Interesting article by Spectator editor Fraser Nelson in today Telegraph’s (you can read it here), entitled “Our politics is bursting with life – it’s the parties that are dying”. As proof, he cites the precipitate drop in the three main parties’ membership numbers (the excellent Taxpayers Alliance boasts more members than the Libdems), and the fact that party conferences are now run as a lobbyists’ jamboree rather than a gathering of the faithful (many Tory MPs can’t even be arsed to turn up to their own conference).Why this has happened doesn’t require a lot of insight – there’s nothing much to choose between the parties, whose leaderships stopped listening to their supporters a long time ago, apart from the six weeks before a general election, when their lying and dissembling reaches a nauseating crescendo as they all pretend to be staunchly right-wing. Once the results have been confirmed, they all shuffle back to the sludgy, grey, meaningless, soulless, valueless non-political centre.
What’s truly offensive about all this is the role of the liberal media. They’re always publishing articles and blogs and holding televised debates and radio programmes about why voters have lost interest in party politics. Yet when there’s a groundswell of support for non-centrist parties or right-wing movements, liberal commentators here and in the States get huffy and then hysterical and start pouring scorn on the morons who have eschewed the traditional parties – the very morons whose lack of interest in mainstream politics they’ve been wringing their hands over.
In the UK, the most biting scorn is reserved for Ukip, which increasing numbers of traditional Thatcherites are discovering is a natural home from home, now that the Tory Party has been hijacked by leaders who don’t believe in anything. In the States, of course, Tea Party supporters and their representatives in the Republican Party are treated as if they’re either too stupid to fart and chew gum at the same time – or criminally insane Nazis who want to exterminate everyone who isn’t like them. The only grass-roots (pseudo-) political movement the liberal media seemed to respect was the rag-bag of nihilists, anarchists, scroungers, schoolchildren and witless, bone-idle “students” who made up the Occupy (My Mom’s Basement) Shambles. Unlike the Tea Party or Ukip, the Occupy Movement barely exists any longer – thank God, because most of its adherents really were too stupid to fart and chew gum at the same time, and they all wanted to exterminate everyone who wasn’t like them (i.e. 95% of the adult population).
The plain truth is that the mainstream liberal media can’t abide democracy, because most people aren’t liberal. New York Times journalists and BBC Political Correspondents would rather hold their noses and vote Tory or Republican than countenance any non-liberal grass-roots movement ever gaining any form of genuine political power. Consequently when any non-mainstream politician emerges capable of articulating the hopes, fears and values of the conservative/right-wing majority, they’re invariably subjected to a Goebbels-style campaign of vicious, hectoring, lie-fuelled, sneering abuse.
Of course, many conservative MSM commentators play the same game (another Matthew D’Ancona piece staunchly upholding the political status quo and I’ll start losing the will to live). It’s only natural to fear developments that threaten a political landscape that you’re familiar with and which essentially provides you with a living.
The next time (and it won’t be long coming) a mainstream liberal media type asks why you and I have grown tired of party politics and then proceeds to contemptuously dismiss the likes of Ukip or the Tea Party as BNP clones, you’ll know that they’re perfectly happy wallowing in the pallid, oozing sludge of the centre-ground where politicians and commentators who are merely fascinated by the exercise of power but only vaguely interested in what that power is used to achieve – tend to congeal.
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