British Politics, Libertarians and LPUK

This post will be long; for that I offer a warning, but no apology.

I haven’t been a member of LPUK for about a month now, and after Anna Raccoon’s devastating post on that party’s current leader, it seems unlikely I will be again. Personal responsibility is crucial to almost every successful formulation of libertarianism, but according to Raccoon’s post, the current leader of LPUK is utterly irresponsible. More than a bit of a problem, I would argue.

Of course there may be those who argue that I’m judging based on only one side of what will probably be a vicious argument. But the facts presented in the post fit the facts as I have observed them, and the whole post has more than a ring of truth to it. And it is a thoroughly depressing truth.

LPUK now appear to have two choices. Either they can ditch Withers and elect a new leader (Christ knows who, and doing so would enhance the perception of a party in crisis) or they can keep him on, and become increasingly like a version of Veritas without the unique selling point of having a celebrity as leader. Neither fate is particularly edifying; it is more than possible to see the Libertarian Party of the UK as entering terminal decline.

But there’s another reason why I don’t much care about hearing both sides of the story. And it’s this: the accusations about Withers are just the icing on the cake for me. The reality is that it is easy for LPUK to enter terminal decline, and easy for it to wink out of existence. And the reason for this is simple – they have made startlingly little progress since they were formed. The party, when it has contested elections, has done beyond poorly. And this is a crucial, debilitating problem. If you can’t credibly contest elections, then the media won’t care about you. If the media doesn’t care about you, you can’t win elections. And so the vicious circle continues, and LPUK remains a largely virtual entity, incapable of the sort of practical action needed to make a genuine political impact in our deeply flawed democracy.

In fact, LPUK are a standing rebuke to those who wax lyrical about the importance of the internet in modern politics. The internet has a role to play, for sure. But if your party was formed, largely managed and supported through the internet, then you have a problem. In a constituency based electoral system such as ours, you need to have constituency organisations that are building support across years, doing the endless (and endlessly tedious) work of canvassing on rainy Saturday mornings. If you are largely an internet organisation, you don’t have that. In fact, the internet becomes as much a virtual prison as it does a virtual tool. After several years in existence, LPUK have remarkably little to show for their efforts. And for all the talk of a resurgence under Withers (a resurgence surely dead in the water now, if it ever truly existed) the party has a mountain to climb, and seemingly precious little resources to allow it to do so in order to get anywhere. The odds were stacked against the party before this scandal (if we can call something a scandal that precious few people in this country will really care about). Now proper political influence seems further away than ever before.

There will be some who will crow over my acceptance that LPUK are not going to go anywhere; the sort of libertarians who have always argued for entryism into the main political parties now have every right to say “I told you so”. Except their victory is pyrrhic, and their laughter hollow. Because there is no natural home in British politics for the genuinely libertarian.

Anyone who argues that libertarians have a natural home in one of the main parties (by which I mean a party larger than LPUK; a pretty minimal hurdle to overcome) is simply wrong. We can ignore anyone who says that libertarians have a natural home in the Labour party as utterly delusional. The same for anyone who might make the claim that the Greens have something to offer libertarians. Their environmental and economic policies could only ever be implemented through draconian state intervention.

Which takes us to the Tories. So many professed libertarians seem to reside in the Tory party, and I don’t really understand why. The Tories are deeply socially conservative. And there is nothing libertarian about social conservatism. In fact, I have a little litmus test I always use when I think that the Tories are a good idea. I think about whether I could honestly vote for the policies they championed at the last election. Then I think of their National Service plan, and remember why I don’t vote for them.

The same for UKIP. There are some who would make UKIP a libertarian party. Sadly, I think they are in an ineffective minority. And to emphasise that point, I can always remember something like their proposed ban on the burqa to reassure me that they are often little more than the right-wing of the Tories in self-imposed exile.

