The UK two party system has changed forever
Despite every effort by the mainstream political parties and their complicit media to disparage the leader of the UK Independence party (UKIP), Nigel Farage shook the status quo by increasing their council seats from 7 to 147 in the local elections.
The run up to the elections was ugly. The BBC did everything short of calling him an alcoholic. Unlike Ed Miliband (the Labour leader) who made a point of tucking into a bacon roll, the sandwich of the people, strictly for a photo op, Nigel actually goes to the pub and likes a pint. There is nothing affected or opportunistic about him smiling with a beer in his hand while campaigning and the public, yearning for sincerity, just doesn’t believe the smears. Every newspaper of every stripe was in competition to publish the least flattering photos of him, in full toothed grin looking like a pug dog chopping on an electric wire, the insinuation being that he is a loose cannon no one can trust. It has to be said though, he did himself no favours when he said he did not want to live next to Romanians, earning himself the ‘racist’ epithet.
What is clear is that people are desperate to put their trust in someone who actually understands their concerns and are angry with the elitist antics of our illustrious leader, David (just call me Dave) Cameron who needs a focus group to tell him what footwear to wear on holiday. Despite positive headlines, the economy is going to hell with a property bubble and GDP recovery figures driven by debt. Dave’s response to any criticism has been a lame and ineffective PR push to ‘look serious’ while talking to Obama over Syria in a photo release, or taking a selfie with a local teenage cancer victim who captured the public imagination in his massive fundraising campaign for teens with cancer.
It is of little wonder that the protest vote came out to give both left and right a kick up the backside. But the moot point is that Farage failed to win control of any councils, thereby gaining no real power on the local level. In fact Labour may have lost lost some seats to UKIP, but gained control of more councils and now has the most.
The pollsters have been busy projecting the UKIP figure onto next year’s general election to show the advent of coalition politics as a permanent feature of British government.
This does not bode well for any substantive change, but rather a turn to the wishy washy backroom dealing of disparate voices all vying for power and change, achieving nothing except a further drag deeper toward leftist policies. As we see in continental Europe everywhere, conservatism has compromised itself into oblivion with coalitions fudging clear common sense agendas.
Britain's Immediate Future looks bleak
Projecting the local election figures on the 2015 parliamentary election, we are almost certain to see a hung parliament with Labour holding more seat s than Conservatives leaving a deal to be done with either UKIP or the liberal Democrats to form a government. It is a no brainer that Ed Miliband’s hard left will merge with the taxation giddy Liberal Democrats to condemn this country to wealth taxes, regulation on everything from energy price fixing and rent controls to a firm grip on free enterprise via a ‘British Industrial Investment Bank’ to do his bidding. He even has an obesity plan to control what we will eat.
So has Farage really shaken the status quo? Not a bit. Despite becoming the lead party in the EU elections, his message of controlled immigration, free enterprise and trade with all countries and the wresting of legislation out of Brussels back into British hands has fallen on deaf ears.
David Cameron continues to push for an unrealistic plan for the EU to ‘change’ and give Britain a ‘better deal’ - whatever that means. This is akin to standing in front of an elephant and telling it to fly. Ed Miliband sidestep s every question about an in/out referendum, which Cameron has promised ‘if the next government is Conservative’ but as it will most likely be a Labour government or at best a coalition, we can expect no change on the EU.
All of Europe is shaking, but the status quo will remain
Disgust with the ruling elites is obvious. In Denmark, Greece, Germany and Italy, anti EU sentiments abounded, some leaning to hard fascism, especially in Greece where the neo Nazi Golden Dawn continues to make inroads despite a third of its leadership sitting in jail. In France the protectionist, nationalistic and secularist national front Party of Marine Le Pen is now the third largest party in the country.
None of this is good news. That each of these countries’ electorates are reacting to the iron fist of Brussels’ control over every aspect of their lives and the imposed austerity that the EU bailouts have brought about is obvious. But the answer of the so called far right of parties like LePens’ National Front and Alexis Tsipras’ hard left Syriza Party in Greece is to clamp down on free enterprise and impose trade barriers. This would further crucify those economies. There are also serious signs of Anti Semitism rising in both those countries, something which neither party seems to want to squash.
The mainstream parties of centre left and centre right in Europe have two thirds of the seats in parliament. The guest list has changed but the dance floor is still dominated by those that form dominant groups. One hundred and sixty national parties across 28 member states are represented in the EU parliament. To get on that dance floor and cut some moves, you have to have to have cohesion in political groupings. To do so you need at least 25 MEPS drawn from 7 countries, plus enough cohesion to sign up to something akin to a constitution. Fat chance of that when one wants to tango with someone who can only do the jive.
Plus there is every possibility that the ex- Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Jean Claude Junker, an ardent federalist will get the top job at the EU Commission and will not tolerate any devolution of power that Cameron so hopes for. The EU Commission proposes and enforces EU law and has to power to sue any state not complying. It drafts the budget and distributes money to the EU states. That’s just for starters. It does all the collective negotiation on EU treaties and sits on all decisions made on common foreign and security policy. The commission is a favourite place for politicians who have reached, although not always, the pinnacle of government in their own countries and have no place else to go after they are out of power. Politicians like Cameron are living in a fantasy world if he thinks he can wrest power back from such a deeply embedded, well funded, self interested power structure.
Two ways forward, but only one real choice
Coalition politics don’t work. Policies become diluted to the point where neither member of the coalition can move forward an agenda for change. In the west, two party politics is the only way real change can be affected with voters having a clear choice as we saw in Britain with the 1983 and 1997 landslides of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair respectively. Their majorities changed the country – one for the better, the other for the worse, depending on your political view.
Generally speaking, any given population in the west will lean about 50% to the right and 50% to the left. An injection of centrist ideologies into this mix and you get a mish mash that will generally lead to so much compromise, usually by the right, that socialism takes hold and cannot be reversed.
When a people rise up and start to agitate there are only two choices. One is for the mainstream parties to put aside their pride and intransigence to change to the message sprouting up from the grassroots. That is highly unlikely in the short term. Politicians grasp onto power at all costs, even to the detriment of their party, as we see with David Cameron, sticking to his centrist policies even though his own party defects to UKIP in desperation. Only when he is gone can the Conservatives have a chance to change. Meanwhile the left will have been in power and done more damage and created more government dependency which in turn becomes harder to withdraw back. Only a seismic event like a war can shake a population to make hard sacrifices.
The second and only solution is to infiltrate and change a party from within as with the Reagan revolution. This demands moral courage and the putting aside of self interest and personal gain, traits all too rare in modern politics despite being the ones the electorate demand. The UK elections got a voter turnout of just 36%, an appalling rate which can only be attributed to apathy and the demoralization that comes when your party compromises itself to the point of irrelevancy as the Conservatives have done in the UK.
If true conservatives don’t wake up and take back control, we face a bleak leftist future. While much hope is invested in Nigel Farage, himself a former Tory, the reality is he is a one man band with a weak national infrastructure to support campaigning, not enough money and not enough candidates. He will target certain seats for the general election and no doubt win a few, but ultimately will have no voice of consequence.
Thanks, Dave.
