There’s a lively story circulating Westminster involving groups allegedly attached to the Liberal Democrats, the UK’s third-largest political party. In some Home Counties there are reported to be a few sets of swinging, or wife-swapping, arrangements among the party’s membership. Orgies as brand extensions.
Consenting adults are entitled to behave as they wish, sure, and there are other verified stories about other party profiles that are arguably more damaging. In 2016, then Labour MP Keith Vaz was caught bang to rights in the company of male prostitutes. Married-with-children Vaz had claimed his name was Jim, and that he was an industrial washing machine salesman, but the sting by the tabloids resulted in a parliamentary committee tasked with investigating the incident, which concluded it was “highly likely Vaz had engaged in unprotected paid sexual activity”.
What makes the Liberal Democrats screenshots and whispers interesting is that the groups implicated are alleged to behave like handicapped people at their summits. Tasteless perhaps, but not as original as you think. In 1998, the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier released The Idiots, about a group of normal people who gather to explore their inner spasser (“spaz”), then mortify other people in public swimming pools or restaurants.
In one explicit scene, the troupe engages in an op-fer-knet (slang) – group sex – which is presumably what offended the film’s critics so much. (Pretending to be handicapped, the group limp around chanting the word as they undress). One particularly affected reviewer claimed that he went home after the film and spent the night next to his toilet.
Once sensible centrism
The Liberal Democrats were the UK’s Democratic Alliance (DA) for many years, but now they’re the UK’s Rise Mzansi. Expats who couldn’t fathom the entitlement complexes of the Conservatives or the vivid red of Labour found a political home in what was once sensible centrism. The party had been led by good men like Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy, and while representation wasn’t strong, the party’s values – in the days when those things actually meant something – were sound.
The hard slog of Ashdown and Kennedy during the wilderness years was repaid in 2010 when the Lib Dems entered a coalition with the Conservatives. Five years later they were unceremoniously dumped, and exited government in weakened shape.
In the queue snaking around South Africa House for last year’s election, one party appeared to hog all the chatter: Rise Mzansi. More than anything, this was an indication that local habits were now affecting perspectives back home. The DA, to many an expat Lib Dem supporter, was not progressive enough and too white – impressions no doubt enhanced by the degenerate legacy publications from which expats sourced their information.
At the same time the Lib Dems were building their own campaign for an election six weeks later. Central to this campaign was a social media strategy in which the party’s leader, Sir Ed Davey, would be filmed behaving like a bad children’s entertainer, or local pub idiot.
Theatrics
There were two reasons why Davey did this. Firstly, his theatrics afforded distraction for his role in (what was until last year) the UK’s greatest historical miscarriage of justice – the Post Office scandal, where 700 sub-postmasters were accused of fraud, prosecuted, and some even jailed for IT glitches not of their making. Davey, then a junior minister for the Post Office, dismissed the cries for help from sub-postmasters, and eventually claimed that he didn’t understand what was going on “because he was lied to” by civil servants.
In a normal age, this sort of bureaucratic cowardice should have resulted in his tendering his resignation and renouncing his knighthood, but Davey had smelt blood in the water thanks to the Conservatives’ ineptitude and needed to fight the 2024 elections.
The second reason is that his party had gone off-piste and now sought to cater to luxury beliefs, leaving bare traces of Ashdown’s and Kennedy’s sensible centrism. Using the similar architecture of their political response to the “pandemic”, which positioned the Lib Dems as a party of curtain-twitching, lockdown advocacy with unshakeable trust in “expertise”, Davey encouraged its youth wing to attach pronouns to their official website bios and adopt the unofficial and incoherent charters of “anti-racism”.
It poached the worst ideas from the Conservative, Labour, and Green agendas – most of which were identical – then returned to the spectrum where it pinned itself to what it claimed was the “centre”. Only it wasn’t the “centre”. It couldn’t be.
Can’t be centrist
Because you can’t be centrist if you want to fight a hot war with Russia – but not with your own children. You can’t be centrist if you believe – as Ed Davey does − that women can have penises. (The UK Supreme Court has recently ruled they can’t – lol!). You can’t be centrist if you claim to uphold the family values of places like middle England but simultaneously express a desire to see its schools flooded with critical race theory. You can’t be centrist if you are pro-business growth at the same time as pro-net zero.
Incongruent realities, the political spectrum no longer a chart but an infinity loop with the mercury flowing left then right, were illustrated back home when Rise Mzansi’s Songezo Zibi expressed delight that @twatterbaas had been doxed – this, from a former newspaper editor. Using language identical to that of the Lib Dems and the detached US bicoastal Democrats who love migrants – except when they are parachuted into their own little towns – you got the feeling that his party’s supporters, the wealthy whites living in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs or on Cape Town’s Atlantic seaboard, also support free speech, except for the times they don’t.
Today’s liberal, right-on politics may be annoying, but that gives them no right to be so brazenly selective. The problem, however, is that there is clearly a place for asymmetrical logic. Recent local elections held last week saw gains for the Lib Dems, leading to more clowning from Davey who was filmed swinging his arms wildly while running just like one of Von Trier’s protagonists.
Whether or not this is just a passing phase, or whether politics is conditioning a generation of bored idiots seeking a thrill, the truth will always remain: the most successful politicians are able to move the centre toward themselves. They don’t plonk themselves in what they determine are the most expedient places, then thrust their hips in multiple directions.
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The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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