From YouTube to UKIP

The British Local and European Parliament elections have passed and The Labour Party is feeling the electoral vengeance that has been dished out to it. Gordon Brown has to contend with the backlash over the MP’s expenses controversy, which although a cross-party affair, has fallen more so on the governing party. This problem was exacerbated on Wednesday by certain MPs ‘rocking the boat’, timing their resignations from the cabinet to the day before the elections and so hoping to the further undermine the PM’s position. One of the prime offenders has to be the ‘poison dwarf’ Hazel Blears. Blears has exhibited marked self-serving behaviour with disloyalty to the Prime Minister, and her avaricious expenses claims, whilst maintaining a sickly-sweet exterior for the media. She probably fancied herself as a potential contender for the top job when she mocked Gordon Brown’s YouTube appearance for being out of touch with the Thatcher-esque line “YouTube if you want to”. Thankfully, public opinion about her flipping of second homes and actively using up her expenses allowance with spending sprees will most likely prevent her from gaining enough support within her party.

My concern about MPs like Blears is the damage they do to our perception about British democracy. Not all MPs are greedy careerists, but fringe parties like the BNP, who hoped to make sweeping gains from the public backlash, would certainly like you to think so. At least, the ones from the three main parties.

I read an article in The Guardian by Charlie Brooker about the BNP’s publicity attempts. He makes an interesting point (though not entirely seriously) that their crass production values and poor graphic design may serve to help them present themselves as an alternative to “professional politicians” whom we hold responsible for the current crisis of confidence. “Extremist material of any kind always looks gaudy and cheap… because anyone who's good at graphic design is likely to be a thoughtful, inquisitive sort by nature. And thoughtful, inquisitive sorts tend to think fascism is a bit shit”. Morality and political beliefs would certainly deter many graphic designers from working for the BNP, but these cannot be the only factors. Graphic design is commercial, and ultimately the biggest political parties with the largest pots of money can attract the hottest design agencies and the talent that works for them. What this means is that the smallest parties in general will generally have the worst advertising campaigns, because they have less money to spend on branding and marketing.

Here I come to the bad example of graphic design I referred to in my last post. It came not from the BNP but another small party, the Euro-sceptic UK Independence Party. Situated near Loughborough train station a fortnight ago was a billboard poster featuring wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the slogan “He’d get our money back!”. UKIP are in favour of a complete withdrawal from the European Union. The European Union never existed in Churchill’s lifetime, it came into being in 1993, so any claims that he would have opposed it are speculative. However, in the aftermath of The Second World War Churchill gave a speech in Zurich. He proposed that that in order to avoid the “frightful nationalistic quarrels” of the past and for Europe to be “united in the sharing of its common inheritance” that we must “re-create the European Family [and] build a kind of United States of Europe”. So, I would assume that Churchill would not endorse UKIP; Churchill after all was not to the right of the Conservative party as many Euro-sceptics are, but was a former Liberal. My next point would therefore be: why would a politician endorse another political party to their own? I think that the level of woolly thinking that UKIP exhibit is of the same kind that they expect of their voters and for that reason they will continue to find it difficult to break into mainstream politics.