And the Liberal Democrats? Well, I had hope when Nick Clegg was elected. And it lasted for about five seconds. He’s an apologist for the Tories with, according to his writing in The Orange Book, staunchly Europhile leanings (albeit with a reformist bent). Not an intolerable position, but hardly libertarian either. And his party is fatally flawed in my eyes because, as vast swathes of the party has shown since they gained some real political power, far too much of it is still social democratic, and thus Labour supporters who can’t quite bring themselves to be Labour.

Which leads us back to LPUK. A tiny party that has spent most of its life fighting for survival, rather than for power. And I want to stress this point – the alleged behaviour of Andrew Withers is just the tip of the iceberg. The party is sinking; which is hardly surprising, since it has always struggled to stay afloat.

But whatever. I don’t need to be a member of a political party. In fact, a spell as an independent is very, very appealing. I wish LPUK the very best – and they’re going to need all the goodwill they can get over the coming days, I rather think. But no more money from me; no more links; no more support.

And that’s that. LPUK is done, as far as I’m concerned. Finished.

What’s next?

Left-Wing? Join the Greens.

Via Charlotte Gore, I see Sunny Hundal has seen the light and decided to join... well, the Labour party. His reasoning, if you can call it that, is this:

But I also think there is a broader issue here. I’ve long said that lefties need to get more involved with Westminster and not just wash our hands off it when we get disillusioned. By that, I don’t necessarily mean going for political office but finding ways to put pressure on Westminster from the left.

Ah, the old entryism argument. Worked so well for Militant Tendency in the 1980's. And no doubt will work just as well for lefties joining the Labour party now.

What I don't get, though, both with people like Sunny and my self described left-wing friends who voted Labour at the last election, is how they can dare call themselves Labour supporters or members and then claim to be left-wing. Because there is nothing left-wing about the Labour party - nothing. Its record in power speaks for itself. It was responsible for the Iraq War. For the decimation of civil liberties in this country. For the debasement of democracy and the rise of spin. For the bailing out of failed banks. What is left-wing about that? Nothing. So why support them? Some sort of base tribal loyalty, where the Tories are worse than Labour, and the feeling that deep down the latter party remains in some way genuinely left-wing - even though the available evidence would (quite literally violently) suggest otherwise.

And lefties can't claim that there isn't an alternative. If you believe in left-wing politics - if you believe in socialism, if you believe in combatting climate change, if you believe a party with a truly pacifist agenda - then go join the Greens. Seriously; they are an updated version of what the left used to stand for. And they've even got an MP now, so you can't dismiss them as political by-standers. The choice is clear, the choice is stark - join a party discredited by endless compromise and a brutal yet pathetic 13 years in power, or join a party that pretty much stands for what you stand for but isn't utterly ideologically tainted. Some choice...

Of course, I can't stomach the Greens - but then again, I can't stomach the Labour party either. Yet as far as I am concerned the Greens have one big advantage over the Labour party - they are not the ideological equivalent of toxic waste. So the choice is simple: if you feel you need to be a member of a political party and you are left-wing, then either join the Greens and retain a shred of fucking dignity or follow Sunny and join the Labour party. Or to put it another way, sell your soul to the political equivalent of the devil.

Who to Vote For?

So, the election is coming. And the question for anyone who doesn’t blindly follow a party without thinking is who to vote for.

Of course, ideally I’d be able to vote for the party I am a member of – the Libertarian Party. But that party is still very much a work in progress, and realistically a lack of candidates means I won’t be voting for them at this election. Which leaves me in the very unedifying and utterly depressing position of trying to figure out which of the useless main parties should get my vote.

Now, I don’t expect one party to absolutely represent my views. I don’t agree with everything that the Libertarian Party says or does. A certain level of pragmatism and compromise is required if anyone wants to be a supporter, let alone a member, of a political party. The same is true of voting. You can’t expect the party you vote for to represent you in every possible way.

Yet I feel so detached from all the parties vying for my vote that it seems next to impossible to choose who should get my vote. Each party appears to be craptacular in its own way. To break it down a bit:

The Labour Party: Well, voting Labour is moronic, as I've explained before.

