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Official Monster Raving Loony Party
| A guide to U.K. Politics |
| God Save the Queen? |
The Official Monster Raving Loony Party is one of the longest running jokes in UK politics, along with the Liberal Democrats. However, they are serious enough to have official membership at £9.99 per annum. David "Screaming Lord" Sutch founded the party in 1983, and it contrived to survive his untimely and lamented death in 1999. The word official is apparently in the party name in order to distinguish them from all the other loonies on the ballot.
They stand in prominent seats in general elections and in most by-elections, receiving no more than a handful of votes. Their most notable showing was in the 1990 Bootle by-election for a seat in the House of Commons vacated by the death of Labor MP Allan Roberts, in which Screaming Lord Sutch beat both the Social Democrats[1] and the Liberals[citation needed] by a few hundred votes.[2] On the surface their sole aim is to add a little colour into otherwise dull affairs, though their predictable clown-like shtick usually results in candidates who are at least as dull as the serious politicians they stand against. At the 2010 general election they stood in twenty seven seats and only came last in fifteen of them.[3]
The present leader of the OMRLP, Alan "Howling Laud" Hope, was the first party candidate elected to public office:
- 1987 - Elected unopposed to a seat on Ashburton Town Council in Devon
- 1988 - Elected Mayor of Ashburton (re-elected in 1999)
- 2010 - Elected unopposed to Fleet Town Council in Hampshire
Policies[edit]
Despite the satirical and comedic nature of the OMRLP and the deliberate absurdity of their manifesto some of their policies have, eventually, become law. Notable among these are:
- All day opening hours for pubs.
- Lowering the voting age to 18.
- Passports for pets.
- Licensing of commercial radio stations.
- Official government honors for the Beatles
External links[edit]
References[edit]
- ↑ See the Wikipedia article on Social Democratic Party (UK, 1988).
- ↑ See the Wikipedia article on Bootle by-election, May 1990.
- ↑ http://www.loonyparty.com/loony-archive/general-election-results-2010/