#Change UK – really? If you don’t get the internet, you shouldn’t be in politics

If you want to vote in the European elections next month, your ballot paper will have a helpful logo next to the candidate’s name to show which party they’re running for – that is, unless you want to vote for Change UK – The Independent Group. Despite their logo being the most boring thing in existence, they still managed to have it rejected by the Electoral Commission, in part because it contained the hashtag #change.

It’s just more of the same for TIG-CUK, who at this stage are basically the party-political wing of the sad trombone “waah waah waaahh” sound. In all likelihood the commission has done them a favour. The thing about hashtags is that anyone can use them for anything. There’s absolutely nothing to stop people, to take one incredibly obvious example, taking to Twitter to post “I’m voting for #change: I’m voting #Labour.” And as the Boaty McBoatface episode should have conclusively demonstrated, if you give the internet a chance to royally stitch you up, thousands of people will gladly do so – and not even out of malice, just for a bit of a laugh.

In tiny microcosm, this epitomises the vapid, cargo-cult nature of political centrism in the UK at this moment. “Change” as a slogan? Worked for Barack Obama, right? All the young folk love a good hashtag, let’s get one of those! What could go wrong? Next thing you know you’re issuing official denials that internet user “wariolover69” speaks for you and angrily trying to find out why someone called Simon Hedges is claiming to be your press officer. They’re desperately flailing about trying to copy things other successful people have done, but without any actual understanding of why they were successful or what would capture the public imagination at this moment.

TIG are pratfalling from embarrassment to gaffe because they have an almost completely shallow understanding of what politics actually is. It is not simply that they lack a guiding philosophy or an organising principle beyond their own careerism, but that they view people who do have one as suspicious and incomprehensible. They want to be seen as radicals but they have the same relationship to genuine political activism that talking English loudly and slowly does to speaking a foreign language. They’re operating far beyond their competence, but they still think the reason they’re not being understood is that everyone else is an idiot.

There is also the deep irony of running as the Change party when your entire reason for existing is that politics already changed and you don’t like it. What do they want to “change”? The exploitative nature of capitalism? The inevitability of climate collapse? Nah, we just want to roll back to the mythical sweet spot of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony and stay there, forever, celebrating the abstract concept of the NHS while the government systematically dismantles it.

Related: Tories hit by new defections and slump in opinion polls as party divide widens

It’s a more pathetic version of the reactionary rightwing demand to turn back time to an imagined 1950s when the sun always shone and you could be casually racist at work without having to go to an equality and diversity workshop. At least they go to the trouble of inventing a utopia, albeit one that would be hellish for anyone who isn’t a middle-aged white man called Mark. The best that centrists can imagine is a glorious return to the sunlit uplands of “just before Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader”. They want change, but only inasmuch as they think they should be in charge so they can explain to you why your dreams of a better world are unrealistic.

There is a genuine hunger for real alternatives in this country, and the rise of the far right on the coat-tails of Brexit is a serious crisis that needs an urgent political response. That’s why we should never, under any circumstances, let the kind of bumbling incompetents who don’t even know why you shouldn’t put a hashtag in a party logo anywhere near it. It would have been mildly amusing to Boaty McBoatface Chris Leslie, but UK politics deserves so much better than this half-deflated whoopee cushion of a party.

• Phil McDuff writes on economics and social policy