personality politics
Every time an election comes around, I’m surprised at how much a party leader’s personality influences people’s political leaning. Obama, the charismatic speech generating machine powered by his misguided though well-intentioned voters, is a typical example of nice guy, mostly unchanged politics. Now, here, on this side of the pond, we have:
Gordo & The Labourers, who have taken the utopian socialist future shtick, oddly, considering The Labourers haven’t had a frontman who is actually left-wing for many a moon and that socialism is the devil in the political world. The original planned manifesto artwork can be seen here.
The Nick Clegg Experience! He gurns, he leaves his webcam on whilst carefully analysing pornography, and he’s playing an intimate gig at an Asda near you very soon. He represents a frustratingly centrist party who don’t have the ‘nads to actually be liberal; more liberal than the Tories and Labour, granted, but then the Scottish National Party are more liberal than the British National Party. Still some way away. The fact he plays the “vote for me, young people!” card also grinds one’s gears. “Young people” are not a continuous political consensus; exactly the opposite if anything.
Cameron did it unsuccessfully, and continues to do it unsuccessfully, with “web cameron” and the like. The less said about David Cameron, the less my burning urge to desecrate the massive campaign adverts every tory twerp appears to have planted across the country threatens to flare up (which would make me a censoring hypocrite).
As one can observe from the political compass, they are now the length of an ant’s antenna away from becoming UKIP (i.e: backwards racist pooheads, evident in almost any section of the UKIP wiki article). Interestingly, Labour are more right-wing and authoritarian than Obama was; the tories are more right-wing than John “bomb bomb Iran” McCain.
If anyone should vote for any of the three main parties, it should be for the Lib Dems – in spite of the nasty things I said, they do seem to be making positive progression towards greener politics. But Green they ain’t – my vote will still rest with them, as everytime I do the political compass test I find myself in the Gandhi-esque region of heavy liberalism and leftist economics, something I know is accurate.
… still don’t know what’s so important about the heads of the parties, though. I don’t even know who the leader of the Green Party is as I write this, other than knowing that she’s a woman. As one awesomely-first-named Zeev Mankowitz apparently said: “people don’t believe in ideas, they believe in people who believe in ideas.”
