Alex Richards
Donor
There's a lot going on here.
And good lord Farage remoulding the SDP into a modern UKIP. This is inspired.
TLIAD: If You Want To Know Who We Are
- Thread starter Uhura's Mazda
- Start date
There's a lot going on here.
And good lord Farage remoulding the SDP into a modern UKIP. This is inspired.
I declare this TL to be 100% aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Nigel Farage turning a National Liberal SDP that merged with the CPGB into an alt-UKIP is certainly the funniest thing I've read all week.
Great stuff!
Great stuff!
Uhura's Mazda
Banned
You see, what a lot of people miss about Richard Huggett is that he was actually quite clever - for instance, when he stood as a Literal Democrat he came up with a spiel which was basically about Direct Democracy, and he called it Literal Democracy, because it was literally people power.
I don't think you'd get that kind of dedication from rolleyes vote-splitters nowadays.
Alex Richards
Donor
I assume the fact that the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats and the SDP were all standing for election at the same time and had MPs prevented the Electoral Commission from clamping down on that sort of thing?
Uhura's Mazda
Banned
Exactly.
Pretty much the opposite: the Owenite SDP weren't particularly lefty, and certainly didn't have much appeal to the voters who would later become RedKIP. This is old-school UKIP, still basically the Conservatives but Eurosceptic and a bit mental. But this time they have had a constant parliamentary presence, which both increases their institutional capacity to win seats (but not really against Labour) and decreases the cultural impact when they do.
Uhura's Mazda
Banned
3: And A Right Good Kaftan, Too
Where Nigel Farage, the affably intolerant bloke down the pub, has shaped the recent history of the Social Democrats, it was Steve Radford who formed that of their Liberal counterparts. Indeed, shortly after taking over the party, he ditched the clunky old name of ‘Meadowcroft-Radford List’ and replaced it with the snappier ‘Radford’s Liberals’. For a long time, they were indeed Radford’s Liberals, unified by the strength of personality of this bald-headed Liverpudlian bruiser.
Radford is a serious, slightly brusque man, who rarely smiles - even when I arrived at the trendy wine bar in Brussels where we had arranged to meet, he merely nodded in my direction. He sticks out like a sore thumb against the mass of millennials. He has been an elected representative since before some of them were born.
First elected to the European Parliament in 1996 in the Rheged Euro-by-election and simultaneously to the Commons for Liverpool West Derby, he gave up the European seat to Michael Meadowcroft three years later. His former Leader paints a picture of a capable man with an ambition to corral the Liberals under his own sway. He spent the late 1990s and early 2000s on almost-constant speaking tours while Meadowcroft was distracted by the duties of leadership and his seats in Europe and Westminster. Consigned solely to Brussels from 2000, Meadowcroft was less able to give quick quotes to journalists, and was therefore progressively sidelined in the media to the point where the leadership change in 2005 came with a palpable sigh of relief that the whole period was over.
I ask Radford how he differs from Meadowcroft in terms of policy: “Michael was always more of an environmentalist than myself,” he says, “but it was mostly a matter of personality. He would say he was urbane, but as far as I was concerned he was weak and uncharismatic.” As far as I myself am concerned, this is really a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Radford moved the Liberals onto an unequivocally centre-left footing, taking advantage of the downfall of Labour. After losing the 2005 election, their new leader in Gordon Brown failed to take them back ahead of the Conservatives in the polls, and only succeeded in denying them a majority in 2010. So Radford began to make the nuclear-free policy a centrepiece of the Liberal offer, along with pulling out of the occupation of North Korea in a peaceful manner. This differentiated him from the Lib Dems, who had been broadly supportive of the War in Korea in principle, and took the ground of Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace Party, which soon gave up the ghost.
“But we always held to the old Liberal values.” Indeed he did. Steve Radford and Fran Oborski would make frequent speeches in the Commons on such subjects as STV (no longer Lib Dem policy), a georgist Land Tax (no longer Lib Dem policy) and free university tuition along with a sharp reduction in student numbers (the opposite of current Lib Dem policy) until Oborski lost her seat in 2010.
