To party or not to party?

The United Kingdom now has a Libertarian Party.

But here are five reasons (presented by the winner of the Libertarian Alliance Chris Tame Prize) why libertarians should NOT form a political party. Rather persuasive I thought;

Being something of a contrarian, I choose to work up from the least important of my five reasons towards the most important.

First, practical reasons. Party politics is expensive, and we haven't got the money. And it's time consuming too, and most of us haven't got the time—nor many of us the necessary skills.

Second, agreeing our manifesto would be an immensely difficult task. Many policies favoured by one lot of us would alienate another lot of us. We would have, not only disputes between purists and pragmatists, but also disputes between pragmatists of different stripes. For example, there would be those who want to maintain some form of public welfare system, and favour draconian immigration restrictions, and those who want to ditch the welfare state entirely, and can therefore afford to be relaxed about immigration.

Third, the only example in recent times of a new party gaining power in the islands called Britain was the Labour party—and it took them 31 years, from 1893 to 1924. I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't want to wait three decades or more for freedom.

Fourth, a libertarian party won't work anyway. I give you the sad story of the one libertarian party which, to my knowledge, has tasted real success—the Movimiento Libertario in Costa Rica. For many years, they did a great job. They got voter support up to almost ten per cent. They won 6 seats in a 57-seat parliament. They even had a credible presidential candidate. Then, in 2005, the party was taken over by so-called moderates. The libertarians, who had worked so hard for the cause, were branded as radicals and purged from the party. And the party now presents itself as a liberal party. All of which leads to a harsh conclusion. If a libertarian party fails, it fails. And if it succeeds, it fails because it gets taken over and isn't libertarian any more.

Fifth, and most important, politics is old hat.

It is fashionable today, on the far left at least, to say that the state is out of date. That, in an age of technology and nuclear weapons, the state or superstate, with its rulers and ruled, its wars, its re-distributory and confiscatory taxes and its bad laws, is no longer an appropriate way for we human beings to organize ourselves. That new forms of society are needed.

I suggest to you that these thinkers, uncomfortable though some of you may be with their ideas, are dead right. Indeed, I go further. I think the state and its political system are already collapsing around us. And what we are living through now is a phase in the collapse, where the statists are desperately striving to shore up their blessed state. That, I believe, is why they are falling over each other in their efforts to do as many bad things to us as they possibly can.

But there is today, both in the islands called Britain and elsewhere, a rising tide of contempt for politics and politicians. The political classes have spent most of the last two centuries trying to persuade us that they and their state are good for us. But people—and not just those already aware of the ideas of liberty—have begun to see this for what it is, a lie. More and more people are waking up from the anaesthetic, and starting to feel the pain. I sense there's the potential for a big backlash building up out there.

So, I think, to try to form a libertarian political party today would be a step in exactly the wrong direction. Not only would we be trying to play the statists at their own political game. But we would also be tying ourselves to a system that is doomed to fail.

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