Paint it black (and white)

Once audacious by-election winners, the Liberal Democrats lost their deposit for the tenth time in this parliament, in Clacton-on-Sea, just a day after they closed their annual party conference in Glasgow.  The purpose of the system of deposits is to reduce the prevalence of 'fringe' candidates or parties with no realistic chance of winning a seat.  In this way, the Lib Dems are withering on the vine.
It is not surprising.  Junior partners in coalitions get little of the credit (usually attributed by many in the electorate to the majority partner) and all of the collective blame for failures.  In Germany, the Free Democratic Party, socially liberal and classically liberal and frequent coalition partner to both left and right since 1949, suffered the wrath of the German electorate for the policies taken during the Great Recession.  In 2013, it was wiped out, failing to make the 5% threshold of voter support (via proportional representation) and thus was not represented in the Bundestag for the first time in its history.  Ironically, the ruling conservative fraternity of Angela Merkel, the CDU/CSU, gained more votes than at the previous general election as hitherto Free Democrats voters transferred their votes to them, yet it was a Pyrrhic victory.  Falling short of the 51% majority and with the absence of natural coalition partners the Free Democrats, Merkel was forced into awkward accommodation with their socialist rivals, the SDP, in a so-called Grand Coalition.  However, though the Liberal Democrats may be devastated, coalitions are still unsual in British politics Labour or the Conservatives will seek to govern as a minority administration if there are no suitable junior parties to provide them with a majority - no Grand Coalitions here.  In an irony on this side of the North Sea, the Liberal Democrats may be saved by the iniquities of first-past-the-post balloting (supposed to provide the strength of single party government to compensate for its unfairness) - for so long they have - justifiably - railed against it, while their vote may evaporate where they have no MPs, the incumbency factor for their sitting MPS may allow to scrape by in survival with just 25% of a constituency's voters.
Meanwhile, UKIP cavort after their Douglas Carswell won the Douglas Carswell mini-election i.e. the Clacton by-election.  Carswell is now the most senior elected UK politician for UKIP, a bit like Boris 'The Animal' Johnson when winning the London mayoral election in 2008 while the Conservatives languished in Opposition.  If Nigel Farage fails to win in South Thanet come next May, there may be a palace coup and Carswell becomes the UKIP leader.
The United Kingdom Independence Party is bit like the Russian Liberal Democrats, the latter acting more like illiberal anti-democrats.  The Russian Liberal Democrats' leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, is like Farage, throwing in what he calls common sense but what is an affront to all the senses and all decency.  Farage's latest wheeze, after his racist comments about Romanians, is to say the first kind of people to be blocked as immigrants would be those who are HIV positive.  No doubt, Farage associates this with licentiousness, criminality and homosexuality (UKIP opposed gay marriage) but it is another example of scapegoating that UKIP so enjoys.  Interestingly, Carswell refused to back this policy position, which is not a shock since Carswell's father was one of the people who first identified AIDS.  Zhirinovsky also has a novel approach to migrants - to eradicate bird flu, he proposed arming all of Russia's population and ordering them and the troops to shoot down the migrant birds returning to Russia from wintering.  In April this year, a month before Farage's car-crash interview where he made prejudicial remarks about Romanians, Zhirinovsky, when asked whether Russians should reciprocate the Ukrainian sex strike, replied that all Ukrainian women were "nymphomaniacs" like the journalist who had asked the question, Stella Dubovitskaya. He then ordered two of his aides to "violently rape" the pregnant journalist for Rossiya Segodnya, who had to be briefly hospitalised for shock.  Farage says he won't ally himself with France's Front National because of ex-leader Jean-Marie Le Pen's comments about Ebola solving France's immigration anxiety and then makes crass statements about blocking HIV positive victims.  Like Zhirinovsky, like Le Pen, like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, like Jobbik, like the Tea Party, Farage is an incorrigible demagogue, avoiding the nuances of mainstream politicians (but not Sir Edward Leigh, a Tory ex-minister who said Labour would 'open the tap of immigration' as if border control was reduced to the level of water management) and painting matters in black and white.  Less educated people like this rhetoric as it speaks to their level - usually ones for avoiding polling stations, UKIP has induced them to engage for all the wrong reasons, for if UKIP holds the balance of power, all minorities will suffer.