FrankTrollman wrote:Koumei wrote:...wait, they're taking the Mike Mearls approach? Has Cameron not seen the kind of failure that marketing produces?
Cameron is caught between a rock and a hard place. He can't run on his achievements, because his government has been such a disaster that he is in the running with Chamberlain and Lord North for worst Prime Minister. And he has this other problem, which is the United Kingdom Independence Party. They are trying to take over as the Conservative party in parliament, and putting up a good showing of it.
Now, with a name like UKIP, you
know it's going to be awesome. The United Kingdom is
already independent. In fact, it's the oldest independent country in the world today. Other countries getting independence
from it is something people have been fighting and dying over for nearly a quarter of a millennium. The idea that independence for the United Kingdom over what they already have had for longer than any other nation on Earth could be a thing that could even happen, let alone be an issue worth discussing to the point of naming your political party after it is absurd. And yet: here we are.
UKIP gets their raison d'etre from being "Eurosceptics" (that's spelled with a "c" because British people). Basically, the European Parliament is by several measures the most corrupt and unresponsive legislature in the history of mankind. And that includes the classical Roman Senate which is appointed by the Senate, and the Soviet Duma, where people were only offered one candidate to vote for by the Communist Party. So you can get a lot of traction with voters yelling about how the European Parliament is shitty and unresponsive. And here's the best part: once they get voted into the European Parliament
they don't have to do anything! They get their voters riled up with stories of European Parliamentarians not showing up for work and taking huge bribes, meaning that they can slack off all day and rake in enormous graft
and this makes them more popular. As long as they aren't an actual majority in parliament, they can just shit all over the legislative process and engage in comically ludicrous kickback schemes
and get rewarded for it.
So the UKIP has been doing very well in European Parliament elections in the UK. Last election, they got the most votes of any party contesting that election, which means suddenly everyone has to take them seriously. So they now have the clout to contest the regular parliament elections
and they are doing that. And here's the thing: they don't have a shitty record while being in charge the way the actual Tories do. They can make all the feel-good Conservative promises they want, and
don't have to talk around their own legacy of failure. They've never been in charge of anything, so they can take everything they want from the Conservatives' platform and can also simply ignore any uncomfortable questions they don't feel like fielding.
It's kind of like the Tea Party in the US. Or in Czech Republic, kind of like TOP09, Public Affairs, New Dawn, ANO11, ProPrahu, Heads Up!, and all the others I can't recall off the top of my head. Right wing
policies don't work, but right wing
slogans do. So if your conservative parties are flagging under the weight of having repeatedly failed to deliver the economic boomtimes they repeatedly assure us will come from slashing the tax bills of rich people and paying for it by slashing the funding of programmes for poor people, you can always just
create a new party from scratch. Repackage the same tired playbook only you claim it's brand new scrappy underdog ideas and deny that it has ever failed - let alone that it's pretty much exactly the deal that conservatives have been offering since the 1920s with no successes to speak of anywhere in the world during that entire near century of repetition.
Anyway, the UK's conservatives are running scared, and that's reasonable for them to do because they have lunatic fringe teabaggers saying everything they want to say plus a bunch of insane and impossible promises that don't even make sense and no one calls them on it because they are new. And their reaction to this is to make promises that are
even more outlandish and insane.
-Username17