UK Politics

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I'm thinking that noticing the many similarities between Labour and the Tories misses the most important thing, the fringes. (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by essell@lemmy.world to c/uk_politics@feddit.uk

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To elaborate...

The UK has always favoured centrist governments, when the Conservatives get too nasty they're unpopular, Labour only wins when they do Thatcherism-Light, etc.

We now have a choice between a relatively moderate conservative prime minister, who is admittedly being dragged to the right by his party and others, and a relatively moderate labour leader who has purged the extremism from his party to pursue a centre left agenda.

In both cases, what I see are two people who believe in principles, compromise them for politics sake, who are fundamentally in favour of the status quo rather than revolution and prefer to win through being seen as competent.

Fine, this has been the case most of my life. It's why I've been relaxed about politics. Whatever happens, things will largely stay the same with small incremental changes.

The difference now is about the fringes. Not a day goes by recently without a headline grabbing policy coming out of the government press machine making a virtue out of being a bunch of ****s.

The ridiculous culture war stuff, the politicisation of fear and anger. Pointless, ineffective policies that are intended to win a few votes regardless of the harm they cause. Sickening stuff a lot of the time, born out of selfishness of behalf of those in power to try and keep that power and get as much as they can for themselves. It feels like they be the ones looting the Titanic as it sank.

So whilst Labour are not likely to usher in a revolution, a golden age or fix things overnight. I'll take centrist middle aged dad running the country if it means an end to this nonsense. An end to a government attacking it's own citizens in the name of defending the people.

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[–] bagfatnick@kulupu.duckdns.org 6 points 6 months ago

The centrism is a side effect of First Past the Post surprisingly. Look at countries with proportional representation. Compare the far right seats in European countries to seats here held by the Brexit / Reform party. If I recall correctly, the 2015 election results are one of the worst, with the Brexit party getting close to 13% of the vote and only 1 seat.

FPtP tends to force parties to compromise before election to gather support. Successful PR governments require the compromising after the results to form a consensus.

The results from this paperare quite interesting at comparing voters to how MPs vote. Essentially the average CON voter is actually more socially conservative than how CON MPs vote. Similarly the average LAB voter is also more socially conservative than how LAB MPs vote. Essentially if you make the populace pick, they’ll prioritise social conservative policies first even if they wanted more financially left policies.