*waits for Labour to appear relevant again*

He is right about the micro politics. There is, as we have said many times on thus forum before, not much room between the traditional Left and Right wings of our political parties these days. Labour really needs to cut the chain that links them to the Tories.

Neither party stands for any grand ideological vision. Almost no voters want them to.

You can say as often as you want that Labour has to do this or that, but what you are asking of them is that they should serve an electorate of you, instead that wider one that outvotes you millions to one.

I am in much the same boat of course. As a Liberal of the old school variety I would rather see my party dump all the old SDP baggage that traps them in the slender wasteland between Labour and the Tories, and start to promote genuine liberal policies again. Not going to happen; they would soon cease to exist if they went into an election with my preferences in their manifesto.

The problem is, they're likely to effectively cease to exist at the next election anyway. The middle ground between Tory and Labour is now no more than a sliver. So they can't live in that area any more. Their choices are become more right wing which won't help them at all, or become more left wing, which you suggest is bound to be unsuccessful.

They were basically buggered the moment they went into coalition, because they don't have anything like the political capability to rein in the current bunch of tories. As a result they've alienated most of their existing political support and don't have any way to attract anyone else - why would anyone vote for a liberal right now? They can achieve nothing if not in power, they've achieved effectively nothing while in power and they're never going to have a majority to do the things they want to do. They've shown themselves to be utterly politically pointless.

They've basically sacrificed their entire political future to be the minor player in a (probably) one term tory administration. It doesn't matter what they do at the next election, they committed political suicide about three years ago.

A more valid choice is stop adhering to the Euclidean political viewpoint that assumes a single dimensional universe which contains no places other than left, right and middle.

I have no way to gauge how old any of you guys are, you might be spotty teens for all I know. But for the purposes of this conversation, you and Paul are old, old, men with no idea that the world has left you behind already.

You hope that politics will get less pragmatic and more idealistic, with grand visions locked in competition with each other, and of course that yours will be proven to be right. Lefties and righties from Marx to Friedman always think that their ideas are scientific and provable, and as humans they like fairy stories. So you people tend to want there to be an epic confrontation with their side winning out in the end, as it is in the story books. Thatcher was the last serious politico in this country to think that way. Blair spotted that the audience had lost interest and capitalised on that. That's what you hate him for.

Recent economic troubles have encouraged those who wish for the old ways to imagine that there will be a return to the ancient regime. That the masses will discover their interest lies in either rampant collectivism, or a massive retrenchment of the state (tick box as appropriate). But this time round you are all swindling yourselves. The public hasn't only lost faith in politicians and institutions as you suppose. The new breed of clean Galahads sent to lead us into a brighter future won't have anyone to follow them there. People have long since stopped buying into the 'grand vision' political myth.

You will never breathe life back into that corpse, no matter how hard you wish you could.

Parties are guilty of taking the electorate for granted. I live in a safe Tory seat. There is no hope of anyone other than a Tory winning in any election. The local council is similarly dominated by the Tories.

The result is that as far as elections go, the other parties really don't bother. The Lib Dems have a bit of a push, but they know that they have little influence here. Labour, always 3rd place, don't bother.

The result: little activity from all three come election time. It is as if they know the outcome, and just let the electorate vote according to habit.

This will be true of safe seats of any colour.

The election is fought in the marginals, and those marginals will be descended upon by the political and media circuses. The whole "debate" will have been focus grouped so much that the messages and topics will be so close as to be identical. I hate to say this, but the parties are chasing the same voters with the same message - effectively old people with far more conservative views than anyone else. Think "Daily Mail" (and, yes, it is wrong to assume this, but this seems to be the influencer in election debates).

Now, I am not making this up. After the General Election when Michael Howard was Tory leader, Channel 4 ran a programme which showed how this was pretty much the case. It also showed how reluctant candidates were to go off topic, and the reporter was ejected from a couple if Q and A sessions from asking questions on subjects not on the day's subject list.

