LONDON — Since the Milkshake Party emerged, many people have been asking us what our policies are on things like education or the NHS. The answer is simple. We don’t have any.
Taking our lead from Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, we are standing on a platform that is no more than a name, some empty platitudes and the sincere hope that we might send some representatives to a parliament we don’t believe in.
We live in a farcical age — and it’s time to embrace absurdity to the full.
The moment for proffering practical solutions to the Brexit catastrophe is long gone. It’s time to come up with a buzzy name and hitch a ride on the Brussels gravy train.
At the MSP, we plan to take the milk out of the cardboard cup and give indignity back to the politicians. In short, we stand for neither Leave nor Remain — but a third “whey.”
“Milkshaking” might be a modern political movement, but our roots lie in a long British tradition. “Pieing” – the art of lobbing a cream- or custard-based dessert in someone’s face for comic effect — was even invented here.
A woman holds a milkshake cup reading ‘ Want fries with that Tommy?’ during a counter protest against Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) outside the Old Bailey on May 14, 2019 in London, England | Peter Summers/Getty Images
Music hall impresario Fred Karno is credited with introducing the routine in the late 19th century, and there was a time when we exported the gag all over the world. Pie fights became a staple of film comedies from the earliest days of cinema; connoisseurs of the art consider Laurel and Hardy’s short film “The Battle of the Century” (1927) to be the standard by which all others must be judged.
From the late 1960s onward the pie, like Ronald Reagan, moved out of the cinema and into the political fray. It was the American cannabis rights activist Tom Forcade who took things to the next level, when he splatted Otto Larsen, the chair of the U.S. president’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. Forcade’s act inspired Yippie activist Aron Kay to take up his cake tin, and soon he was pieing everyone he felt deserving of it — including Andy Warhol, who was so unhappy with the result that he insisted on restaging the whole thing.
Of course, we at the Milkshake Party don’t condone violence of any sort, and it is important to stress that throwing a drink at someone is indeed common assault.
What Kay realized was that in the age of the photograph, the farcical image of the political heavyweight covered in cream and looking like a complete prat was king. Mao Zedong wrote that “political power comes out of the barrel of a gun,” but it was Forcade who grasped that you didn’t need a gun, just a tart and some spray-on cream.
In the 1980s, Belgian writer Noël Godin became notorious for planting pies in the faces of everyone from the film director Jean-Luc Godard to Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Godin particularly targeted high-profile people whom he believed to be lacking a sense of humor.
“Milkshaking,” the modern take on custard-pieing, sits very firmly in that tradition.
In recent weeks, we have seen several self-important figures of the right have their pomposity pricked. The far-right bigot Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known by the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, was the first to be on the receiving end of a lactosing, but UKIP hopeful and YouTube hatemonger Carl Benjamin has since been obliged to take at least three visits to the dry cleaners.
Now, Nigel Farage has become the latest target. After delivering a speech in Newcastle on Monday, the Brexit Party leader was hit square with a Five Guys salted caramel and banana beverage on his way to his car. The assailant, Paul Crowther, 32, was quickly arrested and later charged with common assault, but it was Farage’s reaRead More – Source
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