A burning union flag is a little on the nose as a metaphor for Reform's plan for the country.

Teufelslied - Israeli Patriotic Song (remastered) YouTube video by Israeli Patriot

Reminds me of this YouTube video...

I checked this too.

*20 seconds* of Reform logo display.

*No other* party logo displayed.

In local election purdah.

This is not normal. At all.

An Israeli West Bank settlement sounds about right for her.

Isn't the most common reason why cheap housing is cheap "because there's no decent jobs here"?

Wages of Destruction paints a really interesting picture of how Hitler, despite his overperformance relative to expectations in the European theater, had quite early on committed to capture Paris, London, Moscow, and Washington DC or die trying, and actually he only ever achieved 1/4.

Trump is not the 45th or 47th president of the USA — he is the second president of the CSA who managed to capture Washington DC: something which Jefferson Davis of course never managed.

Wasn't interwar fascism most popular in overpopulated agrarian communities, which didn't exist much in the UK due to migration out of rural areas to cities, or to other countries?

(eg Britons were still able to emigrate to the US after 1924, while Italians and Spaniards were mostly shut out.)

Is "A year in provenance" supposed to be "A year in Provence" there?

If rural Italian local governments are indeed running the kind of scam I suggested, then the newspaper articles would be _advertising_ for that scam.

@mateosfo.bsky.social may also want to get appropriate labels from @labeler.urbanism.plus, as I see you already have done.

You make it sounds more like a scam, in which Italian villages dupe foreigners with more money than sense (who will eventually go home when they learn what life in such a village is really like) into renovating the village at their own expense.

The only way "family voting" could have cost Reform the election is if "Muslim" communities in the constituency were full of downtrodden secretly-apostate women eager to "free" themselves by getting their own husbands deported.

It wouldn't surprise me though if many Reform supporters believed that.

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This only works in PR systems though: under FPTP making fascists the only anti-immigration option means they'd be more likely to win the election, as their vote is united while the pro-immigration vote is split.

(Sort of like how the 2015 UK General Election in Scotland was an SNP landslide.)

(By the way, I asked the same question on your blog: you may also want to answer there...)

Was this scheme specifically introduced by Meloni's government?

Although I'm not sure they'd have cause to worry about non-white immigrants swamping such villages anyway: don't immigrants tend to want to be in the big cities where the jobs are (or where their co-ethnics are already living)?

Although Horden's new rail line mostly leads to places (Sunderland, Hartlepool and Teesside) that are still economically crappy: Newcastle is still a bit far, especially when there's only one train per hour (hard to increase given that the Sunderland-Heworth section is shared with the Metro).

The renovation and residence requirements attached to these sales make them look like a government scheme rather than the free market.

Why is Italy trying to revive these economically-moribund villages, rather than paying their residents to move to the city?

Doesn't the fact that Horden now has a train station again suggest that it's one small town that should be redeveloped (it's arguably a de facto Peterlee suburb) rather than just abandoned?

Didn't LA's Red Cars lose money for their entire existence, because they were built in the first place as a loss leader to help sell real estate?

The Trump who supported an unsuccessful plan to downzone much of NYC's Upper East Side in the 1970s?

That's not a YIMBY!

Centralized social media platforms (where people crave the possibility of "going viral") have for this reason been a boon to far-right politics.

Isn't that itself down to demographic change in the sense that the most important "shareholders" are pension funds?

Which begs the question of why the Times continues to give her a column!

Which is something you'd expect to hear from a Jewish supremacist of course.

Propaganda of course.

Maybe that's what motivated Starmer's blunder in 2024, which deprived his incoming ministry of fiscal headroom?

It was less forgivable then due to the golden opportunity offered by a right-wing vote split between the Tories and Reform.

Teufelslied - Israeli Patriotic Song (remastered) YouTube video by Israeli Patriot

I wonder if Melanie Phillips would like to sing this song unironically?

There are no significant political party differences in the UK on public resource allocation. All believe that pensioners and the NHS are the overwhelming priority, and spending on anything else must fit in around those, to be generated by tackling "waste" or "growth".