Vote Mid-Life Crisis

When it comes to mid-life crises, most of us go down well-trodden paths: taking up with unsuitably young partners, buying a Harley-Davidson and going on a coast-to-coast road trip in the US, growing a beard and 'dropping out' to live in a commune, becoming a naturist - you know the sort of thing.  Speaking personally, I started buying seventies American sports cars and imagining that the A303 was Route 66.  But if you are a celebrity, even a minor one, you have to do something more spectacular, more public, more noteworthy.  Like starting a political party.  Laurence Fox's recent announcement that he was going to do just this smacks of the mid-life crisis, or even breakdown. Indeed, his preceding ill-informed pronouncements on racism and Black Lives Matter, not to mention that failed music 'career', have the definite feel of a man spiraling toward a breakdown in the wake of a divorce.  Hell, maybe if Billie Piper had divorced me, I'd be founding a political party.  Or recording bad records.  The problem with trying to create new political parties (in the UK, at least) is that is extremely difficult to define exactly what it is you are standing for: what ideological ground are you staking out?  Which demographics are you targeting?  Most fundamentally, what are you offering voters that no existing party or movement offers them?  These are the issues upon which all recent attempts to start new parties have foundered on, the SDP, UKIP, Brexit Party, the Independent Group of MPs (or whatever it was they were called), all failed because, ultimately, they were unable to define themselves in terms of unique ideologies or policies.

Whenever any of them demonstrated any degree of popularity at the polls, the existing parties moved to take those voters back by shifting their own ideological bases.  The SDP, for instance, was born out of a perceived leftward shift in the Labour party and, for a while, enjoyed some success in attracting moderate voters of the centre left.  But Labour changed tack under first Neil Kinnock, then Tony Blair, shifting back toward the centre, leaving the SDP nowhere to go.  Similarly, once Vote Leave had prevailed in the EU referendum, not only was UKIP left without an issue to campaign on ('leave the EU', 'We are, so why else should we vote for you?'), but the Tories lurched to the right and the Brexit Ultras took over, ensuring that eurosceptic vote shifted back to them.  A similar fate befell The Brexit Party, with the Tories seeing offtheir electoral threat by moving even further to the right.  Of course, the thing which usually kills new political parties stone cold dead is the UK's 'first-past-the-post' electoral system, which makes it near impossible for smaller parties to win parliamentary seats no matter how many votes they garner nationally.  With a system of proportional representation, obviously, they might stand a chance.  The only exceptions to all these rules lies in nationalist parties, like the SNP or Plaid Cymru, that are able to build strong regional support based upon cultural identities.

But getting back to Laurence fox's mid-life crisis.  What does his proposed political party stand for?  Who is trying to represent?  Well, on the basis of his vague ramblings, people like him, it would seen.  Not sad middle aged actors whose careers have stalled and are down to airing their breakdowns in the media in order to generate the publicity and attention they crave, but rather those people who apparently feel 'unrepresented' by modern politics.  Those people, like him, who think that it is 'political correctness gone mad' that non-white people are portrayed in historical dramas, or that seem unable to grasp why 'Black Lives Matter' isn't incompatible with 'All Lives Matter'.  In other words, the sort of people who are already well catered for by the Tory Party and a whole cabal of far-right and neo-fascist organisations.  People who think that their voices are being censored by the media because they can't say really offensive things that might contravene equality laws.  The fact is, though, that the likes of Fox are being heard: they are all over social media, not to mention exploiting their showbiz connections to get on TV and in the papers, to spread their ignorance.  What they don't like is that those who disagree with them are allowed to publicly criticise them.  But that's the other side of free speech - the freedom of others to say that you are a dick.  But hey, nothing is ever really going to come from Fox's political party - it's just another vanity project, like that 'music career' of his.  It will all fizzle out once it comes into contact with reality.