In a way, this loss was inevitable. She had originally won the seat on the back of a fight to save the Kidderminster A&E, and as that fight had been unequivocally lost, all that was left was a vaguely localist platform for which her remaining Councillors attempted to hold their Wyre Forest District Council seats. But losses mounted, and the Tories regained the seat, leaving Radford alone. In the meantime, Rob Wheway had lost the other Liberal seat in Europe, that of Mercia, in 2009. It was looking like the end of Radford’s Liberals - the old policies no longer held the allure that they once did. Even a commitment to a Universal Basic Income in 2015 didn’t save Radford’s own seat of Liverpool West Derby, and from then on they had no seats in Westminster.
I ask how Radford felt at losing his seat: “Disappointed. It was especially bad, because the Eurosceptic vote almost all went to the fundamentally illiberal SDP.” Indeed - another cornerstone of Radford’s Liberals was that the UK would do much better outside of the EU. It would be “able to renationalise the water and the railways, and govern ourselves without the bureaucracy and autocracy of the Union”.
But perhaps he ought to have been relieved. By his own admission, the Liberals “stand outside the post-Thatcherite consensus” and to have a party genuinely espousing devolving power to regions and neighbourhoods, to dismantle nuclear weapons, and dismantle the post-World Trade Center terror laws is… well, positively quaint. Perhaps the last time the Liberals were in the news for anything good was in 2007, when Radford gave a barnstorming speech against Hague’s 50-day detention bill. It passed.
“The idea of our civil liberties being impinged upon, with everything from ASBOs to so-called Terror Prevention legislation to this new Online Surveillance Protocols Act, fills me with dread, and it depresses me to see so little opposition to all of this. Not only from parties in Parliament, but from the general public.” Radford lapses once more into restrained silence. The pro-Radford Liberals today straddle this mix of economic progressivism and individual freedom in society. Socialism for people who don’t like Socialism, you might say. It makes sense that they haven’t done very well since Kendall took over the Labour Party.
Their one seat at this point is Radford’s in the European Parliament, the one he first won in 1996. After Meadowcroft gave it up in 2009, it passed to one of Radford’s supporters in Liverpool, Hazel Williams, and then to Ann Hines in 2014, who had until then been the Liberal group leader and Leader of the Opposition on Liverpool City Council. However, she resigned her seat shortly after the general election in 2015, and the ensuing by-election, which attracted a breathtaking 4.3% turnout at great expense (the constituency covers Cumbria, Lancashire and Merseyside) was won by Radford. “It was all completely above-board,” he tells me, “there was no pressure to hand the seat back to me. I was just the most likely candidate to win the by-election.”
Rightly or wrongly, this type of thing has contributed to an image of the party - which has a membership of just 4,000 - as a personal plaything of Radford, in which all patronage depends on obsequious loyalty to the Leader. This is certainly the impression given by bitter ex-Liberals who have left the party due to lack of patronage or personal disputes with Radford. But when a man has to constantly deny ludicrous allegations such as the famous one that he kept one of his Liverpool Councillors as a gimp in his cellar (“I don’t even have a cellar!” Radford laughs, in the first smile I’ve seen on his face so far), you kind of have to feel sympathy. And as we are finding out, there is a significant anti-Radfordite movement within the party.
But the party’s brand has suffered. It wasn’t just a mindless rebrand that gave the party it’s minimalist logo, it’s new teal colour scheme, and the name ‘Radical Party’ in 2011. This was partly to minimise the image of being a Radford vehicle; partly to distance the party from the increasingly unpopular Liberal Democrats, who had gone into coalition with the Tories the year before; and partly to start afresh from the scandals that periodically rock the group. These are storms in a teacup, but it’s hard to keep the teacup scratch-free when a storm is raging within. The Hein story in Edinburgh, and the enormously fun Crystal Methodist saga, are some of quite a few which contribute to the Radicals’ public image of being (in David Cameron’s words) “a den of fruitcakes, loonies and sexual deviants”.
Radford merely responds “Mr Cameron made a public apology for that remark”.
But what of Radford’s achievements? Well, he rattles off a few, but they are of so little consequence that I don’t even bother to note them down. Perhaps this is the price of being outside Government: while Michael Meadowcroft was part of Major’s government, Radford has been significantly less involved than the Lib Dems, One Nation or the SDP since then - he shouts from the sidelines. Being outside the post-Thatcherite consensus means that you don’t get to shape it. Perhaps that’s better than declining to the status of the “inveterate opportunists” in the Lib Dems.
