Quote Originally Posted by Phoenix Rising View Post
For the past six months the British libertarian and eurosceptic UK Independence Party has been neck and neck with the far-left Liberal Democrats.
Those labels still don't mean what you think they mean. UKIP are not libertarian, and they are only eurosceptic because Europeans are foreigners who don't speak English as a first language. They aren't authoritarian either, they're just a bunch of spineless chucklesmurfs.

Calling the Lib Dems far-left is absolutely hilarious, I'm sorry, but it really is. The Orange Book is a quintessential neo-liberal piece and the party, since coming to power, have lived up to it entirely and have variously refused to oppose the Tories or simply totally supported them on almost every policy issue that has come up. Which is why seeing them as traitors is silly, but more on that in a minute.

Opinion polls conducted by various independent sources have been taking place across the United Kingdom and these recent polls have shown that the UK Independence Party is crushing the far-left authoritarian Liberal Democrats. One of Britain's leading newspapers, The Guardian, is running a poll on their website asking people who they support more, the UK Independence Party or the far-left Liberal Democrats. UKIP is currently winning the poll by a wide margin and the poll will still be up for the next two-days.
Again the Lib Dems are no such thing. They are 'authoritarian' only insofar as they support the status quo, which is of course a right-wing capitalist system of exploitation that can certainly be called authoritarian.

Now, there's something regarding the Lib Dems that as a non-Brit I suspect you are entirely unaware of. Their support currently is not based on proposed policies, but on broken promises. The party has indeed been seen as the most leftist major one in British politics (Which doesn't say a lot) and in the last General Election many people voted for the Lib Dems with the expectation that, if they did indeed gain a measure of power, they would use it to moderate the Tories and/or the treasonous Labour Party, who have long since betrayed their working class supporters and are now the Tories but a different color. As it turned out, the Lib Dems are the Tories but another different color; they have resolutely refused to oppose any Tory proposal, no matter how vile, and their original motivation for caving in on everything was to secure a referendum on the possibility of switching our voting system from First Past the Post to Alternative Voting, where they completely failed to convince the public of its merits and completely failed to successfully oppose the Tory propaganda machine that destroyed AV's prospects for at least a generation.

Since the vote they've had no excuse at all; they just say "Well without us it would be even WORSE" except there is no evidence at all that they have softened Tory policies in the slightest. Of course, if you actually read The Orange Book this wouldn't come as a surprise but who does research into political parties these days?

Now, regardless of what you think of everyone's policies and actions here, the important point to take away from this post is that while the Tories are doing exactly what everyone expects them to - smurfing the poor, demonizing minorities, and failing to accept that life for the 99% is not the same as life for the 1% - the Lib Dems are seen as traitors. They are considered to have betrayed their party's ideals and it is a fact that they have betrayed some very important election promises to their core voters. It's not remotely surprising that this would drive large numbers of people away from them, and this poll more probably says something about their betrayals than it does about support for UKIP.

Anyway vote Monster Raving Loony Party all day erry day or gtfo.