[jjsheridan5]

Independents hold NO cards. They lose all their seniority in the party, all their committee spots, they get nobody to caucus with. It’s a good way to end a career but it doesn’t actually accomplish much.

And that is why UKIP is so meaningless, and can't accomplish anything. These same kinds of things were said about UKIP, and they were about as wrong as they could be, just as they are wrong now. What happened was that UKIP tapped into the same frustration that exists here, in even greater supply, and rather than being a fringe 3rd party, has emerged as the dominant one. Far from holding no cards, or ending their career, or accomplishing nothing (all the usual predictions), they are actually in the process of saving their country, and are crushing the old order, an order that is very similar to our own.

[discostu]

Completely different system in the UK. The British parliament is designed to have many parties and lots of alliances between them forming blocks, it’s a system where a party with a few members can mean something. Our system is designed for 2 parties, there’s the majority, the minority, and anybody else that shows up can bugger off. We’ve had plenty of folks go independent here, and most of them never won another election.