Perhaps Radford’s continued relevance lies in his role in opposing the Transatlantic Trade Agreement. He is one of the leading British opponents, working with the Socialist Alliance and even the Scottish Greens to organise submissions against clauses which risk placing the NHS into competition clauses. Working with the Greens, by the way, is a major breakthrough - from 2004 to 2011, Radford’s party was officially the British branch of the European Green Party, which still rankles with the actual Greens. They sit together in the Greens-EFA group in the European Parliament now, but there is still coldness. The TATA promises to unite the British Left in opposition to the Kendallites, which would be a very interesting development: it could even create a large-scale counterweight to the growth of the SDP.
That’s if Radford can control his recalcitrant membership. Late in 2015, they formally divided into two factions, and while the Radfordite Radical Action group seems to be the larger, the opposing Liberty faction appears to contain most of the younger members. There is perhaps a generational shift, similar to that which replaced Meadowcroft, waiting to happen in what we must now call the Radical Party.
“I’m not worried,” says Radford, “my Party in engaged in building something larger than itself, and those that wish to tear us down will always point to internal divisions - but I say that the factionalisation is a good thing: it proves that we have enough members to fill two factions!”
How much longer the Radicals will remain Radford’s party, of course, we will have to wait and see.
Radford is a serious, slightly brusque man, who rarely smiles - even when I arrived at the trendy wine bar in Brussels where we had arranged to meet, he merely nodded in my direction. He sticks out like a sore thumb against the mass of millennials. He has been an elected representative since before some of them were born.
First elected to the European Parliament in 1996 in the Rheged Euro-by-election and simultaneously to the Commons for Liverpool West Derby, he gave up the European seat to Michael Meadowcroft three years later. His former Leader paints a picture of a capable man with an ambition to corral the Liberals under his own sway. He spent the late 1990s and early 2000s on almost-constant speaking tours while Meadowcroft was distracted by the duties of leadership and his seats in Europe and Westminster. Consigned solely to Brussels from 2000, Meadowcroft was less able to give quick quotes to journalists, and was therefore progressively sidelined in the media to the point where the leadership change in 2005 came with a palpable sigh of relief that the whole period was over.
I ask Radford how he differs from Meadowcroft in terms of policy: “Michael was always more of an environmentalist than myself,” he says, “but it was mostly a matter of personality. He would say he was urbane, but as far as I was concerned he was weak and uncharismatic.” As far as I myself am concerned, this is really a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Radford moved the Liberals onto an unequivocally centre-left footing, taking advantage of the downfall of Labour. After losing the 2005 election, their new leader in Gordon Brown failed to take them back ahead of the Conservatives in the polls, and only succeeded in denying them a majority in 2010. So Radford began to make the nuclear-free policy a centrepiece of the Liberal offer, along with pulling out of the occupation of North Korea in a peaceful manner. This differentiated him from the Lib Dems, who had been broadly supportive of the War in Korea in principle, and took the ground of Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace Party, which soon gave up the ghost.
“But we always held to the old Liberal values.” Indeed he did. Steve Radford and Fran Oborski would make frequent speeches in the Commons on such subjects as STV (no longer Lib Dem policy), a georgist Land Tax (no longer Lib Dem policy) and free university tuition along with a sharp reduction in student numbers (the opposite of current Lib Dem policy) until Oborski lost her seat in 2010.
In a way, this loss was inevitable. She had originally won the seat on the back of a fight to save the Kidderminster A&E, and as that fight had been unequivocally lost, all that was left was a vaguely localist platform for which her remaining Councillors attempted to hold their Wyre Forest District Council seats. But losses mounted, and the Tories regained the seat, leaving Radford alone. In the meantime, Rob Wheway had lost the other Liberal seat in Europe, that of Mercia, in 2009. It was looking like the end of Radford’s Liberals - the old policies no longer held the allure that they once did. Even a commitment to a Universal Basic Income in 2015 didn’t save Radford’s own seat of Liverpool West Derby, and from then on they had no seats in Westminster.
