British political history is littered with wreckage of fringe parties, from Mosley and the communists to Natural Law and the SDP
There are very few new ideas in politics, only old ones presented in new ways. Mould-breaking new political parties have regularly come and gone in British politics. Only one or two, like Labour, have taken root and prospered. The rest, led by a roster of colourful "men of destiny" including Lord Rothermere, Horatio Bottomley, Oswald Mosley, Desmond Donnelly, James Goldsmith, Robert Kilroy-Silk, and now George Galloway, have sometimes taken off like rockets but have all fallen back to earth like stones.
British political history is littered with the wreckage of fringe parties whose moment briefly seemed to have arrived or which appeared, sometimes to otherwise sensible people, like a good idea at the time. Some of these parties were plain potty, – step forward, or rather, float forward the Yogic fliers of the Natural Law Party. Some were vehicles for delusional egotists on the Roderick Spode model immortalised by PG Wodehouse. Others, like the Communist party or successive parties of the far right from Mosley's fascists to the BNP, never ceased to dream that the old order would one day be overturned in their favour, but it never happened.
Thirty years ago – comfortably leading both the Conservatives and Labour in many of the pre-Falklands opinion polls – the Social Democratic party appeared to be the exception to the rule. The SDP came close to the elusive breakthrough in the 1983 general election. But not close enough. A mere five years later, most of what remained of the SDP voted itself out of existence. It had been another false dawn for new politics. The SDP left a mark, but yet again the system had survived the challenge.
Disenchantment with the established political parties is not a new phenomenon. Now Britain is going through another phase of it, spiced with economic uncertainties across Europe. None of the three major parties seems able to enthuse its own nominal supporters, never mind capture many new ones. But is the eventual shakedown likely to be any different from the failures of the past?
It is, of course, tempting to say yes. Wouldn't it be nice if the world was different? Media organisations, always on the lookout for a new story, are among those who are most easily tempted. Yet, Alex Salmond's revitalised SNP apart, no new force is making itself felt with any consistency. The green landslide stubbornly refuses to happen. Claims that Galloway's byelection victory in Bradford West signifies the arrival of a wider mass movement of opportunist Islamophile leftism seem wildly improbable, though the Labour party is suddenly in a rare state of nerves about it.
The upsurge of media interest in the independent candidate for the London mayoralty, Siobhan Benita, is the latest centrist manifestation of the same perceived volatility. Benita's attraction has much in common with that of the SDP in the 80s – moderate, intelligent, Labour-inclined, interesting ideas, hostile to Ken Livingstone. She might well prove to be an outstanding mayor if she ever got the chance. But the reality is that she is going nowhere without a party, even in a personalised contest like this.
It is the great political conceit of our era that the problem with today's politicians is that none of them is good enough for us. This in turn helps to sustain the general contempt towards politics which runs through television shows like Have I Got News For You or The Thick Of It – and large parts of the online debate too.
It also helps generate a kind of idealised alternative media version of politics, represented a decade ago by West Wing and today by Borgen. Siobhan Benita has sometimes been described as the Borgen candidate, but at least Birgitte Nyborg, the central character of the Danish drama, leads a proper political party. Benita is more like Ros Pritchard, the character played by Jane Horrocks in a 2006 TV drama, who in a mere eight weeks is carried from supermarket manager's office to No 10. But they are all, it seems necessary to repeat, fictions.
Yet the volatility is undeniable. Support for the two main parties has slumped over recent decades. In byelections, fringe parties can do spectacularly well. But this doesn't mean, as some appear to want to believe, that there is an overwhelming appetite for more radical politics of left or right. What there is, as there was in the 30s, is an increased appetite at the margins for radical alternatives, while most people still cling to what they have got or occasionally flirt with something new. That is not the same thing.
But the mood has to go somewhere. Germany provides a useful reality check. German politics is fragmenting: once a two-party polity like Britain, today it has seven parties: centre-right, centre-left, liberals, far-right, far-left, greens – and now, shiver my timbers, the policy-free Pirate party. "The Pirates are what the Apple generation imagines a political party to be," the FT Deutschland newspaper said the other day. "Their supporters long for something new with a technical fun factor that promises optimism, clarity, simplicity and user-friendliness."
Another word for this would be gesture politics. And, although we have no Pirate party to speak of yet, the piratical fragmenting mood is alive and thriving in Britain too. New politics always beckons to some. Let's stop the City. Let's mess up the Boat Race. But it is mostly political escapism. The world is mostly complicated, cruel and difficult, not cool, fun and clear. The old parties are deeply frustrating, but they reflect hard, tangled times. And they still have their feet on the ground not their heads in the clouds.
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