I refer Mangetout to the OP;
This description is emotive rather than factual (no matter how accurate). What is a fact is that they are regarded by many as a mob of racist thugs.
To be accurate: A significant element within the BNP are racist thugs. But their current leader, Nick Griffin, has been a true weasle politician, targeting other sections of the electorate with more ‘appealing’ policies, and playing down the racist aspect except when it’s with the aforementioned thugs.
I beg to differ; their racism and thuggery has been factually documented on national television.
Without wishing to hijack this thread, I’d be interested to see any news articles about this, if you could dig them up. If true, it actually sounds like fiscal mismanagement, but I can see how it might have been spun by the BNP into something racial.
There’s racists and thugs in every party. You’re stating that the entire BNP are racist thugs. Which is not true.
However, the BNP are the most visibly racist and thuggish party. Which I can tell you from personal experience.
It wouldn’t have been necessary if GPs didn’t so frequently refuse to take asylum seekers onto their books. And in any case, it’s closing due to insufficient numbers. BBC NEWS | UK | England | Derbyshire | Asylum seeker surgery 'to close'
I can’t disagree with that.
This seems to be shifting away from the OP, so bringin back more parties.
Don’t forget Mebyon Kernow. The Cornish nationalist party. They don’t get any chance of a seat in Parliament as they only field candidates in Cornwall and you need a candidate in 10% of the seats nationwide to qualify for benefits. But they regularly come in 3rd or 4th in Cornish seats.
Or perhaps it would be less emotive to say that the BNP is a disorderly affiliation of persons whose strong racial prejudices, tendency toward violence and incitement of hatred is a matter of record.
While true, it is also evident that the BNP achieve their greatest success in areas of high deprivation and significant ethic diversity by blatantly playing the race card.
I suppose we should mention the Scottish National Party, who campaign for Scottish independence, and Plaid Cymru, who can’t decide if they want Welsh independence. I believe both are heavily left-wing.
What, you mean like I did (as did Futile Gesture, I now realise)? 
A later cite which supports my version: BBC NEWS | Health | Asylum seeker row over GP surgery
This might need its own thread
As this thread is about facts rather than opinions (or indeed wishful thinking) I really can’t let this go…
The Tories are ahead in just about every opinion poll - not by much I admit but ahead. They are guaranteed to get at least 30% of the vote, and will probably get a fair bit more (around 35% I would estimate).
It’s true that barring a miracle/disaster (delete to taste) they will not form the next governement - that will almost certainly be the labour party, they will be a COMFORTABLE second.
Also they polled most votes in the two most recent large real life elections.
So in short - yes we’re* down; but we’re far from out.
Also the number of MPs for Scotland is to be reduced (not sure when) but that will clearly impact on Labour and Lib/dems than the tories
- yes I’m a member. Would you like to buy a raffle ticket - first prize is a mini?
As for the BNP - Ignore them - they’ll go away. It’s only the massively disproprtionate coverage they get when they get a councillor in Dagenham (on a protest vote about local issues) that gives them any media presence at all. They’re electorally insignificant (Nasty bastards as well)
Minor point: Sitting MSPs (Members of the Scottish Parliament) cannot be MPs at Westminster and vice versa. The two bodies have no overlap in Members at all.
(This may merely be an agreement between the Parties, and not stated in law, I’m not certain.)
The Constituancy boundaries are the same and the ‘first past the post’ voting system is the same, although the Assembly also elects some additional members by a PR system. Thus giving the Greens and the Scottish Socialist parties some seats…
I don’t follow Scottish politics very closely, but I have many friends who do, and they consider the SNP to be fairly right-wing.
Majority unionist party, and largest party in the Six Counties, but not the “majority party”.
Original name was “New Unionist Party”. Basically, for all their talk about neutrality on the national question, they’re unionists who don’t like the sectarianism traditionally associated with unionism.
Thanks for the corrections to my first reply. Yes it was the ‘Natural Law Party’ I was thinking of, their Yogic Flying was a larf. How are the Monster Raving loonies doing these days now Screaming Lord Such is dead? I hope they are still making life more interesting at election times.
Back in the late 1600s, two factions emerged. The Tories were representative of the rural squirearchy, the Whigs of the merchant class and urbanized aristocracy. The franchise being very limited at that time, there was no “people’s” group – each appealed to a particular subset of the electorate as it stood then, with the common people largely having no vote and supportive of what their local leaders were in support of. Neither were strictly liberal or conservative in modern parlance, though the Tories tended to be more conservative and the Whigs more liberal at a randomly chosen time – but that might be swapped as regards a particular issue. Neither were formally organized and both were essentially coalitions of factions, some of which might shift from party to party as circumstances dictated.
Tories and Whigs alternated in leading the country down to about 1840, when problems over the Corn Laws (importation of wheat and other grains) led to the two ancient parties falling apart. An element of this resulted from the Reform Bill of 1832, which expanded the electorate, and led to several later Reform Bills that continued the process until today you have an almost universal electorate.
Out of this came the Conservative and Liberal Parties, which alternated majorities in the Commons and hence the right to form the Government through the 1800s and down to World War I. The Liberals split in the late 1800s over Irish Home Rule, the Liberal Unionists voting with and eventually merging with the Conservatives. The term “Tory” tended to be used as slang for “Conservative” as the party throughout this period and indeed down to the present.
In 1895 the first Labour M.P.'s were elected, and the party was a left-wing fringe party down until the early 1920s. In the first of two elections in 1924, Labour became as strong as Liberals and Tories, and Commons was in approximate equal thirds. Labour was given the nod to form the Government, and carried on for a few months, following which there was another general election (I believe they lost a vote of confidence, but I’m not positive of this), and the Conservatives came back in power. The next election, in 1929, led to a Labour majority, and the Liberals were relegated to minor party status.
An interesting trivia question, by the way, is when the last time a member of the Liberal Party occupied No. 10 Downing Street – the answer, amusingly, is 1955, Clementine (Mrs. Winston) Churchill having been a lifelong Liberal, though of course she worked closely with her husband’s Conservative colleagues insofar as she had any role in government whatsoever (e.g., organizing aid to Russia during WWII).
Since single-member constituencies go to the man with the highest vote, they nearly always fall to the Labour or Tory candidate, but there is a fairly large membership of the LibDems (~20% of the electorate) that is underrepresented in Parliament – it’s not a fringe party in the sense that American third parties are. And it has more than once been the deciding factor in the formation of Governments, when the other two parties were fairly evenly divided.
It must be fascinating to participate in UK politics. In the US, real choices seem so much more limited.
Do all of these parties have a real effect on national politics? Do they all field viable candidates in most races?
In the US, we have many political parties, but only two dictate the policies of the nation. Occassionally, a minor candidate will upset the balance, but he/she won’t have any real chance of winning. It is often said here that a third party candidate took votes from the Democrats in 2000, causing the Republicans to win. Had this third candidate’s votes gone to Al Gore, he likely would have won the election in Florida, and Dubya wouldn’t have become president. Ralph Nader, according to some, was the spoiler. There must be countless times this sort of thing happens with as many parties as exist in UK.