For Labour this year’s conference is getting worse. First of all there’s the screaming Green New Deal nutjob who blames capitalism for all the world’s environmental ills and whose Twitter feed is full of full on Malthusians who want to curb the world’s population.
Then there is the latest Labour Soyboy who is complaining that ‘too many white men are asking questions’.
Of course Cervixgate rumbles on with those who want to protect women’s rights still unable to attend conference for safety reasons.
This is not a credible political party who the great British public could trust to run the country effectively and fairly. This is a collection of different middle class faux outrage cults all gathering together under the Labour umbrella.
It’s incredible how far a once-respectable Party (even if I didn’t share their politics) has fallen…
It’s not just incredible, it’s incredibly frightening as the British Parliamentary system relies on there being an effective and credible opposition in the House of Commons to challenge and hold to account the governing party. Without that credible opposition you can quite easily end up with an elective dictatorship.
I’ve been following politics since my teens and it’s my view that what’s happening in the Labour Party is worse than what happened in the early 1980’s. At least back then the party was riven by different views about how the country’s economy should be run, now it’s pushing out counterfactual guff about how a man can have a cervix.
What’s incredibly frightening is that if Boris Johnson continues to circle the drain and nobody steps in to sort out the Tories, this bunch of loons may actually be voted in. Even if only 10% of the population are voting by then, whoever gets the victory will take it
Welcome to Fahrenheit211. Sadly you could be correct. I was once a supporter of Boris Johnson as I believed him when he said that he had libertarian instincts with regards stuff like freedom of speech, but since he’s been leading the government I have become increasingly disappointed in how left wing he has become. I still think that his government has handled the vaccine rollout better than some governments have but that’s about all I give him credit for.
I can well see a situation where the Tories mess things up with regards to the economy or energy or some similar aspect of governance and people end up voting for Labour lunatics on the grounds that they would be by then irrevocably fed up with Tory mismanagement. The voters chucked out Major because he and his government were becoming associated with sleaze and economic mismanagement and its not too far fetched to see a situation where similar associations end up doing for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives. People could end up voting Labour out of sheer frustration with the Tories and there are already signs that voters in the former Red Wall seats might be getting pissed off with a Tory party that is increasingly looking like Lib Dems in Tory clothing.
The Tories are now too readily identified with kow towing to the various identity politics cults, ecowank policies and a failure to plan for problems. There is a need for a sensible party of the Right to challenge the Tories from this side and a sensible party of the centre Left to do the same for the Labour Party. The Lib Dems are a busted flush as far as I’m concerned, they are so much a weak party willing to say anything to anyone if it gets them votes and seen to be as such that I don’t think they are able to carry out their usual historical role of being a repository of votes from those who are pissed off by both Labour and Tories.
Thanks
I also thought Boris would do a lot better than he did. I’m just glad to say I didn’t vote for him, as I’d given up voting long before
Boris has been a major disappointment on everything from free speech to immigration. I don’t agree with not voting however is all that happens is your ideological opponents vote instead and have less challenge. Voter apathy is why London is continuing to be saddled with the appalling Khan. If ten or fifteen percent more people got off of their arses and voted for the Tory candidate Khan would have been out of the door.
I understand the arguments for voting, but at the moment, the only options are which type of stick you want to be beat with. Until they give us a ‘None of the above’ or ‘leave us the hell alone’ option, I can’t bring myself to vote for any of them. A vote for a bad party is worse than no vote in my opinion
I also understand your both are bad argument. The ultimate answer is to have better parties. The last few elections and seeing how the Israeli election system builds consensus even though it has the propensity to create unstable govts, have somewhat lessened my objections to proportional representation.
I think we should remove politics from Government. It never seems to end well
Not sure how that could be achieved unless by some form of direct democracy which although it has a lot to commend it, is still liable to end up political. The Civil Service is the closest we’ve got to apoliticality in government and administration but even there there is politicisation. The problem is politics has been a part of government since time immemorial. If it isn’t political parties and political ideologies jockeying for positions of power which is what we have now, then its people competing to be close to the King and to have influence over the King which is what we used to have.
A lot of the problems as I see it is political disengagement by the average British subject. Those who disengage end up with the sort of government that they did not vote for. I wonder if things would be better if more Britons were politically aware and politically engaged rather than apathetic about politics?
