The Northern Independence Party (NIP) may have begun life as a Twitter joke, but those still scoffing would do well to learn from recent history. Italy’s Five Star Movement erupted into political life on the back of a comedian’s blog, before flipping Italian politics on its head. The Brexit Party, founded in 2018, was a hollow shell but transformed British politics in the short time of its existence (it was renamed Reform UK in January 2021).
Both were helped by money and, crucially, more representative electoral systems than first-past-the-post. But as Paolo Gerbaudo argues in his 2018 book
Digital Party, the combination of the increasing political prominence of social media and popular disaffection with the