Disappointing to see, but hardly a great surprise that Rupert Lowe's Great Yarmouth First Party made huge gains in my area. As I've posted before, Yarmouth itself is a disadvantaged town with quite high levels of immigration so is susceptible to grifters with false promises who like to blame immigration for a lot of the area's problems. To be fair, his party also picked up places in the more affluent rural divisions too.

I'm sure that more than a few voted for Lowe's party out of frustration at Starmer and Labour and a disillusionment with the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. Lowe's party manifesto makes much of the failings of traditional party politics of course but whilst it's promises to "put residents before bureaucracy" , "defend local jobs and services" and put the town "before Norwich or Westminster" appear reasonable and attractive enough, when I've either spoken to or heard those campaigning or voting for them, there has been much talk about immigration but not too much meat on the bone about how they are actually going to make good on these promises.

I'm not saying that all voters for Lowe's party are like it, but whilst I don't particularly like to use the word "thick" to describe some of them, certainly adjectives like "gullible", "uneducated", "ignorant" and "bigoted" can apply. I've also heard a few that are openly racist.

The party makes a big deal of it representing the interests of "local" people and of "ordinary working people" but the irony, of course, is that Lowe himself is a multi-millionaire (£30m I think is his estimated wealth) who lives primarily in Cheltenham.

The complacency of the liberal elite in the US allowed them to ignore the concerns of large swathes of the population which enabled Trump to get elected. Unless Starmer and Labour wake up quickly and start to realise that they need to urgently address the concerns of the electorate, populism will surely succeed here too. Sadly, one of the (several) things Starmer is not good at though is reading the room.😟