Why vote Labour when you can Touch Love?
A tour through Britain's odder electoral parties.
Britain, it transpires, has a lot of political parties. An ease of registration and a tolerance for political eccentricity have seen our democratic options multiply over the years. As it stands, 350 are currently registered with the Electoral Commission. With Westminster winding down into silly season, it felt like an opportune time to dig through the list and unearth some of the kookier electoral options.
In these turbulent political times, people are definitely fed up with the same old parties. Reform has risen on the back of that, while left-wing parties are jockeying to take votes away from Labour. For some voters, there may be an appeal even further from the mainstream in those parties that barely bother the counting staff at local and general elections, but still feel they have something to contribute to our politics. So, since this blog focuses typically on the comings and goings of the giants, here’s some time for Britain’s oddest minor parties.
The name alone makes you think something wild is going on here, and they promise to be Britain’s newest and most radical political party. They rather modestly promise to rebuild and remake society and “solve all of Britain’s problems”. Unlike many of the parties on this list, they have gone beyond simple platitudes and created a website with thousands of words of policy, from making a fairer minimum wage to pushing for one world government, and the ominous sounding Human Darkness Policy.
After a while, this all starts to have a slight sex-cult vibe, which starts to make sense when you discover that Deputy Leader Rosie Morrell aims to be “the first sex worker ever in British politics”. She is, apparently, a sexual therapist as well as right-hand to the incredibly well-educated but not at all modest leader Marcus White – and appears in various states of undress across the website, while he looms next to her.
Given the pledges of a single world government, a centralised state-owned bank and the lengthy “sex and psychology” section, it all starts to veer towards a sort of swinger-absolutism. Which, I guess, is at least an ideology.
Standing in South Dorset last year, Rosie managed to get 52 votes.
2. Matriarchal Party United Kingdom Great Britain
While Everyone is God manages pages of verbosity, MPUKGB seems to exist as a solitary blog post from 2010. I came hoping for some radical feminist positioning, perhaps the inversion of society and the centring around women, but the Matriarchal Party seems to lack this ambition. It does, however, share the same sense that Britain’s problems can be easily solved.
Targeting Great Yarmouth in 2010, there is a mix of local and national policies – often underlined with a distinct “FULL STOP” to show which ones they (or rather, she) is really serious about. Like a lot of minor parties, it points at populism, with a post-ideological smorgasbord of easy answers. Crime will be cut, immigration reduced to zero, and public services improved. In fact, it is a little disappointing that nothing that Matriarchal shines through.
Margaret McMahon-Morris picked up 100 votes in 2010 but has failed to stand again.
I was naturally drawn to this one by the name and pictured an ageing waterfowl arranged against austerity. Anyway, a bit of digging tells me that Old Swan is a ward in Liverpool, and this is a hyper-local coming together of trade unionists and other activists against the Tory policies of the early 2010s. They were still kicking around in 2021, picking up third place in the eponymous council ward. Disappointingly, they have yet to incorporate elderly Anatidae into their branding.
Devolved administrations also boast their own obscure parties, with a number of splintering independents (and parties committed to abolishing both the Senedd and the Scottish Parliament). Scotland – Unhyphenated stands out for two reasons, though. The first is having the sort of ranty, incoherent website that is beloved of minor parties. The second is that, somehow, they managed to get registered with a hyphen in their name, which rather undermines their whole thing.
It’s pretty challenging to interpret what they stand for through the website, but they seem angry about a lot of stuff. Nor is it clear why they want Scotland to be unhyphenated, or how they achieve that when they can’t even manage it for their own name.
You are probably thinking “that sounds like a pub”. And it is. Indeed, it boasts of being Richmond Park’s best pub, as of a 2022 award. The political party was a gimmick, used to run in last year’s election as a fairly naked attempt at publicity. There was no real politics, just a bid to get people through the doors. The landlord picked up 349 votes and beat the SDP into last place. Whether it brought new business in isn’t clear, but I guess we are talking about it now, and it does look like a very good pub.
Again, you might be thinking this sounds like a pub, but this is a serious, real political party. Originally the Psychedelic Party, they rebranded in honour of a graphic novel. Their platform is almost exactly what you’d expect, with calls for the legalisation of cannabis, ayahuasca, and other drugs. They also want to defend libraries and, more unusually, to bring back exile as a punishment for crimes and to restore “shamanic Christianity”.
7. The Entertainment Party
I wish I could tell you more about these guys. The name is fascinating – what is the entertainment? Who are they entertaining? But, unfortunately, it is also SEO poison. As a political outfit, they are basically untraceable online, buried under page after page of party entertainers. So I’m going to assume they are a gang of magicians, clowns, DJs and bouncy castle operatives, lobbying for the industry and, I don’t know, promising to replace Buckingham Palace with a big inflatable.
Finally, a political party that has everything. A vaguely suggestive name. A website that will burn away your retinas. A meandering manifesto that addresses Mistake Makers, Superpowers and the endless all-caps use of LOVE. This feels more like a religious thing than a sex thing, but with an absolute insistence on TOUCHING LOVE. There are also hundreds of videos on YouTube if you want to delve further into the movement. Though I must say, from a comms perspective, there are better ways of beginning your addresses than “Dear Manure Producers”.
In 2019, Harriet Gore picked up 47 votes for the party in Kensington.
It is easy to despair about the state of British democracy. Old parties are struggling to adapt to new realities. Voters are becoming increasingly disillusioned. For all its flaws and frustrations, there is something charming in the way our system opens up room for the dreamers, the eccentrics, and the drug-addled. So perhaps in 2029, there may be more space for sex therapy and planetary banking, psychedelics, or hyphens.
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