The Strange Death of LPUK...

...and looking to the future.

In a moment of what looks like outstanding petulance from a (former) party chairman, LPUK is felled by its own leadership clique:

Final closure: de-registration papers have been received by the Electoral Commission this morning. When they have been processed, LPUK will cease to be a political party.

And the reason for this? The leadership seems more willing to destroy the party that open the accounts up for a bit of scrutiny. Which is ironic when you consider that one of the reasons why the party was formed was to campaign for more openness in politics.

A word of warning, though, for those people who have been predicting an acrimonious breakdown in the party since its inception: before you start your "I told you so dance", remember that the confusion in the party has been massive over the past few weeks, and in particular over the past few days, so there is every chance that half the party will claim that it is finished while the other half claim it is still a going concern. Clarity is something surely lacking in all aspects of the Libertarian party at the moment. (As if to prove the point, while I was writing this post, there has already been a counter claim that the party is not finished. Way to go, people.)

But if the party is truly dead and gone, then two things are going to happen. FIrstly, they'll be a lot of blame to fling around. Some of it will probably end up heading in the direction of Anna Raccoon and perhaps even blogs like this one, which have been fiercely critical of LPUK of late. That would, of course, be blaming completely the wrong people. Besides, any party that can be felled by a few blogposts really isn't a credible political organisation.

No, the blame lies with a leader who was utterly irresponsible, in particular with the finances of that fragile organisation. It also lies with a chairman who, when faced with serious allegations about the party finances, decided that a vapid, banal report determined to blame just about anyone else other than the leadership clique was the best way to cope with that problem. Ken Ferguson's insider account of the past few weeks is a startling read, and a damning indictment of an incompetent and incapable leadership - and, if I were a senior member of that party,that report would leave me wondering whether a police investigation into the finances would be the best way to move forward.

The second thing that is going to happen is that the supporters of the party who aren't utterly disenchanted with politics after this whole sorry farrago will have to decide what to do next. Joining UKIP isn't a credible answer, in my book - mainly because they aren't a Libertarian party. Likewise, forming a new party is probably not the answer - even if a constitution was put in place to try to stop this sort of thing happening again, a new party would still have the crushing problem of being staffed and led by interested amateurs with other jobs that would make their political efforts, at best, part-time. A party needs paid political professionals, and for that it needs a decent amount of money. That will only come when the issues it represents have been forced into the limelight.

So the best thing the (former) party's supporters can do, in my opinion, is to do everything they can to raise the profile of libertarian (and liberal) issues in this country. Attend things like this, support organisations like this, and contribute to joint ventures like this. Then, when a genuinely liberal alternative has been brought to the attention of a much wider audience than the libertarian wing of the blogging world, it would be time to form another party.