I ask how Radford felt at losing his seat: “Disappointed. It was especially bad, because the Eurosceptic vote almost all went to the fundamentally illiberal SDP.” Indeed - another cornerstone of Radford’s Liberals was that the UK would do much better outside of the EU. It would be “able to renationalise the water and the railways, and govern ourselves without the bureaucracy and autocracy of the Union”.
But perhaps he ought to have been relieved. By his own admission, the Liberals “stand outside the post-Thatcherite consensus” and to have a party genuinely espousing devolving power to regions and neighbourhoods, to dismantle nuclear weapons, and dismantle the post-World Trade Center terror laws is… well, positively quaint. Perhaps the last time the Liberals were in the news for anything good was in 2007, when Radford gave a barnstorming speech against Hague’s 50-day detention bill. It passed.
“The idea of our civil liberties being impinged upon, with everything from ASBOs to so-called Terror Prevention legislation to this new Online Surveillance Protocols Act, fills me with dread, and it depresses me to see so little opposition to all of this. Not only from parties in Parliament, but from the general public.” Radford lapses once more into restrained silence. The pro-Radford Liberals today straddle this mix of economic progressivism and individual freedom in society. Socialism for people who don’t like Socialism, you might say. It makes sense that they haven’t done very well since Kendall took over the Labour Party.
Their one seat at this point is Radford’s in the European Parliament, the one he first won in 1996. After Meadowcroft gave it up in 2009, it passed to one of Radford’s supporters in Liverpool, Hazel Williams, and then to Ann Hines in 2014, who had until then been the Liberal group leader and Leader of the Opposition on Liverpool City Council. However, she resigned her seat shortly after the general election in 2015, and the ensuing by-election, which attracted a breathtaking 4.3% turnout at great expense (the constituency covers Cumbria, Lancashire and Merseyside) was won by Radford. “It was all completely above-board,” he tells me, “there was no pressure to hand the seat back to me. I was just the most likely candidate to win the by-election.”
Rightly or wrongly, this type of thing has contributed to an image of the party - which has a membership of just 4,000 - as a personal plaything of Radford, in which all patronage depends on obsequious loyalty to the Leader. This is certainly the impression given by bitter ex-Liberals who have left the party due to lack of patronage or personal disputes with Radford. But when a man has to constantly deny ludicrous allegations such as the famous one that he kept one of his Liverpool Councillors as a gimp in his cellar (“I don’t even have a cellar!” Radford laughs, in the first smile I’ve seen on his face so far), you kind of have to feel sympathy. And as we are finding out, there is a significant anti-Radfordite movement within the party.
But the party’s brand has suffered. It wasn’t just a mindless rebrand that gave the party it’s minimalist logo, it’s new teal colour scheme, and the name ‘Radical Party’ in 2011. This was partly to minimise the image of being a Radford vehicle; partly to distance the party from the increasingly unpopular Liberal Democrats, who had gone into coalition with the Tories the year before; and partly to start afresh from the scandals that periodically rock the group. These are storms in a teacup, but it’s hard to keep the teacup scratch-free when a storm is raging within. The Hein story in Edinburgh, and the enormously fun Crystal Methodist saga, are some of quite a few which contribute to the Radicals’ public image of being (in David Cameron’s words) “a den of fruitcakes, loonies and sexual deviants”.
Radford merely responds “Mr Cameron made a public apology for that remark”.
But what of Radford’s achievements? Well, he rattles off a few, but they are of so little consequence that I don’t even bother to note them down. Perhaps this is the price of being outside Government: while Michael Meadowcroft was part of Major’s government, Radford has been significantly less involved than the Lib Dems, One Nation or the SDP since then - he shouts from the sidelines. Being outside the post-Thatcherite consensus means that you don’t get to shape it. Perhaps that’s better than declining to the status of the “inveterate opportunists” in the Lib Dems.
Perhaps Radford’s continued relevance lies in his role in opposing the Transatlantic Trade Agreement. He is one of the leading British opponents, working with the Socialist Alliance and even the Scottish Greens to organise submissions against clauses which risk placing the NHS into competition clauses. Working with the Greens, by the way, is a major breakthrough - from 2004 to 2011, Radford’s party was officially the British branch of the European Green Party, which still rankles with the actual Greens. They sit together in the Greens-EFA group in the European Parliament now, but there is still coldness. The TATA promises to unite the British Left in opposition to the Kendallites, which would be a very interesting development: it could even create a large-scale counterweight to the growth of the SDP.
