Party Politics and its Victims

I ranted about this on Twitter a few days ago so I thought it might be apt to resurrect this blog in order to articulate my thoughts outside of a 140-character context.

I really hate party politics. I'm sure that Twitter has nurtured this deep-lying feeling of detest, but more than anything else I just really despise the effect that it seems to have on people. Party politics has become very much a way for the non-politicians of the world to get out their Westminster doll sets and pretend that they too are part of this close-knit, Eton bred inner circle of opportunists and pseudolutionaries. In a democratic society, the concept of free-thought has been thought to go hand in hand, but instead we live in an age where politicians preach figures that most people don't understand in an arms race of adopting the most compelling rhetoric to sway the fickle in your favour.

Everyone who finds an interest in politics eventually decides that it's a natural next-step to adopt a political party, whom they most identify with. But once this is done, the whole idea of independent construction of ideals goes completely out the window as they lap up whatever their party pukes out and feel an ingrained duty to defend it as their own thought however well they can. For me this became more evident than ever when the Liberal Democrat supporters (Democrats, as in Social Democratic) decided that Nick Clegg tearing up his own pre-election student fees pledges meant that their own opinions were torn up with it. I just can't fathom how someone can defend something as such a sound ideal, until a politician corrects them and they suddenly go full circle. Trying to mate ideals with a new form of political-relativism is the most oxymoronic concept I can think of; ideals are absolute and they are your own, not to be shepherded by whomever happens to win a party election. The whole idea behind democracy is that people are free to think as they like and express their own opinions onto a representative parliament every time election day comes around, but somewhere along the way people have forgotten to think themselves and just followed whatever their respective party tells them to think. And it's most ironic of all in a group of supposed 'liberals' who are freely chaining themselves up in our bike rack of Westminster mind-fascism.

I don't intend for this to just attack the Lib-Dems, as I believe this is something ubiquitous throughout party politics and all that it devours. It's just ever-more personal to me as I myself was caught up in the Lib-Dem 2010 hype and would I have been old enough would indeed have cast my vote their way. But once I began seeing and disagreeing with what they did in their new position, at no point did I consider the possibility that whilst it may seem completely counteractive to my own ideals, Nick Clegg was the best person to look after my ideals for the time being and as such I should entrust them to him to do as he wished. It seemed much more obvious that they were no longer a party I could identify with, and as such my support vanished automatically.

With each new policy thousands of people wheel themselves into a bandwagon of thoughts they had never considered before, but adopt them as their own without resistance or consideration. Because this is your party, isn't it, with your interests at heart - so it follows naturally that what they're proposing has to be in your best interests, right? There were 3 main political parties at the last general election, who between them harboured 88.1% of the vote. Does anyone really think that in a free-thinking society, all the varieties and dilutions of opinions can be aptly considered in 3 political manifestos? It's regrettable enough that we have a parliament where whips discourage individual thought in favour of political points, but what I don't think the rest of the country understands is that this does not apply to you. This is not your career and you are not ruining your chance of a ministerial position if you dare to think against a party policy. How anyone can defend 100% of their party policies is beyond me, or even 50%. Ed Miliband and David Cameron will not raise your defection from the Labour party or the Conservative party prescribed line of thought in the next parliament meeting, so why pretend you can seriously identify with such a massive proportion of what your party thinks? It's as if everytime anyone goes 'actually, I don't like this latest policy' the opposing partisan tweeters will combine together to shout "AHA! A chink in your party's armour! WE ARE SUPERIOR!"

We seem to live in a place where what you think on an issue has to be delayed until someone you respect tells you want to think. I prefer not to encase myself in the partisan, because I don't believe that what you think should be processed through a Westminster dilution process. Your ideals are only ever your own, but people seem to think of 'idealism' as a bad thing. Think what you want and defend what you think, don't think what they want and defend it as your own.