I'm sure I'm not the only one feeling a bit downcast at goings on in LPUK at the moment. Whether it's coincidental or linked I don't know, but I'd been wondering why the LPUK blog has been absorbed into the party site and why Looking For A Voice, the personal blog of the new(ish) party leader Andrew Withers (AKA Guthrum if I recall) has become viewable by invite only. This morning I read this at Anna Raccoon's and this on LPUK.org, and I can't help but wonder. I'm not going to go into it all - if either of my readers are interested they'll either know already or follow the links and read it for themselves - and I'm not going to take sides except to say that Anna Raccoon so clearly feels aggrieved that I can't help but sympathise. Beyond a denial in a comment on the second of those links Andrew Withers has yet to put his side of the story out there that I've seen, so until he or LPUK have anything further I guess we wait and see and make up minds as and when.
What I will say is that it's all very depressing and unedifying. LPUK is a very young party and this seems to be a hell of a case of birthing pains. People are already wondering if it will survive and I'm wondering the same thing. Doesn't matter how much is true and how much is a misunderstanding or whatever, with such a tiny party there's a real danger that enough people will just turn their backs on it for it to go from being a micro-party to an ex-party. If it turns out that there's truth to the allegations I expect that risk to be quite high, and that would be a great shame. I'm not a member and I don't do anything here for LPUK apart from mention them now and then and have links to the blog and the party site on the sidebar, but I liked a lot of the manifesto and I supported the ideals. Above all else I think it's a good thing for the UK to have a party for libertarians to get behind (despite the contradiction involved) and to promote libertarianism to those used to thinking in terms of left and right. Not much of that all important promotion is going to be going on at the moment, or if it is it's optimistic to think that it'll be done as well as it would otherwise.
I dunno, maybe it's actually a good thing that LPUK is still so small. I'm not suggesting all this be covered up - far from it - but escaping wider attention while it resolves all this might be the way LPUK can survive and grow.
P.S. - I am about to send the link to Looking For A Voice and the LPUK blog off to the suspended animation room. This has nothing to do with what's gone on and is purely because neither are live blogs at the moment, or if they are they can't be visited. I need to do some blogroll maintenance anyway and this might be the spur for it.