That’s if Radford can control his recalcitrant membership. Late in 2015, they formally divided into two factions, and while the Radfordite Radical Action group seems to be the larger, the opposing Liberty faction appears to contain most of the younger members. There is perhaps a generational shift, similar to that which replaced Meadowcroft, waiting to happen in what we must now call the Radical Party.
“I’m not worried,” says Radford, “my Party in engaged in building something larger than itself, and those that wish to tear us down will always point to internal divisions - but I say that the factionalisation is a good thing: it proves that we have enough members to fill two factions!”
How much longer the Radicals will remain Radford’s party, of course, we will have to wait and see.
Just when you though the TL couldn't get any more aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, it just did.
Even in an ATL Radford can't help being associated with rumors of seediness, apparently. And I know I've been lurking in the British politics thread too much because I actually laughed at the metal trader bit.
One of the things I like about this type of bottom-up, focus-on-the-minnows TL is the way the wider implications only become apparent slowly - has the splintering of the Liberal movement led to a UK less friendly to civil liberties?
One of the things I like about this type of bottom-up, focus-on-the-minnows TL is the way the wider implications only become apparent slowly - has the splintering of the Liberal movement led to a UK less friendly to civil liberties?
Uhura's Mazda
Banned
Certainly Labour have become much less keen on the whole liberalism thing after Blair lost in 2005, with the most statist impulses of New and Old Labour coming to the fore. But because the Tories are taking in a lot of voters who would otherwise go Lib Dem in the South West and the shires, the liberal/libertarian tendency within their party is growing - hence Carswell as leader post-2015.
Uhura's Mazda
Banned
There Grew a Little Flower
So far in this feature, I have been interviewing figures from minor parties which have been prominent for two decades or more. Well, the Greens (the Green Party of England and Wales, to be exact) have existed for longer than any of them, but only came to prominence a couple of years ago, when Julia Stephenson scraped into the European Parliament in the London North 5-seater. The Scottish Greens had held seats in the Scottish Assembly from 1998 to 2006, but the rest of the country remained cold to the charms of the Greens until the collapse of the Lib Dems after the coalition.
Stephenson’s fellow Principal Speaker of the Party is Zac Goldsmith, who invites me a to a pub in the vicinity of London County Hall. When I catch sight of him, he is raising a pint to his lips with both hands. It has been remarked before that Goldsmith, editor of The Ecologist until 2009, is an awkward man, but I didn’t have him down as being barely human.
Zac - he insists that I call him Zac - comes from a prominent family. His sister Jemima Khan will be well-known to readers, his father James Goldsmith was a French Eurosceptic MEP who donated large sums to the SDP, and his uncle Teddy was an early adopter of Green ideas. Zac himself was a member of the Conservative Party until 2005: “For a long time, the Greens were a home for people too left-wing for the Labour Party - most of the actual ecologists had drifted Meadowcroft’s way, people like Jonathan Porritt and Paul Ekins. But with the War in Korea, a lot of those people were torn from us by Galloway and Corbyn, with their Peace Party. Our membership more than halved. But from that transition, a lot of the old people came back and we became a much more cohesive unit.”
In 2005, the Peace Party lost all its seats (although they came within 12 votes of gaining Coventry North East) and the subsequent discovery that North Korea had indeed been in possession of WMDs stripped the party of all but its most pacifist supporters. But they had seen life outside the Green Party, and with the leftward turn of Labour under Brown and subsequently McDonnell, the Greens seemed less necessary. McDonnell’s ideas about local democracy, indeed, seemed designed to squeeze that wing of the Greens out of the market.
Subsequent Principal Speakers, Jenny Jones and Clive Lord among them, were focussed more on electoralism and centralisation than ascetic Rightness on the fringes of politics. This is not to say that the Left of the Green Party was absolutely wrong-footed, as Zac Goldsmith explains: “My wing of the Party, and the recruits we picked up from the death-throes of Radford’s cult, were all fully behind Sara Parkin’s proposal to replace the Principal Speakers with a single Leader. Caroline Lucas, an ex-Radical, gave a very persuasive speech. But the old guard rallied all their supporters and forced us to back down. It was a good deal: they gave way on a significant body of policy.”
