Member-only story
Real-Time Reform Member Counts
Is the “live membership ticker” automated? No.
Kemi Bedenoch MP (Conservative, West Sussex) accused Reform UK of ‘faking’ member counts. The Conservative leader claimed:
It’s not real. It’s a fake [clock] coded to tick up automatically. We’ve been watching the back end for days and can also see they’ve just changed the code to link to a different site as people point this out.
It is unclear how someone watches “the back end” through a public website.
Counters and clocks
Counters on web pages have a long history. Back in the primordial days of the internet, some pages carried a ‘hit counter’. The counter showed the number of page views.
Debt clocks and similar tickers are often set to go up by specified amounts. That leads to errors when left running. The UK clock on the ‘National Debt Clock’ site claims national debt exceeds £3,104 billion. This figure assumes national debt rises by £5,170 every second.
