A small piece of British political history passed unremarked last week as the Official Monster Raving Loony Party – after 33 years in existence – finally earned the right to a party political broadcast, albeit in Wales and only after putting up enough candidates to qualify, with virtually all the candidates English-born and England resident. Perhaps just as well: all they could proffer in the PPB was something more befitting a schoolchild’s failed media studies presentation. The party once responsible for maverick genius Devon councillor Stuart Hughes, poll-tax court filibuster Danny Bamford and homeless campaigner the late Willi Beckett is now a pub-crawl crew of mumbling face-painted pot-bellied oxygen thieves dressed for a carnival float, proffering infantile kitsch about mermaids and dragons. Once the OMRLP used satire to make pertinent points and suggested outrageous solutions that history proved sound (passports for pets, all-day licensing to stop binge drinking, reducing the voting age etc). Now they serve little purpose save self-aggrandisement. The way the post-Lord Sutch OMRLP has carried on, they could fit my old friend’s coffin to a dynamo and provide Britain with free electricity until doomsday.
Mark Boyle
Johnstone, Renfrewshire
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