People like Zac, and Julia Stephenson (now notorious for her comments on “the free market of attractiveness”) and Vanessa Hudson were key members of the Executive which shaped modern Green policy. These included a statement that only the free market could resolve environmental issues for good, a much-discussed promise to create an Environmental Service system whereby everyone coming out of school would be forced to spend a year planting trees and working in recycling centres, and of course the controversial ‘Steady State Immigration’ platform in which Britain’s borders would conform to a one-in-one-out policy to protect the environment from untrammelled growth.
“Part of the objective of these ideas,” says Zac, “is to create a genuine discussion about the environment in British political discourse. Our ideas were never dinner party material when we were all about empowering parish councils to commission solar-powered streetlights.” And he has a point. The Greens had never troubled the pollsters until 2010, when they exceeded 1% for the first time with 143 candidates. They even saved half a dozen deposits in places like Brighton Pavilion, Bury St Edmunds and North Herefordshire. This couldn’t have happened without the increased attention that started to come from large public press conferences and publicity stunts with divisive policies. The divisiveness, to be sure, was felt within the party as well. A splinter group called the Green Democrats split off in 2012, but sank without a trace, although it controls Frome Town Council with an iron fist.
With 28 councillors in principal authorities, the mainstream Greens seem to have made a success of it, joining the ranks of the Radicals, SDP, BNP and One Nation, who all have fewer than 100 councillors. Their major success came in 2014, though. “The last time the Lib Dems made themselves unelectable, in the European elections of 1989, we got 15%, but we didn’t get a single seat because of the electoral system. This time, we got something in the order of 2% and Julia got in on Lib Dem and Radical preferences.” Julia Stephenson, until then a columnist for the Daily Mail, has made regular appearances on every TV programme from Question Time to The News Quiz to Clarkson (where the eponymous host made quite a few cringeworthy remarks about her figure) and has put the Green Party on the map. They improved their vote to 2.5% in the 2015 general election and came second in the Isle of Wight. And they outpolled the much more left-wing Scottish Greens by a factor of two to one.
That election, in a roundabout way, brings us to the Greens’ second major success. Despite regional devolution being one of Liz Kendall’s promises in her leadership challenge against John McDonnell in 2014, nobody expected any of it to actually be implemented. And indeed it hasn’t, not even the Welsh Assembly (which is supposed to be due to Labour’s disappointing results there in the general election). But despite the resounding failure of the London devolution referendum in 1997, Kendall has gone ahead with it without a referendum. Zac Goldsmith was the Green candidate for Mayor: “I’ve caught a lot of flak for that, I admit. All of that heirloom stuff was really a distraction away from the real issues, and it was downright embarrassing to lose to not just Sadiq, but even Ken Livingstone. I didn’t even know the Peace Party still existed.”
The main story, though, was Zac’s victory in the three-seat constituency of Richmond and Kingston in the London Assembly, which actually has more power than the Mayor himself. “Yes, and that proved to everybody that the fuddy-duddy old third parties are no longer electable. The Lib Dems and Radicals didn’t win a seat between them, and even the SDP were beaten off in Bromley. No, what we saw was the Independent Working Class Association winning in Islington and Hackney, the BNP in Barking and Havering, and myself in the West. We are the parties of the future, for better or worse.”
With one delegate in Europe and one in County Hall, it is perhaps too soon to draw those sorts of conclusions. But the South-West of London used to be fertile territory for the Lib Dems. They now seem to be in a state of permanent decline, having attracted just 3% of the vote in the last election, and sitting with Zac Goldsmith it doesn’t seem too ridiculous to imagine that the Greens will displace them across the country as well as in one corner of London.
Zac Goldsmith has a sort of charisma vacuum, but a vacuum still pulls you in. He isn’t a crusading campaigner or an impenetrable oddball, like most of the other third party leaders I’ve met, more a sort of Tory with a conscience. Which is perhaps the reason for his party’s recent successes, straddling the border between iconoclasm and Establishment. The Greens are people to watch.
This TL is the cray-cray, and is also awesome. I'm still glad I don't live there, though...