It also showed how the three main parties were profiling the electorate in seats they bothered about, and how they boiled it down. They used the same software as George W Bush (where they determined that he should be seen with dogs and guns because his target voters valued those images).

I don't know what the solution is to this, other than living in a marginal constituency where I would have more lunch speaking to a candidate, and where my vote could indeed make a difference.

Well, it always worked for the Monster Raving Looney Party. Oh no, wait.. You really think them doing something utterly strange and outside the normal bounds of political life is going to get people voting for them? Aside from, you know, having to explain their politics in terms of geometry. That's a sure fire winner.


You can believe what you like.


Actually, I was being entirely pragmatic. The Liberals made a decision which has absolutely screwed them politically. No policy change they can institute at this point is going to save them, because a) The electorate simply won't believe them until they implement that policy and b) They aren't going to get a chance to implement any policy any time soon. They've put themselves is a no-win situation. They can create an entirely new political dimension if they like, it won't have any voters in it.


Let's get this clear : The liberal party is a dead as a dodo and will be for probably a generation. The other two main parties serve no rational purpose for a large percentage of the voting public. None of this is going to change any time soon. That idealistic enough for you?

Regarding stance...

David Cameron's vision has been lost, says author of 'hug a hoodie' speech

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... ig-society

Yeah, probably true, but I don't care. The Liberals of old were radical reformers. Their basic ideas have stuck (personal liberty and trade without government interference) to the extent that you associate those notions with the Tories who originally opposed them.

For a long time the Tories represented protectionism against foreign competition; traditionalism in our relations to each other and to power; and reaction against new ideas as a general principle. The Tories broke the Liberals by spending a century and a half becoming more like them. They first stole our lunch in 1867 (Reform Act) and have been gradually eating it ever since.

What remains of the Old Tories is the vestigial echo. It can be heard in the fox hunting lobby, and the more outlandish statements they make when they get riled about Europe. But with no empire left, they have no mojo, and are unfit to reproduce. That's why when you see a young one in the wild its such a preposterous sight (Jacob Rees-Mogg).


And recently Labour has been doing the same. They spent decades pursuing doomed protectionist and interventionist strategies that did more harm than good. They didn't become more liberal because they wanted to, they did it because they lost a series of elections and were never going to win again otherwise.

Old Labour, like the Old Tories, is a vestigial nipple of declining relevance. Where the one relied on Empire for its moral purpose, the other relied on it for the captive markets that allowed inefficient British manufacturers to compete against better managed German and American companies. Old Labour implemented a number of reforms after WWII, but then tried to preserve everything in aspic. But the empire went, and the captive markets got competitive, and then the Japanese arrived.

The Old Labour and Old Tory argument was about patronage. The division of spoils of Empire. One set wanted no change ever, the others wanted one change - and then no change ever again. Nurturing continual change is a Liberal idea.

But with that basic question of entropy answered, maybe we don't really need dramatic upheaval. Apparently this is the worst recession ever, our economy is a snake pit of disaster. Everything is in crisis, we all got into the handbag and went to Hell.... bit of a damp squib apocalypse really isn't it? Could it be that our present system works well enough, and merely needs minor adjustments as we go along?

So perhaps these more liberal versions of the Tories and Labour are ok for the foreseeable future. Their brittle resistance to change has snapped, but they have little enthusiasm for big new ideas that arrive all at once. A kind of mini synthesis that leaves everyone more or less OK. You're not inspired, and neither am I, but the vast majority of the voters don't care about grand political ideas.

The differences between the leading parties are technocratic minutiae. The larger schisms are within the parties themselves, and even then, as often as not are mostly interpersonal rivalries rather than battling philosophies.

As for my party of preference. Well, they are only of value to me when they are pursuing an interesting reform agenda. The only one they really have at present is changing how the votes are counted and thereby introducing the concept of coalitions to British politics. If their own voters will abandon them for even that trivial reform, then perhaps they need to spend some time in the wilderness becoming interesting and dynamic again.