The Fall of the Libertarian Blogosphere and the Libertarian Idea?

We've lost/sort-of-lost several excellent libertarian bloggers of late - Obo, Constantly Furious, Anna Racoon and Mr Eugenides have all gone (although Obo does occasionally raise himself from the dead), and the Devil himself is considering packing it in.

I can understand why, after all the removal of the cancer that was Labour came as a short lived blessed relief when the coalition proved itself to be almost as cunty and simply a different, slightly less virulent form of cancer.

And therein lies a problem I've mused about - the nature of UK politics - in England at least - is it's two-party problem. We want Labour gone, which means we'll get the Tories, which is always going to be a bitter disappointment to those of us who regard them as a lesser of two evils. It's still an evil we have to live under, and one that propagates the increasing power of the state, albeit at a slower pace than Labour.

And that's going to be the way it is until we get rid of First Past the Post elections. I've generally been against Proportional Representation, but it seems to me the only current possible way of sticking a foot in the electoral door, and perhaps my dislike of it comes from the worry of the new rather than anything really rational. After all the main claims against are it would make government more dysfunctional (not a bad thing right now) and it would sever the constituency link (as opposed to centrally-made decisions, parachuted candidates into safe seats and earning three times the average wage which must keep that link awful strong.)

In addition, whilst I support the LPUK's aims (in the Oldham by-election I'll finally have someone to vote for with a clear conscience) it's not suitable for the current social make-up of the UK and hence is doing a fine job of pissing in the wind and getting precisely nowhere in the larger picture.

Freedom is a concept, and one that is difficult to sell to people being kept in gilded cages - as Pink Floyd sang did you exchange, a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? And the answer for much of the UK is yes. Tell people who do not feel affected by the state spying on them that you'll stop the spying in exchange for giving them less redistributed money, and all they'll see is you promising to take their cash away for nothing. For a not inconsiderable chunk of the UK the LPUK manifesto reads "vote for us so we can kick you repeatedly in the genital area with big spikey boots", and so - unsurprisingly - they're more likely to vote for Jedward than the LPUK.

We need another option, a party that broadly tends towards libertarian, but without going the whole hog. If Statism is A and Libertarianism is Z, then the UK is hovering around F, and tottering backwards, whilst the LPUK wants to take the nation as a whole to V when we really need to just move forward before even considering tackling the second half of that particular alphabet.

People want lower taxes and better security, they want to spend more and feel safer. Offer them those in exchange for more freedoms and they'll take notice, and that means holding your nose whilst doing the occasional thing against your ideology - taking the occasional step back in order to give yourself the leverage to move two steps forward. It's all good and well saying the ends never justify the means, but when you're sat in a cell for making a drunken and ill-thought out comment on Twitter it probably doesn't feel as meaningful as it did when you were preaching it from your chair (Pink Floyd and Who lyrics today folks!) the night before.

Know thy enemy. And it's the inertia of the British public, the ones who'll more readily vote for X Factor than being free, that is the barrier Libertarian ideology must cross, and it never will do whilst it tackles said barrier by looking at it grumpily rather than finding the necessary tools to bring it down.