbyists and the strategists tell them. It's in the national interest, they say.
It's not in ours.
To have hope, we need agency, the power to change things. The power to change Westminster.
How do we do that?
Vote
So vote against the system. That's been Farage's message for thirty years. Vote for me, he says. I'm an outsider, he says. Not part of the establishment, he says. A patriot, he says.
He lies.
He's a liar, a grifter, a racist, a bully, a fraud. He says vote against the system, but he is the system.
How do you vote against the system, when the system lies?
So don't vote against the system. You can't vote against the system, because voting is the system.
Instead, vote to subvert the system.
People say Binface isn't a serious candidate. He is. What they're missing is what he is serious about. He's not serious about winning. He doesn't intend to win. He's serious about democracy.
He knows a fair bit about democracy, does Binface. He wrote and presented a BBC Radio 4 series about it. It's good. You should listen.
Binface knows that voting once every five years, to elect a person who doesn't represent you to a parliament where more than half the members — those in the 'House of Lords' — aren't elected at all, and where the First Past the Post voting system means that few elected members have majority support in their own constituencies, isn't remotely democratic. It's a joke.
He knows it's a joke. He shows it's a joke. So let's put the joke on him. Let's elect him.
It might be unfair to say that, if elected to Westminster, he would be the only person there who understands democracy. But it wouldn't be very unfair.
Because he understands democracy, because he is subversive, because he is creative, he could expose all the hypocrisies, all the contradiction, all the tomfoolery and dishonesty. He could light a fire in Westminster — and we all know it's tinder dry.
Putin' the Right where it belongs
The right has been on a roll, lately.
They're rising so fast that they've even cloned another party, a splinter group. A party even further right. Even more obnoxious.
They're moving the Overton window.
Reform gained three and a half million more votes in the 2024 election than in the previous one, an increase in their vote of 535.08%. They won eight seats — up from none at all.
Farage himself won a seat.
Which he held until last week.
When he resigned it, in an attempt to thwart an investigation into his finances.
And walked into a trap.
So now he faces the Bin.
Binface can't win, the po-faced commentators chorus.
Can't he?
Many of Farage's voters aren't voting for Farage. They're voting to put the boot into the establishment. When Farage faces Binface, which of them represents the establishment, and which of them represents the boot?
We voted for Boaty McBoatface.
I don't think the political establishment understands how deeply unpopular the whole system it, how many of us want to put the boot in.
Now we can.
Now we can vote for Count Binface.
Tidy
And suppose the people of Clacton do vote for Binface, what's Farage going to do?
He's become a laughing stock. Whenever he appears on television again, whenever he stands for election, or endorses a candidate, or makes a speech, or goes into a pub, or promotes a new memecoin, people will remember the Bin. People will point and laugh.
He won't be able to go out in public. He'll be finished.
And if Farage is finished, what happens to Reform?
What happens to Reform?
What happens...
Now that's tidy.
