Is this the man who is destined to lead the British conservative party back from the wilderness and hurtling into office. I really don’t know, but it certainly wouldn’t be a bad thing for British democracyif he was. With all due respect for the Lib Dems, what the UK has now seems to be something like a ‘one party system’.
A Fistful Of Euros
European Opinion
“With all due respect for the Lib Dems, what the UK has now seems to be something like a ?one party system?.”
Absolutely. That’s the really worrying aspect for those who, like me, put maintaining our Parliamentary system of government very high in our hierarchy of esteemed political values.
In the final analysis, our Parliamentary system is the most effective means for protecting personal rights and curbing abuses of power by governments of any complexion.
The written constitution of the unlamented Soviet Union was not short on guaranteed rights – the problem was that the Soviet Union lacked the political and legal institutions to enforce the rights. The end result was that the rights were worthless.
The trouble with our Conservative Party is that it has wasted so much time with introspective navel gazing instead of getting on with the task of providing effective opposition to an incompetent government.
The poor Lib Dems are neither here nor there. Just before the election, in an interview on the BBC Today programme, Charles Kennedy, the Lib Dem leader, was asked about Britain joining the Euro. He said that not joining was a missed opportunity. Has he not noticed the flagging economic performance of the leading Eurozone countries? What does he think joining the Eurozone would have done to Britain’s house price bubble?
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The trouble with our Conservative Party is that it has wasted so much time with introspective navel gazing instead of getting on with the task of providing effective opposition to an incompetent government.
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That’s the trouble? I thought the trouble was that they, over and over and OVER again keep trying to sell the same policies that the country doesn’t want. The UK apparently (and good for them) likes being a non-white friendly, gay-friendly, europe friendly nation whose government is heavily involved in education and health. Rather than working within that framework to improve things, the Conservatives seem to imagine that if they only wish hard enough they can turn the clock back to 1848.
“I thought the trouble was that they, over and over and OVER again keep trying to sell the same policies that the country doesn’t want.”
Well, Maynard, there is that too, I agree, but then the two aspects aren’t mutually exclusive. Philip Stephens in the Financial Times described the focus of the obsessions of some vociferous Conservatives as “repellent”, which is as an appropriate description as any I can think of. Quite why some Conservatives feel impelled to tell other folk how to live out their lives is beyond me and with Britain’s per capita prison population exceeding that of all other EU countries except Portugal, we might reasonably expect some questioning about its effectiveness in curbing the course of violent crime which is still rising.
In fairness, the Labour government has been hopelessly incompetent over the administration of inward migration. I say that not because I share the evidently racist concerns of some Conservatives – I’ve posted too often about Daniel Defoe’s satire: The True-Born Englishman (1701), for that – but because there are valid reasons for concern in these times about uncontrolled migration flows. The reasons for the administrative mess are not a matter for great surprise – after all, Blundering Blunkett was the minister responsible and that virtually guarantees a muddle. But then some Conservatives went on and on about immigrants as though that was the only failing of Blair’s government besides the untoward Europhiliac inclinations of Blair and some ministers. Fortunately, the Treasury hauled us back from joining the Euro as the result of a major policy review ending in June 2003 and then the French and Dutch kindly voted down the EU Constitution earlier this year without much prompting from British Eurosceptics.
However, besides any of that or getting Britain embroiled in the disaster of the Iraq war, there is a long list of government failings in reforming the public services, notwithstanding huge increases in public spending, a rising tax burden and a current budget deficit of over 3%. Much effort and expense went into preparing Transport 2000, which supposedly enshrined Labour’s integrated transport plan but that hardly got underway before a new transport minister came in and (very sensibly) shredded it.
The government is over-regulating the economy, one consequence of which is that spending on business investment has recently shrunk to the smallest percentage of Britain’s GDP since records of the data series started back in 1965 – and that for all Blair’s effusive rhetoric about reform and modernisation. A few months ago, Blair was telling us how important he regarded manufacturing as when manufacturing has lost c. a million jobs since Labour came to power.
There is an important job for the Conservative opposition to do in stripping away all the New Labour spin and showing up the yawning gap between government rhetoric and the reality. That is the basic function of the opposition in a Parliamentary system of government and that, above all, is what the Conservatives have been failing to put across.
However, Bob, and this is my point, voters don’t get to cherry pick the parts of a political party that they like. The only choice they have is all-or-nothing. And the fact of the matter is that most Britons (and, as I said, good for them) find the basic moral starting point of the conservative party to be repellent. They may well agree that the Labor party has presided over some almight cockups, but voting is a choice of the lesser of two evils.
Until the Conservatives can get rid of their current ghastly moral philosophy, Labor is going to have to screw up in some pretty memorable fashion for them not to be perceived as the lesser of two evils. That was, and remains, my point. The average voter couldn’t care less about todays rumors about which Conservative grandee is bad-mouthing which Conservative has-been. But they can do a pretty good job of discerning the basic moral stance of a party.
Of course your point and mine are not mutually exclusive. It’s surely not surprising that the party predicated on “screw you, I’ve got mine” isn’t much interested in what’s good for the country when it could be worrying about what’s good for its individual members.
I couldn’t bring myself to vote in the May general election this year, which is highly unusual for me.
Kenneth Clarke – who is making a bid for leadership of the Conservatives – has made reference to the declining quality of political debate in Britain. I’m unsure how many others in Britain go along with that but we do know a larger percentage of the electorate here didn’t vote in the May election than voted for Labour candidates and that the overall turnout of 61% was only marginally up on the 2001 election, which had been the lowest since 1918.
We also know that professional politicians – and journalists – are regularly rated as somewhere near the bottom of the heap in polling surveys of public esteem.
The combined membership of the three main political parties in Britain currently comes to somewhere about three-quarters of a million when the size of the total British electorate is some 44 million.
Most studies I’ve seen estimate the percentage of floating voters – who switch parties between elections – as somewhere around a quarter and, possibly, as high as a third of the electorate. On that basis, political activists, which include all elected politicians by definition, are an extremist minority.