Wednesday, 22 April 2009

The Ideological Overlap

Brian Micklethwaite of Samizdata has an excellent post on the matter here:

There is just so much ideological overlap between the big parties these days that Balfe could switch parties without himself moving his position.


This is something I've said myself many times. (Just not as concisely!)

One of the commenters adds:

There are no "parties". There is just one big political class, complete with a full set of emblems, trappings and rituals.


And that truly is Tony Blair's legacy: in a decade, he managed to transform British politics from whatever it been over the last 500 years into a class of grasping, self-obsessed, entirely unaccountable, entirely useless and entirely interchangeable Lego parts.

5 comments:

Goodnight Vienna said...

Well said, Obo. Unless something drastic changes Cameron's Conservatives will have bloggers just as hot on their tail as Brown does now. We've got a pitiful pseudo-democracy and it can't go on.

RantinRab said...

All the mainstream parties are all much of a muchness. There are no clear boundaries between them.

David Davis said...

You said:
"There are no "parties". There is just one big political class, complete with a full set of emblems, trappings and rituals."

Yup. It's Sean Gabb's "Enemy Class", or rather just the legislaturing part of it...

For one moment I read "embryos" instead of emblems - but I suppose they'll have those soon too - look at "Georgia Gould" for example!

Mitch said...

The good news as OH reminds us is that we outnumber them 60,000,000 to 646 and if we wanted to we could walk to Westminster hang them all agree never to mention it and go home and carry on with our lives.

Otto said...

The ideological overlap is not as new as all that. Before even the traitor Heath, there was the word Butskellism made from the surnames of the Tory Rab Butler and Labour's leader Hugh Gaitskell.

Butskellism only seriously went out of fashion in the Thatcher years. It started to come back as soon as John Major was the prime minister.

God only knows when we'll get a government that is genuinely in favour of private property, free enterprise, low taxes, freedom of speech, etc..