The last quarter-century of political history is full of celebrity-led “get out the vote” initiatives (Rock the Vote, P. Diddy’s preposterous “VOTE OR DIE” campaign), and celebrities from outside the realm of politics recruited to goose the profiles of long-shot small parties (Howard Stern’s aborted flirtation with the Libertarian Party, Ralph Nader’s total destruction of the Green Party’s U.S. viability for probably a couple of generations), but notwithstanding satirical campaigns, non-politician notables actually attempting to launch new parties are much rarer.
 

This actually happened.

So I was amused to learn that founding Damned member Raymond “Captain Sensible” Burns attempted in earnest to form a political party in 2006. Calling it “The Blah! Party” (yes, the exclamation point was part of the name), Sensible endeavored to simultaneously galvanize protest votes and energize the disaffected, while taking public stances on matters like the proliferation of obesity, the imprisonment of non-violent offenders, public transport, renewable energy, and U.K. companies being bought out by international conglomerates. It was an ambitious undertaking, but Sensible had the help of a PR firm and—I’m not kidding—a potato chip company.
 

 

After all those exasperated rants from the stage during concerts over the years I have finally done the decent thing and started a political party with the aim of shaking up British politics.

My colleagues and I have named it the Blah! Party because this is what goes through your mind when you hear our great leaders spewing out the usual old garbage…. ‘45 minutes’, ‘WMD’, ‘faith schools’, ‘nhs reforms’, education education education’.... it’s enough to make to put a brick through the TV - so have put my money where my mouth is and decided to take on the vile frauds on their own turf.

The Blah! party is ridiculously easy to join via blahparty.org and once you’ve done that you can start firing off policy ideas as we are aiming to be the most representative and democratic party of ALL…... YOU will write our manifesto! Bearing in mind of course that as I am involved it will not tolerate racism, sexism or any other unpleasantness. We aim to be a NICE party, and although we are not adverse to having some fun along the way we ARE deadly serious about holding the current ghastly crop of political clones to account on your behalf for the nonsensical decisions they all too often make.

The more members we get - the harder it will be for them to ignore us…. and the possibilities really start opening up so if YOU TOO have had enough then get over to the Blah! website and let’s shake some action!

 
Continues after the jump…