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Thursday 25 May 2017

The Official Monster Raving Loony Party Is Too Normal

The OMRLP is short of candidates. Only 12 Loonies have been nominated for GE2017, the fewest since 1987. The problem is that nothing seems whacky anymore. Satire and irony are dead. There’s no competing with the idiocy of the major party manifestos, as the party political machines inhale more and more data from a population hooked on the Daily Mail.

"Shit in, shit out," as a data scientist might say, if quotes from such 'experts' were allowed.

But they're not, which is how Trump got to the White House and why Theresa May was there to sort of hold his hand. 

The "truth" is that the OMRLP could romp home in this election. It just needs to become truly loony. Here are some genuinely ‘strong and stable’ foundations on which to build: 
  • Every university that accepts UK government funding must offer Creationism as a degree course, and as a compulsory module in Archaeology, Anthropology, Education, Geography, Geology, History, Medicine, Physics, Theology and Veterinary Science;
  • All aircraft flying into or from the UK should be fitted with a ChemTrail monitor to measure the quantity of mind-control chemicals they are adding to the atmosphere (ignore these people);
  • All academic research grants should be awarded by a simply voting majority of all the UK's local councillors.
Of course, the OMRLP must also recognise that it is competing with the sheer mendacity of mainstream politicians. It should therefore utterly fail to deliver on any of these cast iron commitments. This will inspire hope that they'll manage it next time, and guarantee progressively more electoral success at GE2018, GE2019, GE2020...


Wednesday 17 May 2017

The Long, Slow Death of UK Party Politics

Every day brings a new low as the UK's political 'leaders' scrape the bottom of the pork barrel for yet another populist gimmick to distract voters from the litter of broken promises and the stench of rotting bureaucracies. While covering the 1972 Presidential campaign, Hunter S. Thompson wrote:
“The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage and whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy—then go back to the office and sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.” Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
He must be howling in his grave.

At some point, you might think, the vast majority of their supporters will see that the Tory-led Brexit is a road to nowhere, or that the UK cannot possibly finance Labour's latest manifesto anymore than it could in the 1970s. The centre ground will re-open to any political party desperate enough to seize it. Politics will be about solving the root causes of genuine problems, rather than dogma and dog whistles for the nostalgic party faithful.

But any such moments of truth are a long way off, and by then the surrounding alternatives will be so bad that voters will have lost all perspective, anyway.

UK politics and its beleaguered public services will have to descend into total chaos before there'll be any meaningful change.


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