The problem with the Civil Service is that they are too political. Donald Trumps ‘Drain the Swamp’ idea was a non-starter, as the swamp simply refuses to be drained. Here we have all institutions pretty much dominated by the left; all people who were not voted for, but wield lots of power anyway
Governments and Kings alike, all want two things – money and power. For a Government, the money comes from tax and that buys power by giving it to people who will vote for them. I don’t see any selfless desire to do what is best for the country in politicians anymore, if it ever was there
Disengagement is probably due to what I said above, there is nobody worth voting for. All Governments want to do is take away power from the individual and interfere in every aspect of their lives. How do you vote for that? If everyone got out and voted, the big two would probably still be the only parties with a chance of governing, so most of us would still end up with a Government we did not want, doing things we don’t want them to do
I don’t think removing politics from Government could be achieved, at least not in our lifetimes, but I think there is the possibility of an alternative system, though how we would get there, I have no idea
If you don’t mind me posting a link to something I wrote, it’s an old blog post, but I think the principle still stands: https://fuelinjectedmoose.blogspot.com/2011/01/democracy-is-not-worth-ballot-paper-its.html
Good piece. You make some good points on the subject of elected administrators. In a way this is what the Police and Crime Commissioners should have been but as so often happens they became party political offices. You are also correct about the problem of the tyranny of the majority which is just as bad as the opposite which is the tyranny of the minority. I believe that the US Constitution was framed so that 51% of people could not oppress the other 49% but it doesn’t seem to work all that well.
I completely agree that the sentiment that all the politicians are ‘the same’ is a big part of disengagement which perversely means that we end up with even worse politicians.
Yes, it’s a cycle that nobody seems able to break at the moment. There’s not just voter apathy, but voter stagnation; people who always have voted for the same party or even worse, always vote the same way their parents did.
UKIP Managed to become a thorn in the side of the big two, but no new parties have come close to forming a Government
Agree on voter stagnation. It was interesting to see how that stagnation was to a certain extent broken with the last GE. A lot of traditional Labour voters chose the Tories for the first time ever. Once the social and cultural taboo that exists in some areas to voting for anyone other than Labour is broken then things become a lot more flexible and fluid.
UKIP did great to push for the Referendum but fell apart after the Referendum due to infighting and tin foil hattery. My respect andsupport for UKIP ended when at a demo in London I saw a UKIP high up sharing a stage with someone from Brian Gerrish’s organisation and Gerrish is a man rightly described as a ‘pound shop Alex Jones’. I walked away from UKIP that day.
The last time a challenger party came up from the bottom and formed a government was Labour and that was nearly 100 years ago. We had other smaller parties mostly related to the Irish question in the early 20th century, but they were thorns in the side of government rather than potential governing parties.
At the last election I spoiled the ballot for the first time in my life. I naturally lean toward the Conservatives and am very averse to socialism. Since the Conservative party are now so left wing I could not bring myself to vote for them. My decision has been continuously vindicated ever since.
I must admit that there have been times when I have considered spoiling my ballot paper. However I thought back to Peterloo and the fight for universal suffrage, the struggle to get the Great Reform Acts passed and those who died so that I would cast a vote, and could not. In 2019 I held my nose and voted Tory because the alternative in the form of Corbyn was at the time far worse. In the subsequent Police and Crime Commissioner election I voted with my conscience and voted Reform despite being not that favourable to some of their policies such as abolishing the House of Lords, because I could not in all good faith vote Tory that time. The Tory candidate in that instance got in as PCC but at least Labour got pushed down the ballot.
We do need a proper conservative party as the current one that has that name has decided to go left to an alarming degree. I have thought of some of the alternative conservative leaning parties like Heritage and Reclaim but Heritage has under David Kurten gone full tin foil hat and Reclaim has turned back into a one man band party with no real ground game. For Britain looked promising but I don’t like their aggressive and intolerant secularism nor the fact that they’ve done nothing to keep ex NF types out of the party.
Britons on the whole do not vote for extremes whether of the Left or the Right so what needs to replace the Tories as a credible alternative solution is a party, as yet unknown, is one that is moderate but also willing to stand up for broadly conservative values.