The Tories: Despite being an ex-member of this party, I can’t see what the Tories actually stand for. Other than not being Labour. And when you throw in their tendency to drift towards social conservatism, it becomes very difficult to rationalize giving them my vote with being a Libertarian.

The Liberal Democrats: They have the most misleading name in history, since they are neither liberal nor democratic. And for every commitment they make to liberty (such as opposing ID cards), there is a corresponding drift towards pathetic left-wing, bash-the-bankers rhetoric. Besides, any party that contains social democratic choppers such as Vince Cable and Simon Hughes is not worth considering for more than about 13 seconds.

UKIP: Despite occasionally posturing as a libertarian party, UKIP come across (despite a handful of reasonable members) as a bunch of Tories rejected by their natural party for having a bee in their bonnet about Europe. Don’t get me wrong, I have no issue with their basic policy on Europe. But I struggle with ideas like banning the burka. It is the sort of mindless attempt at populism that completely undermines any rhetoric about being a party of freedom.

The Green Party: Yeah, because I can stomach the Green Party’s mix of socialism and reactionary politics without wanting to chunder. Oh, wait…

The English Democrats: As far as I can see, this lot are like UKIP, but 50% less professional and 75% more loopy. So that’s a no, then.

The BNP: Given I am not a nationalist, socialist or racist, this bag of simian misfits is the worst of all the options. Voting Labour is moronic; voting for the BNP is repugnant and moronic.

So where does that leave me? On the one hand, I could vote for the person I believe would be best able to represent the issues in my constituency. But I’m not planning to live here in the long-term, and I would hate to have a vote for a competent Tory candidate, for example, being construed as a vote for the utterly incompetent and lacklustre Tory leadership.

For the first time ever, I find myself in a position where I don’t know who to vote for. Maybe that will change in the run-up to the election, and one of the parties listed above will inspire with their campaign. But as things stand, that seems about as likely as Gordon Brown stepping down from his job tomorrow, and admitting that he just wasn’t up to it. And I keep on coming back to the option of spoiling my ballot paper. Hell, I’ve even worked out how I would do it – drawing a box at the bottom of the ballot paper and writing “none of the above” next to it – and giving that option the dubious benefit of a wasted vote.

So what if Tory candidates don't care about the environment?

I can't understand why anyone thinks this is news:

ConservativeHome asked Tory candidates to rate 19 policy issues on a scale of one to five, with five being the most important. Only eight of the 141 Tory candidates who responded gave climate change five marks, the lowest number for any issue.

Yeah, that's 'cos they are Tories, for fuck's sake. They are not the Green party. They are not going to be obsessed by the supposed problem of climate change, in the same way that the Green party isn't going to spend a lot of time thinking about marital tax breaks. And personally I'd rather the party most likely to become the government before the year is out focussed on real issues facing this country, like the shafted economy, the two wars we're fighting and the decimation of civil liberties under Labour rather than made up tripe about the environment.

Cameron's Questions

Apparently, Cameron's speech was trying to answer three questions: why us, why now and why me? No doubt Cameron managed to do a sterling job in his speech of dealing with these questions, but I have my own answers. That, possibly, are a little bit more cynical.

Why us?

Unfortunately, there isn't anyone else. Quite simply, just the Tories can possibly replace Labour. The Libertarian Party, UKIP, the Greens - even the Liberal Democrats - are crippled by the nature of the two party system and are simply not able to transform themselves into a likely contender to replace Labour as the government. The Tories aren't in a position to win for any other reason than the pendulum that swings between the two parties in our two party system is finally swinging back towards them.

Why now?

For two reasons. Firstly, the whole of the Nu Labour project was a massive confidence trick. It had no idea about basic economics, and its leaders took as much money as they could from the people to fund projects they quite simply could not afford. All the talk about increasing spending was actually about taking risks that the government could not fund and therefore could not afford to take. Now that confidence trick has been rumbled. All the prophecies about the government not leaving enough for a rainy day have been shown to be 100% true. The Labour party built two election victories on a fraud in the economy. They were caught out. The damage they have done to a now near bankrupt country is plain for all to see. As a result, they are about as popular as smallpox. That's one of the reasons why now is the time of the Tories; everyone hates the fucking government.

