Conservative party conference - the full review I don’t believe I’m going out on too much of a limb here to say that the majority of people currently reading this do not like the Tories very much - and I’m certain that is a massive understatement. Fair enough. I happened to attend Tory conference earlier this week and I could talk all day about the negatives I witnessed. However, before I get into all that - relax, I’ll get there - I would first like to discuss the positives.
True, the UK electoral system is designed in a way that there tend to be two major parties in each electorate. But there is really no reason why a major party could not be replaced by a different one; that certainly has happened in many democracies, and it has happened historically in the UK.
So, instead of hoping that the Conservatives become more moderate again, a Briton could also hope for and work towards the UK's two-party system becoming Libdems versus Labour, for example. They might then be fine with the Conservatives being run forever by "the shower we currently have running the show" if that means the party will become marginalised and be replaced by a more moderate one.
One reason to prefer that instead of hoping for re-moderation of the Conservatives would be that they have not been moderate for several decades, so hope may be thin on the ground that there is enough liberal wing left for them to ever become sensible again. You may not like that view, and you write that "everything has been used up over the last dozen years" as if there ever were any good ideas in that party twelve years ago, but were there?
I am writing this as somebody outside of the UK and am therefore implicitly writing about the entire conservative political movement over the last forty years across all the 'Western' world, but basically the only idea it has had in all that time is: make the rich richer, make the poor poorer, and distract voters by stoking fear and hatred of immigrants and minorities. That's it.
There isn't, and never was, a good idea. There was only a thin veneer of ideology in the shape of trickle-down economics, which falls apart after one second of thinking it through. Because it is immediately clear that a billionaire given another hundred million currency will just stack it on top of their other billions, especially if the poors don't have the disposable income anyway to buy anything the billionaire would try to sell after investing that hundred million; and conversely, somebody living paycheck-to-paycheck given anther one thousand currency would immediately spend it to fulfill their urgent needs, meaning that trickle-up would obviously work to stimulate the economy where trickle-down never will.
In other words, if this kind of conservatism disappeared from the mainstream political spectrum of a nation, to be replaced with something like the UK's Libdems, nothing of value would be lost.
True, the UK electoral system is designed in a way that there tend to be two major parties in each electorate. But there is really no reason why a major party could not be replaced by a different one; that certainly has happened in many democracies, and it has happened historically in the UK.
So, instead of hoping that the Conservatives become more moderate again, a Briton could also hope for and work towards the UK's two-party system becoming Libdems versus Labour, for example. They might then be fine with the Conservatives being run forever by "the shower we currently have running the show" if that means the party will become marginalised and be replaced by a more moderate one.
One reason to prefer that instead of hoping for re-moderation of the Conservatives would be that they have not been moderate for several decades, so hope may be thin on the ground that there is enough liberal wing left for them to ever become sensible again. You may not like that view, and you write that "everything has been used up over the last dozen years" as if there ever were any good ideas in that party twelve years ago, but were there?
I am writing this as somebody outside of the UK and am therefore implicitly writing about the entire conservative political movement over the last forty years across all the 'Western' world, but basically the only idea it has had in all that time is: make the rich richer, make the poor poorer, and distract voters by stoking fear and hatred of immigrants and minorities. That's it.
There isn't, and never was, a good idea. There was only a thin veneer of ideology in the shape of trickle-down economics, which falls apart after one second of thinking it through. Because it is immediately clear that a billionaire given another hundred million currency will just stack it on top of their other billions, especially if the poors don't have the disposable income anyway to buy anything the billionaire would try to sell after investing that hundred million; and conversely, somebody living paycheck-to-paycheck given anther one thousand currency would immediately spend it to fulfill their urgent needs, meaning that trickle-up would obviously work to stimulate the economy where trickle-down never will.
In other words, if this kind of conservatism disappeared from the mainstream political spectrum of a nation, to be replaced with something like the UK's Libdems, nothing of value would be lost.