Back to: Blogging for Orbit Forward to: Lies, damned lies, and popular beliefs. Three main political parties have substantial representation in the House of Commons in Westminster; there are a handful of independent MPs and members of regional or minority parties, but in general governance is in the hands of the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, and to a lesser extent the Liberal Democrat Party It's fairly clear that, in addition to having rich tribal identities going back centuries, the individual members of these parties hold very different beliefs about how the UK should be governed.
It would be hard, for example, to find much in common between the beliefs of my local MP an old school Labour Fabian Society member and those of the conservative back-benchers who lately thumbed their nose at the Prime Minister by sneaking an Alternative Queen's Speech motion into Hansard, calling for various policies that surprise no-one "bring back hanging" being about the most progressive of them. Scratch a Liberal Democrat and, along with a lot of hand-wringing, you'll get broadly socially liberal policies and, unless they're an Orange Book type, broadly socialist ones as well.
So why, when we have three clearly divergent political cultures, do I have the feeling that there's nobody to vote for β that whichever government is formed after the next election will continue to iterate and evolve the policies that have dominated British politics since May ? I'm nursing a pet theory. Which is that there are actually four main political parties in Westminster: the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Ruling Party.
The Ruling Party is a meta-party; it has members in all of the three major parties, and probably the minority parties as well. It always wins every election, because whichever party wins or participates in a coalition is led in Parliament by members of the Ruling Party, who have more in common with each other than with the back bench dinosaurs who form the rump of their notional party.
One does not rise to Front Bench rank in any of the major parties unless one is a paid-up Ruling Party member, who meets with the approval of the Ruling Party members one will have to work with. Outsiders are excluded or marginalized, as are followers of the ideology to which the nominal party adheres. Alternatively they might be a barrister a type of lawyer specializing in advocacy before a judge, rather than in back-office work.