And on top of that, the Labour party have chosen perhaps the worst of their Trinity of Evil (Brown, Harman, Balls) to serve as Prime Minister. Despite him not winning any sort of election to become Prime Minister. Despite him having all of the personal warmth of a particularly nasty ice age. And despite him consistently showing in the polls that the people of this country that the people in this country would rather have a over-ripe turd in a suit as Prime Minister than the "Right" "Honourable" Gordon Brown.

Why now? Labour lied to the public for 10 years, bankrupted the economy, and made a fat, misanthropic puff adder Prime Minister. The surge towards the Tories isn't about how much people love that party. Rather, it is about their determination to get the hell away from Labour before they accidentally launch nuclear weapons against the British people and thus complete their task of utterly shafting the United Kingdom for decades to come.

Why me?

Well, you gave a better speech than David Davis a few years ago, Davey Boy. Simple as that. It meant the Davis campaign for leadership floundered, and you became the favourite. Had that not happened, then Davis would be leader now and you would be Shadow Education Secretary or something. Pure bloody chance made Cameron Tory leader. Nowt more than that.

And there is nothing historical about the Tories standing poised to be the next government; there is nothing particularly exciting about it either. The fact that they have come back from the political wilderness owes far more to the egregious incompetence of the Labour party than anything else. People want the Tories now simply because they are the only party in a position to replace the hated Labour government. Put very simply, this is the 1997 election in reverse.

Choosing who to vote for

There’s an election this week. And like with all elections, I think it is vital that everyone who has the right to vote should vote. But I will concede that who to vote for is a tough call.

My party (by which I mean the party I’m a member of – I’m no Silvio Berlusconi, I don't have my own party) is only standing in these elections in a very limited way*. I look forward to there being an LPUK candidate in Nottingham in the future who I can vote for and potentially actively support in other ways. However, in these elections, that isn’t going to happen. So I’m left with the other parties.

We can dismiss some parties outright. The nasty, racist little nationalist socialists in the BNP can kiss by hairy arse – they won’t get my vote. Not now, not ever. Similarly, the socialist anti-humans of the Green party – people with less of grip on economic reality that Gordon “end to boom and bust” Brown - aren’t worth considering. The only thing they have going for them is that they are less racist than the BNP. Well done guys – you’re less pig ignorant than the knuckle draggers.

Then we have the main parties. Normally I wouldn’t lump them together. The flaccid Social Democracy of the Liberal Democrats is different to the broken, tone-deaf would-be populism of the Labour Party. Which in turn is different to the cock-sure arrogance of the Cameron Conservative Party – a group of people so sure that power is going to fall into their laps that they haven’t bothered to work out why they want it. They are different, and there are very different reasons as to why you might or might not vote for them. But fuck it – for the purposes of this election, they can be classed as the same. For all their claims of being different – for all their supposedly different aims – after weeks of reading what they have been buying on their own behalf with my money, I think we can class the elected representatives of those parties as the same. Leeches. And we need to punish those parties to show such behaviour isn’t acceptable. Even if it is just in this election, show just how you cannot accept such egregious troughing on the part of our MPs.

So then we have UKIP. I think UKIP are going to well in these elections. They will be the natural party for so many people if they want to register a protest vote. Yet I find myself questioning whether UKIP have actually earned the support they will get this week. The answer has to be no. Given the vicious infighting and the constant attempts to undermine their leader, UKIP have shown all the forward thinking of a suicidal man on a bridge. Had we not had the steady drip of the expenses outrages over the past few weeks, UKIP would be staring at electoral oblivion. Sure, luck is undoubtedly a factor in politics. But UKIP have been luckier than most. And there is always the nagging feeling with UKIP that the extremists in their membership – the petty Little Englanders who are members purely because they are too anti-social to stay in the Tories – may actually succeed in one of their coup d’états, and replace Farage.

