The Dead That Vote

Right-wing nutters really are the gift that keeps on giving, aren't they?  Just today we heard how Reform, or whatever the Hell they are calling themselves these days, (weren't they the Brexit Party, Nigel Farage's second attempt at achieving Westminster representation for Brexit, after UKIP?), sacked an inactive candidate, only for it to turn out that his inactivity was down to the fact that he was dead.  The obvious question, of course, was whether he was dead when he was first selected as their candidate, as Reform seems to be designed to appeal to the rabid pro-Brexit demographic, which includes significant numbers of mad old fogeys waving their walking sticks at European-shaped clouds.  It is entirely probable that many of them are actually dead, their embalmed corpses wheeled into polling stations on sack trucks by their equally rabid elderly friends and relatives in order to vote.  Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if the alleged increase in support for Reform registered in some dubious opinion polls is down to these corpses being unwittingly surveyed by pollsters.  So yeah, this guy could have been dead when he was selected - let's face it, as he would have stood no chance of being elected to anything under a Reform banner, it was a low risk strategy.   All he had to be was a name on a ballot paper to give the impression that Reform is a legitimate political force able to field candidates nationally in any election, at any level.

But, if he had been elected, what then?  Would they have had him strung like a life-size puppet in order for him to make public appearances and attend meetings?  Or maybe they could just have operated him from the waist up, via a stick up his arse?  Perhaps Reform should pursue a slightly different strategy: still use the corpses for voters and candidates, but try reanimating them.  Not only would a shambling corpse at least give the impression of activity, but thanks to their inevitably addled brains, they'd be easy to manipulate and would never be likely to question any of Reform's policies, no matter how extreme and reactionary they might be.  Now, I'm well aware that, as a party of the extreme right, appealing mainly to ruddy faced white idiots, it would be difficult for Reform to resort to using Voodoo witch doctors to reanimate their supporters as zombie - they're the sort of immigrants undermining British values and culture - but I'm sure that, unless low budget horror films have lied to me, there are plenty of mad scientists out there who could do the job scientifically.  Obviously, by now, it would be unlikely that any of them were Nazi war criminals and therefore likely to be sympathetic to the party's ideology, (unless they'd been conducting their longevity and revivification experiments on themselves), but I'm sure that many of the current crop trained under Nazi mad scientists.  So there you go - a possible way ahead for Reform.