The Serious (hopeful) Message Behind Count Binface

England has a rich history of fielding ‘joke candidates’ at political elections. We’ve all heard of the Monster Raving Loony Party, and now of course the world and his wife are aware of Count Binface, an intergalactic space warrior who is standing in a hugely relevant by-election in Clacton-on-Sea.

Next door (in the same constituency) is Jaywick, England’s most deprived area. This video is very interesting, looking at how this proud community has been forgotten by society (and in 2 years, its MP has appeared to do nothing to help move the mattresses and other trash that literally lines its seafront).

What is the council doing?

It’s unlikely that Count Binface will win. But his popularity has shown that compassion is winning every time, and if the election was national, he would win. One of his policies would be to make executives who are polluting our rivers to swim in them, to make them take action!

This hilarious video from a USA YouTuber trying to make sense of how a bin can stand for parliament is worth watching. He is trying to understand how it all works, finding it unfathomable why other parties aren’t standing.

The comments section is also funny, as Americans don’t get it either, yet are warming for the ‘bin to win!’

On a serious note, Count Binface is in real life an Oxford classics scholar and comedian, who is kind, intelligent, compassionate and funny. And seems to have reverted our imagination back to the days when people in England were still nice! If he does that alone, it’s something.

The excellent political commentator Maximilian Robespierre also posts that when Reform UK are criticising a man with a bin on his head as ‘the establishment’, we know we are hopefully gradually moving towards a more compassionate political age!

I’ll cut your taxes, and raise everyone else’s. Count Binface

Why is Count Binface so popular?

Nobody is denying that England has serious political issues. But we don’t want to turn into the USA where (as Andy Burnham said) people who vote for different political parties, don’t speak to each other in the street. A country so polarised that recently a senator was shot dead in her home, along with her husband and dog (Gilbert became the first dog to ever lie in state).

Of course now with the awful murders of Ann Widdicombe, Sir David Amess and Jo Cox, this issue is being debated in England too.

A quick online search finds that before their murders (all in the last 10 years), the last politican murdered was Ian Gow back in 1990 (by the IRA). And before that all other MPs murdered were during the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’, before the Good Friday peace agreement.

So one has to ask what has changed that we now have had three political murders in fairly quick succession? The political temperature of hate and division has massively gone up during this time.

And now with most MPs receiving death threats on a regular basis, it doesn’t take a genius to work out why a candidate of compassion (even from another planet) is bringing hope to our nation.