Uhura's Mazda
Banned
Conclusion
A year ago, in the summer of 2016, when we still had the Pound, when Hillary Clinton was still ordering drone-strikes on Yemen, and when Kurt Cobain was still alive, I set out to interview as many minor party leaders as I could. Quite a lot of them, particularly those with time on their hands, actually agreed to meet me, but others disappointed me. I would have liked to tick the SNP and Plaid Cymru off my list, with 8 and 2 MPs respectively, but it was not to be. I must also admit that I sent requests to the leaders of the Peace Party and various socialist parties with which it was once in league, but never followed up on the responses I received. I didn’t think that the general readership would like to be confronted with write-ups of discussions with dull Marxists with tiny numbers of people in local government.
I was also anxious to meet Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, and to compare this new brand of populism to that of Nigel Farage. But Griffin cancelled on me due to a prior commitment, which I later discovered was a picket against a mosque in East London. He currently seems to be superseding the SDP in terms of opposition to Europe and the Greens in terms of his dedication to a bucolic vision of England. The establishment of his ‘Greenshirt’ litter-pickers early this year seems to be one of the major reason for the vertiginous decline of the Greens in recent polls. The BNP, by contrast, are now on 4%.
Another man I regret missing out on is Robert Kilroy-Silk. He entered the European Parliament on the SDP ticket in 2014 and pushed the apparently well-established Nigel Farage out of both the leadership and the party by the end of 2015. I was keen to see whether his reputation as a slimey, smug has-been had any basis in the truth of his personality, but I guess leaders of parties which are haemorrhaging support don’t tend to give ammunition to the media if they can avoid it. The Romans put much stock in the concept of a Fatal Flaw: Kilroy’s must have been Vanitas, and this vanity has opened up a dangerous gap on the right for the BNP, a traditional far-right party, to rise. Meanwhile, Farage (although initially expected to start his own party to corral his loyalists out of Kilroy’s sway) is spending much more time on American television than in his Orpington constituency. The hope from Faragists seems to be that Jonathan Arnott challenges for the leadership sooner rather than later.
There’s no danger of a leadership contest within the Lib Dems, who also refused my requests for interviews. I was at the Liberal Democrat party conference this week: a dispirited gaggle of pasty, flabby men who flocked to the questionable delights of Portsmouth to trade thirty-year-old gossip about notorious activists and Councillors. The Young Liberal sideshow, into which I poked my head at one point, consisted largely of shifty-looking young men in tweed, and failed to fill the rather small lecture theatre they had booked. I have heard it said that they have fallen below ten thousand members in total, but as they haven't published the relevant figures since 2005, this remains an estimate. Lord Clegg, of One Nation, spent much of the weekend manning his party’s stall in the vestibule. There wasn’t much interest. People were there to see the MPs’ speeches and not much else. Between Rusbridger’s on the Saturday morning and GVJ’s just before Thurso came on 24 hours later, little happened but drinking.
Perhaps the minor party that has undergone the most major turnabout since last year is the Radical Party. Steve Radford was ditched as Leader shortly after I met him, although he continues as the party’s representative in Europe. In his place, the libertarian Liberty tendency put in place their own Oliver Wainwright, a great-grandson of former Liberal MP Richard Wainwright and recently named the sexiest man in London. Where Radford was anti-nuclear, the Liberty grouping are downright pacifist. Where he was in favour of a traditional Liberal Land Value Tax, they reject that in favour of a levelling Negative Income Tax. Where Radford stood for Direct Democracy through regular referendums, Wainwright espouses something called ‘Liquid Democracy’, which he claims to understand. The Radicals now support a voucher system for healthcare and education, whereas last year they wished to renationalise the railways and water. There has been a radical change in the party.
And they seem to have struck a chord. They are riding high at 5% in the polls and their candidate, Loz Kaye, was the victor of the Manchester Gorton by-election earlier this year, with the Peace Party’s George Galloway splitting the Labour vote and a horde of young activists from the university enthused to fight for civil liberties against Kendall’s Online Surveillance Protocols Act. The Radicals reportedly have their eyes on a number of other seats in the next elections (presumably in 2019), including Bristol West, for which seat they have already selected local businessman and colourful-trouser-wearer George Ferguson.
