dong20 said:
I had pages of argument about this with solong....it was a concept he seemed unable to grasp.:smile:
Something I've never been able to grasp fully :redface: is what the difference is between someone calling themselves British and English? Is British the more insular term because it is separate from the Welsh, Scots and Irish and then you use English if you want to refer to the whole country?
LordPendragon said:
The Lower House is elected and Tony Blair is currently Prime Minister as he is head of our Labour Party (remarkably supposed to be like your Democrat Party) and has been in power since 1997. We have elections every 4 to 5 years.
I often wonder what people think of the Labour party in other countries! OK, Blair got on well with Clinton and everyone here seemed to be worried about a 'left wing' Prime Minister not getting on well with a Republican, but they needn't have worried! They got on better, if not more so, than with Clinton - perhaps because they had so much in common!
I guess the point to make to outside observers (and this is just from my own political knowledge, so make your own mind up!) is that Labour seemed unelectable until Blair turned the party round, threw out all the far left wingers, branded the party 'New Labour' and introduced lots of policies that made voting Labour attractive to Conservative voters. In effect Labour became more Conservative than the Conservatives had been, although most people seemed to think at the time that Labour was just occupying the 'middle ground'.
In that sense although there is talk now of abandoning the core values of Labour in fact the party had abandoned and disenfranchised its previous supporters in order to get the chance of getting to power in the first place - things have just moved further to the right, especially with this War on Terror or whatever they're calling it now, that the 'middle ground' voters or media types who write up the political articles are getting nervous.
By middle ground voters I mean the type of people who do not want to vote for a police state and bringing back capital punishment, but at the same time probably feel that treating people fairly if it affects them in a financial or time consuming way is also not what they want.
Labour provided that 'middle ground' perfectly when it came to power in 1997 to my mind because the Conservatives were losing respect and influence over these floating voters. When Margaret Thatcher left (or according to some sources was all but pushed out the door by the rest of her party) the strong controlling hand that had led the Conservative party, for good or ill, for such a long time was gone, leaving a power vacuum which couldn't be filled by people like John Major (It is telling that the policital satire show Spitting Image couldn't find anything to satirise about John Major except by painting his puppet grey!)
All the bickering and infighting, constant rotations of leadership etc left the field wide open for a strong leader. This gap had been there for years until Blair turned up and in 1992 it looked likely that Labour would win then, because Neil Kinnock then leader was seen to be a strong presence. Unfortunately strong leaders can alienate as well as gather support and Kinnock's speech before the election where he was seen to be grandstanding and seeing the result as a foregone conclusion (he excruciatingly tried to get his audience to cheer 'Well all right!' with him) led to the Conservatives getting another five years.
I agree with the maxim that its the party in power at the time that loses an election rather than a new political party winning an election. I think once in power you stay there for a very long time, whatever happens - people like to stick with what they know, so support slowly ebbs away until eventually it reaches a critical point where the opposition party has enough votes to take over - that's what happened to the Conservatives and is what is happening to Labour right now.
The Conservatives could have stopped Labour by putting up a half-decent leader of the party to combat Blair - it would have been a battle of personalities then rather than the half-hearted pathetic attempts to discredit Blair by putting up 'demon eyes' posters of him!
This is the background to Labour getting in in 1997 - what is really interesting to see is how history is beginning to repeat itself with the Labour party. The strong personality of Blair is being attacked by members of his party who are wanting change and opportunities to advance - soon he will go and there will be a power vacuum at the heart of Labour as there was with the Conservatives after Thatcher - for good and (most often!) ill Blair was the figurehead for all the policies of his government, and there will be a big backlash against anyone who replaces him when the next election comes round, especially if he isn't democratically voted in but just chosen internally by the Labour party (similar to John Major getting into power?)
This should leave the way open for the Conservatives to come back into power, after all Labour is slowly destroying itself as the Conservatives had done. I don't think at this point that it will happen, unless something really devastating happens to destroy Labour's credibility (like taking us into another World War in the Middle East perhaps?)
They haven't really caught onto how to do that because they haven't elected a leader yet who is willing to disenfranchise the right wing core support for the Conservatives in the same way that Blair was willing to use then discard the core left wing support for Labour. Previous leaders like William Hague (I've drawn a blank on the other names, but there have been three or four over the years Labour's been in power) always shot themselves in the foot by bringing the middle ground voters towards the Conservatives then shouting "Bloody immigrants! Bring back hanging! I hate Europe!" or words to that effect! So everyone who didn't care for Labour or the Conservatives but just wanted lower prices on petrol for their 4x4s went back to voting Labour, who didn't like immigrants either and were wanting to introduce compulsory ID cards but weren't as vocal about it - they just introduced changes once back in power!
The funniest thing I've ever seen in political debates was when Blair was justifying invading Iraq in 2003. You would expect a party in opposition to encourage debate about the legitimacy of this yet Labour headed by Blair had so overtaken the right-wing justification for war that all the Conservatives could do was say 'well if we were in power we'd have done that!' and they had to take the debate into petty areas such as whether the soldiers had been given the correct equipment to fight with, rather than whether they should be fighting and dying at all. The same thing, from what I saw, seemed to occur in the US in the last election where the only thing the Democrats ran on was that the 'War on Terror' was not being handled correctly, or that Bush wasn't a war hero, rather than the bigger issue on what the hell a 'War on Terror' was and whether Iraq could be justified in any way other than Bush getting revenge on his daddy's nemesis.
This new Conservative leader seems to be a start in disenfranchising the 'right wing' Conservatives because there was a lot of fuss from some Conservatives that David Cameron was too young, too trendy etc. Unfortunately he's very obvious in his bandwagon jumping to win support - Blair was able to hide his true intentions behind a mask of sincerity and idealism, while David Cameron does stupid things like riding a bicycle to his office to show the gathered photographers that he is tough on green issues, then gets scuppered when the reporters find out that he had his car following behind him with his work shoes in!
In the end politics is not about actually 'doing' anything, it's about looking as if you care about what the public think while being able to push them to one side to do whatever the hell you want.
This faux caring is probably what has contributed to our celebrity obsessed culture - and you couldn't get a more perfect figurehead for sincerity without caring, action without knowledge, than Princess Diana - or the "people's princess" as she was dubbed by Blair.
Gosh, I started off wanting to talk about the strange way Labour had become right wing and I've realised that left or right wing, votes are all that counts, politicians will do anything for them, especially in an age where there are no strongly held beliefs, you can flip-flop your policy at any time to keep in favour.
