My favorites are the ones from 2024 London mayoral election[1]:
> The Binface manifesto called for the abolition of VAR [video assisted referee] (presumably in football matches) and promised to force Thames Water managers to "take a dip in the Thames... see how they like it", in reference to the recent sewage discharge controversy; also to "build at least one affordable house", referring to the housing crisis in London.
My real favorite part is that some of these are obviously nonsensical, but some of them are actually reasonable sounding ideas... I'm not sure I would personally vote for free broadband for everyone, but that is absolutely legitimate platform that I could see somebody actually running on.
I'm not British, but I'm a fan a silly humour. One message I like is:
"I would make an absolutely cast-iron firm commitment to build the 100bn Trident weapon system ... but then I would make an equally firm private commitment after that public commitment not to build.
Because they are secret submarines and no one will ever know...
Win-win. A hundred billion quid. Shove it in the health service"
This was achieved before the Uxbridge by-election. Which is pretty good going for a pub [1] built at the same time as the first European settlement in the interior of the continental US [2].
The modern Lords is composed of a mix of Life Peers, who were sent there in their lifetime by the Monarch, generally in fact as a result of the government of the day (ie elected politicians) choosing them†, and a fixed number (from the pool) of Hereditary Peers, who have inherited this honour typically (but not always) from their father and so on, perhaps for centuries.
Historically all the Peers could sit, today a fixed number of Hereditary Peers are chosen, the rest get the same title etc. but have no role in Parliament. An election is held (internally) to decide who gets to do this, on the one hand it is paid (a few hundred pounds for each day you're there, so real money albeit you wouldn't get rich) but you're expected to actually do something useful, which if you are accustomed to just sitting on your backside getting rich off the labour of others will be a nasty surprise.
So, even if Binface were actually a peer (which he is not) he wouldn't necessarily be in the Lords today, and actually if he was in the Lords that means he'd need to quit to become an MP as it's not legal to be both - historically it wasn't even possible to quit but somebody in the Lords really wanted to be an elected politician in the 20th century so the rules were changed to allow them to stop being a Lord -- interestingly the law actually doesn't destroy the peerage, if you're a hereditary peer and you want to be an MP so you give that up the peerage exists anyway when you die and it gets inherited as normal.
† This is as self-serving and corrupt in practice as you'd expect. For every famously charitable sports person and beloved actor honoured, expect a career politician looking to retire, a party donor and some dodgy business guy who in a century everybody will know was a crook or a rapist or both... But in principle they could just send the nice lady who taught a generation of kids to read, that bloke who won six Olympic medals and somebody who was born with no legs and yet single handedly saved all the kids in a burning orphanage, so there's that.
Not quite. Scottish peers (to be precise, members of the Peerage of Scotland, which isn't quite the same thing) and Irish peers (again, more precisely, members of the Peerage of Ireland) elected representatives from their number to sit in the Lords, in much the same way as the hereditary peers do today.
Scottish peers got the universal right to sit in the Lords in 1963.
The right of Irish peers to sit in the Lords, if elected, survived Irish independence in 1922; however, the office tasked with overseeing their election, that of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, was abolished with independence, so their numbers gradually dwindled: the last Irish peer to sit in the Lords died in 1961.
> a fixed number (from the pool) of Hereditary Peers, who have inherited this honour typically (but not always) from their father and so on, perhaps for centuries.
That's so incredibly embarrassing and anachronistic.
Binface getting more votes than the neo-fascist Britain First in the recent mayoral elections was cathartic. They tried to play it off that they weren't really trying to win so it doesn't count, and they're definitely not mad, please don't put in the newspaper that they got mad.
Didn't the UK use to have a joke candidate called "lord Buckethead" too? I'm pretty sure I saw him on some stage with Theresa May. Is it related to the count?
In somewhat related news, Hungary has a joke-ish party called the "Hungarian two-tailed dog party"[0], which does a lot or civic work but usually campaigns with slogans such as "more of everything less of nothing", "100% more happiness", sends people on tv tribunes dressed like chickens etc..
This year they managed to elect the major of a district in Budapest which has been controlled by Fidesz since forever.
> In earlier elections, Harvey stood as Lord Buckethead, but was forced to change the character due to a copyright dispute with the American filmmaker Todd Durham, who created Lord Buckethead for his 1984 science fiction film Hyperspace.
> In the 2019 United Kingdom general election he stood as an independent candidate against Boris Johnson in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency. As he had not resided in Britain for more than 15 years he was ineligible to vote but eligible to stand as a candidate. He focused his campaign on voting rights using the slogan "Don't vote for Tobin, let Tobin vote". He gained five votes.
Bringing back Ceefax, the teletext service.[9] He had previously promised to bring back the service in 2017 as Lord Buckethead.[12]
Returning 20,001 police officers to the street, a reference to the Conservative pledge of 20,000 more police officers.[13]
Nationalising model railways.[14]
Holding a referendum on holding a second referendum on the United Kingdom's membership in the European Union.[14]
Allowing any Czechs on the Irish border to remain.[14]
Nationalising Adele, the English singer.[15]
Abolishing the House of Lords.[15] He had previously pledged the same in 2017 as Lord Buckethead.[16]
Giving free broadband to everyone.[15]
Stopping the sale of arms to repressive regimes.[15]
Making Piers Morgan zero emissions by 2030.[15]
Renaming London Bridge to "Phoebe Waller-Bridge".[15]
Introducing a minimum voting age of 16 and a maximum of 80.[15]
Sending £1 trillion a week to the NHS.[14]
Proroguing Jacob Rees-Mogg.[14]
Banishing Katie Hopkins to the Phantom Zone.[14]
Moving the hand dryer in the men's toilet at Uxbridge's Crown and Treaty pub to a "more sensible position".[14]