A year ago, I asked myself what sort of person voluntarily dedicated their lives to a minor party. Since then, I’ve come across a wide variety of people, from single-issue crusaders, to oddballs distrustful of the authority of a more major party, to people who genuinely just seem to belong where they are. And I think British politics would be a lot poorer without such people - lonely people, constantly aware of their own unpopularity, but enthusiastic about living on the edge between survival and oblivion.
We can only hope that British voters continue to be so adventurous.
I was also anxious to meet Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, and to compare this new brand of populism to that of Nigel Farage. But Griffin cancelled on me due to a prior commitment, which I later discovered was a picket against a mosque in East London. He currently seems to be superseding the SDP in terms of opposition to Europe and the Greens in terms of his dedication to a bucolic vision of England. The establishment of his ‘Greenshirt’ litter-pickers early this year seems to be one of the major reason for the vertiginous decline of the Greens in recent polls. The BNP, by contrast, are now on 4%.
Another man I regret missing out on is Robert Kilroy-Silk. He entered the European Parliament on the SDP ticket in 2014 and pushed the apparently well-established Nigel Farage out of both the leadership and the party by the end of 2015. I was keen to see whether his reputation as a slimey, smug has-been had any basis in the truth of his personality, but I guess leaders of parties which are haemorrhaging support don’t tend to give ammunition to the media if they can avoid it. The Romans put much stock in the concept of a Fatal Flaw: Kilroy’s must have been Vanitas, and this vanity has opened up a dangerous gap on the right for the BNP, a traditional far-right party, to rise. Meanwhile, Farage (although initially expected to start his own party to corral his loyalists out of Kilroy’s sway) is spending much more time on American television than in his Orpington constituency. The hope from Faragists seems to be that Jonathan Arnott challenges for the leadership sooner rather than later.
There’s no danger of a leadership contest within the Lib Dems, who also refused my requests for interviews. I was at the Liberal Democrat party conference this week: a dispirited gaggle of pasty, flabby men who flocked to the questionable delights of Portsmouth to trade thirty-year-old gossip about notorious activists and Councillors. The Young Liberal sideshow, into which I poked my head at one point, consisted largely of shifty-looking young men in tweed, and failed to fill the rather small lecture theatre they had booked. I have heard it said that they have fallen below ten thousand members in total, but as they haven't published the relevant figures since 2005, this remains an estimate. Lord Clegg, of One Nation, spent much of the weekend manning his party’s stall in the vestibule. There wasn’t much interest. People were there to see the MPs’ speeches and not much else. Between Rusbridger’s on the Saturday morning and GVJ’s just before Thurso came on 24 hours later, little happened but drinking.
Perhaps the minor party that has undergone the most major turnabout since last year is the Radical Party. Steve Radford was ditched as Leader shortly after I met him, although he continues as the party’s representative in Europe. In his place, the libertarian Liberty tendency put in place their own Oliver Wainwright, a great-grandson of former Liberal MP Richard Wainwright and recently named the sexiest man in London. Where Radford was anti-nuclear, the Liberty grouping are downright pacifist. Where he was in favour of a traditional Liberal Land Value Tax, they reject that in favour of a levelling Negative Income Tax. Where Radford stood for Direct Democracy through regular referendums, Wainwright espouses something called ‘Liquid Democracy’, which he claims to understand. The Radicals now support a voucher system for healthcare and education, whereas last year they wished to renationalise the railways and water. There has been a radical change in the party.
And they seem to have struck a chord. They are riding high at 5% in the polls and their candidate, Loz Kaye, was the victor of the Manchester Gorton by-election earlier this year, with the Peace Party’s George Galloway splitting the Labour vote and a horde of young activists from the university enthused to fight for civil liberties against Kendall’s Online Surveillance Protocols Act. The Radicals reportedly have their eyes on a number of other seats in the next elections (presumably in 2019), including Bristol West, for which seat they have already selected local businessman and colourful-trouser-wearer George Ferguson.
A year ago, I asked myself what sort of person voluntarily dedicated their lives to a minor party. Since then, I’ve come across a wide variety of people, from single-issue crusaders, to oddballs distrustful of the authority of a more major party, to people who genuinely just seem to belong where they are. And I think British politics would be a lot poorer without such people - lonely people, constantly aware of their own unpopularity, but enthusiastic about living on the edge between survival and oblivion.
We can only hope that British voters continue to be so adventurous.