OT - Local elections

[Airborn Pie]

UKIP were just the product of the hijacking of the Conservative Party by self-serving centrists and career politicians, who hijacked the Labour Party in the same way. For years people were walking around saying "It doesn't matter who I vote for, because I get the same thing", and they were pretty much correct.

The Labour Party is closer to having regained its soul than the Conservatives are at present, but the sooner the traditional parties of the Left and Right re-establish their true identities, the better for democracy. I've got no problem with the electorate having a centre ground option as well, but that job belongs to another party.

Don't you think that a majority of people are sick of the extreme left / right and want to re-establsih the centre ground in politics?

[jackal2]

Don't you think that a majority of people are sick of the extreme left / right and want to re-establsih the centre ground in politics?

No. That's the media narrative, and some people even get brainwashed into repeating it, but their day-to-day actions and conversations (in the pub or wherever) tell a different story, as do election turnouts.

People are in fact much more engaged with politics when they have a choice between strong opposing parties with clear water between them, led by conviction politicians who seek power because they want to achieve something with it, rather than career politicians who seek power as an end in itself, willing to flip flop from one stance to another to satisfy short-term public whims, please the media establishment and survive until next week.

Talking of which, it is large parts of the media who have sought to re-define any reasonably strong Right or Left view as "extreme", when it is nothing of the sort. The media, and the Civil Service, favour a political environment which never strays far from the centre. This situation (which pretty much existed between 1997 and 2015) allows them to dictate the way the country is run themselves, with elections occasionally thrown in to create the impression of public consent, yet in reality the public have no great choice.

For obvious reasons, this establishment hate "interventionists" (to quote a line from Sir Humphrey Appleby!) who attract substantial amounts of public support and have ambitions of changing the status quo and "running the country themselves" if they get elected.

My politics are Conservative, but that's irrelevant to this point. I'm arguing in favour of proper political parties who give people something genuine to agree or disagree with. Something to campaign for, or against. Give me the passion of a Thatcher or a Corbyn over the cynical, soulless salesmanship of a Blair or a Cameron any day of the week.