Then we have Libertas. Who are like UKIP but slightly different. In name, if nothing else. They don’t seem to really be offering anything that other parties aren’t already offering – other than being newer. The Euro-sceptic side of British Politics already has a party struggling to make a breakthrough – adding another one to the mix probably won’t help anyone.

And there we have the problem. I want to vote – I will vote – but none of the parties represent me or, as arrogant as it may sound, deserve my vote. I’d be intrigued to hear how the readers of this blog are going to vote and why, but at this point I’m guessing that I won’t be alone in going to vote this Thursday and only really making up my mind when I am in the voting booth, preparing to put my “x” in one of the boxes.

*Good luck to those who are standing, btw. 

Don't Vote Green

Here's a new one on me - the scandal around MPs' expenses means we should vote Green*. No, really - this appears to be part of their campaign in the upcoming Euro-elections. Politically, it is a very interesting idea - and does make me wonder why the Greens have moved away from/added another plank to the single issue of environmentalism that has left them to such ferociously useless election results in the past.

I suspect the economy is the answer. Being environmentally friendly, for a lot of people, is something to do when you're feeling economically secure. And Green issues tend to be more prominent in national politics when the economy is doing well. The Greens do better when you can afford to worry about climate change and so on. If you are ever so inclined to worry about such things. 

It follows that the recession will have hit the Greens badly. Note the disappearance of the Green case from the rhetoric of our political leaders. Recently, all Brown, Cameron and Clegg (on the rare occasions when he has been bothered to open his gob) have been going on about the economy and, even more recently, have been trying to out do each other with apologies for the gross abuse of the expenses system. Climate change etc has vanished from their agendas. Because the voters care more about the economy, about taxation, and now about how much they are being fleeced by MPs through their "self-regulated" expenses system. 

So the way the Greens have launched their campaign is actually quite canny, particularly for a group of tree-huggers who normally work hard at detaching themselves from political reality. They are talking about the issue of the moment - expenses. And also talking about how their investment in green industries could create jobs.

Yet, voting Green is still a really, really dumb thing to do. They may be more trustworthy than the three main parties when it comes to expenses; I can't be bothered at the moment to do the research on just how much their existing MEPs have taken from the EU. But when you take a look at their page on Wikipedia (which their own site directs you to) you see some *interesting* policies:

Like many Green parties, the Green Party of England and Wales does not consider economic growth to be the only or the best indicator of progress, as it sees endless growth as incompatible with a planet of finite resources. It is against mass consumption and destructive consumer lifestyles and hopes to encourage an economy built on sustainability and long-term use.

For many people, struggling with recession and desperately hoping for more economic growth to help guarantee their job and ensure that their house maintains value, this must be more than a little wounding. And for those looking for a little more justice in the tax system, well, the Green Party definitely isn't the way to go:

On taxation, the Green Party believes in increasing the top rate of income tax to make the system more redistributive. It is in favour of a more progressive system of corporation tax to encourage small businesses over large corporations. It supports eco-taxes, such as those on packaging and carbon emissions, along the lines of the 'polluter pays' principle.

Old school Social Democracy - worthy of the old school Labour movement. As is this:

Also, the party wants an increase in trade union rights and the renationalisation of the railways and other public utilities.

So, the Green Party wants to increase taxes on the rich and on business, at the same as nationalising things. This all sounds a lot like Labour under Gordon Brown. Or the Labour Party under Michael Foot.

I'm mildly impressed that the Green Party have tried to grab the political moment and try to make the case for them being the real alternative to the main parties. Unfortunately, they aren't that different from the Labour Party of the 1980's and their policies reek of economic naivety. Anyone thinking about voting Green, well, I'd urge you not to. You're not voting for change. On so many levels, you'd be voting for a worse version of the status quo.

*As a heads up, voting for a party in the Euro-Elections will have zero impact on the expenses system. That is created by and regulated by MPs. in order to deal with that, we need a General Election. So on this level - as well as many others - the Green case is very, very weak.