Here it is, explained for Americans who watch Game of Thrones. It’s exactly the same! Except for the lack of incest, naked women as backdrops, and bloody torture and execution.
Only thing that baffles me is how you UK people fail, year after year, to elect the party with dragons.
Also, shouldn’t UKIP be the party of the White Walkers?
GRR Martin says Games of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire is nothing compared to the history of the Plantagenet Kings.
They fail to elect the dragon party because the party has been sitting across the narrow sea for 3 damn years now, making no progress towards overthrowing the usurper-bastard king. Meanwhile, the party’s queen does nothing except complain that her people don’t understand her and nail members of the upper class to crosses.
Actually, Britain is pretty similar to “Game of Thrones” in geography more than politics. King’s Landing = London (just warmer and cleaner); Westeros = Britain; and the big ice wall = Hadrian’s Wall on steroids. Which kinda means, yes, Scots = Wildlings north of the wall. And the Knights’ Watchmen do seem to have pseudo-Scottish accents. (Funny thing, though, Lord Balish the pimp has more of a Northern Irish accent.)
They and the Tories both.
@3 raging bee
Fun fact, before becoming a pimp, Lord Baelish was mayor of Baltimore.
I’d have gone
Labour:Targaryens — against (wage) slavery
SNP:Starks
UKIP:Iron Islanders
Greens:Children of the Forest — maybe too on the nose
Also, the conservatives don’t really pay their debts (though neither do the Lannisters) and the Lib Dems have done nothing much to restrain the Conservatives.
More like the Iron Born: a bunch of bullies who believe they’re badass übermenschen who’ll eventually end up pissing off someone much stronger than them be utterly crushed and spend a decade or two licking their wounds before starting doing the same bullshit again because they are utterly incapable of learning (it’s their drown-in-cheap-beer-then-get-resuscitated tradition: messes the higher brain functions)
Come to think of it, Valyria is like continental Europe:
Enormous expansionist slaver civilization which used to be ruled by constantly feuding inbred dynasties, viewed for a long time by their neighbours as inept barbarians beneath contempt until they started building enormous militaries and went on a rape & plunder spree that lasted for centuries, stole everything they could from their conquered victims then claimed that every craft, art and technology was invented by them thus “demonstrating” their bloodlines inherent superiority, saw their dominance collapse after a catastrophic event, yet enough vestiges of their former power remain to give pause to even the mightiest realms.
Ok ok, our Khaleesi‘s war cry (“Mit Eurobounds und strengsten Buchhaltung“) really needs more work.
That’s what the royals are for.
That’d be Plaid Cymru. They have a fair few seats in the Welsh assembly.
Reading your summary before watching the video, I assumed ‘the party with the dragons’ referred to Plaid Cymru, given the big red dragon on the Welsh flag. Turns out they mean the Greens.
PC do seek to protect the Welsh language and aspire to an independent Wales, but they’re otherwise fairly similar to the Greens (and the two parties have formed a sort of anti-austerity alliance, along with the SNP). Those three parties are progressive, socially liberal and left-wing. They’re also currently all led by women, which is very pleasing (especially since they’re working together against the male establishment leaders). I think you’d like them, PZ.
@ Dylan Llyr
A Green/SNP/Plaid Cymru coalition would be the ideal… we can all dream, eh?
Having never watched Game of Thrones, I learned more about that than I did about UK politics.
@ Latveriandiplomat #6
Well, they completely missed their own target for “tackling the deficit” (by an absolutely gigantic margin), and some quick maths earlier reveals that the national debt has grown by 36% since 2010 when they were elected… so, yeah.
@ 12 Yeah. But if Scotland keeps voting SNP, they won’t remain part of the UK for much longer! Wales will take a bit longer, but I live in hope. Events in Scotland are quite inspirational at the moment. I envy them.
My meager history knowledge kept speculating that ASoIaF was just a rephrasing of actual history, to make it more interesting to read than just dry history of names and places and wars etc. And the mythos geography hinted so strongly that this was just rephrased history. The Wall v Hadrian’s was too obvious; implying Scots are Wildlings, also too obvious. but then, I could not keep up with the story and just let it sit there while I moved elsewhere; trying (impartially) to catch up by watching the gore&pornfest of HBO’s GoT.
@Thumper #14:
But…but…that’s all the fault of the Iron Bank of Brussels!
You mean the Iron Bank of Frankfurt.
If UK conservatives “always pay their bills” then they’re clearly nothing like US conservatives.
The party with dragons is Plaid Cymru.
Well, the last Tory led coalition government, who had a stated objective of driving down the defecit, managed to borrow more in five years than every Labour government in history combined. Paying their debts? Not so much.
I’ve been campaigning for the Scottish Green Party (pro-independence, separate from but allied with the England and Wales Green Party). We don’t expect to win any seats, but it’s important to raise the party profile in advance of next year’s elections for the Scottish Parliament – we currently have 2 MSPs, and have good prospects of increasing this. Scotland has been bizarrely prominent in the current campaign – in previous UK elections it’s hardly been mentioned by anyone outside Scotland itself – because the SNP* looks like taking most of the Scottish seats, which are currently held by Labour, and could hold the balance of power. The horror with which this prospect has been greeted by English politicians and commenters has been most amusing to behold, after the same people spent most of last year assuring Scots of their undying love and deep respect, to get them to vote against independence. It seems paradoxical that losing the referendum has done the SNP, and the SGP, so much good – both have greatly increased their membership in its aftermath (I’m one of the new SGP members). But the referendum undoubtedly saw a huge rise in political involvement in Scotland, and Labour made the strategic error of a joint “No” campaign with the hated Tories. Their former working-class strongholds voted heavily for independence, and are now, according to the polls, mostly going to the SNP.
*Which is not as progressive as the video would have you believe: for example, its leader until a few months ago, Alex Salmond, gave Donald Trump a thorough arselicking over the latter’s golf course project near Aberdeen, which involved destroying a Site of Special Scientific Interest. However, it’s well to the left of Labour – a pretty low bar these days.
Why was the characteriz/sation of the Tories as “rich douchebags” rejected? It may have been crude and simplistic, but is it really wrong? To explain things using the only other thing about British culture Americans understand (Monty Python), David Cameron seems like he could be a finalist for Upper Class Twit of the Year.
Am I really the only person who finds it funny that the British person speaking on the video is BBC correspondent Jon Snow?
…You know nothing!
Oh hai! Look what I found. The Guardian’s video Guide to the UK Election for non-Brits.
@ bassmike
I noticed and yes, I giggled :)