New political party?

[DrPatrickBarry]

Stolly,
Witton Park above reckons "Our system works well", I am not sure I agree with him. Personally I think both the Tories and Labour are too "broad a church". The Tories have been hampered for decades by the hard right of their party, and now labour has lurched to the hard left. This leaves the moderates in both parties in a difficult place. I personally would be comfortable with a coalition consisting of some mixture of Tory Wets/Blairites/Lib Dems/SNP, which would require both of the big parties to split.

[Witton Park]

Which would decimate otherwise Tory voters 😊

More positively I really hope the hard left and hard right have now reached their high water mark and both begin to wither on the branch. As with Donald Trump, promising populist dreams eventually hits a hard wall of reality. Real politics requires reality grounded people to work together and compromise not mini dictators promising fools dreams.

I think it would decimate Tory and Labour.
If you look at the last election, 42 Tory and 40 Labour out of which around 30 of the Tory were leavers and 18 pf labour.
Then consider that Labour has very high pockets of remain voters in London and a few cities like Manchester, Liverpool...

I reckon that the Tories and Labour would be below 30%.

I fail to see what is populist about wanting to operate as a country on similar terms to the USA, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.....
In fact the majority of the world.

[Witton Park]

Stolly,
Witton Park above reckons "Our system works well", I am not sure I agree with him. Personally I think both the Tories and Labour are too "broad a church". The Tories have been hampered for decades by the hard right of their party, and now labour has lurched to the hard left. This leaves the moderates in both parties in a difficult place. I personally would be comfortable with a coalition consisting of some mixture of Tory Wets/Blairites/Lib Dems/SNP, which would require both of the big parties to split.

Our system has worked well until it gets in to a situation where the executive are out of kilter with the people and the parties with their members and voters.
The party executives favour bureaucracy.
In many walks of life we have seen it mushroom. Little empires growing, constantly trying to justify why they need to grow more.

We have gone from roughly 650 paid, elected officials back in the 60s, to 1'000s now. Probably over 10,000.

It needs pairing back.

MPs, MEPs, Police Commissioners, MSPs, AMs, MLAs and huge swathes of paid councillors. Then we have the EU bods such as Commissioners and their underlings, the QUANGOs, SPADS.....

The absolute cracker is Gavin Barwell (ex MP) who wrote a book How to win a Marginal Seat, promptly lost it and is now paid more money as a SPAD to Mrs May and has more influence that a Secretary of State.

That makes it seem as if our system doesn't work well, but it does and it is about to hit the reset button.

You talk of the "hard right" Tories. Fact is the Tories are a right of centre party.

There aren't any hard right. They are largely centrist Blairites. You say moderates are in a difficult place, well if they are it's off their own making.

The centrists largely ran both parties from the mid 90s to 2015. There was little politically between them. A few % here and there on tax.

Labour have reset, perhaps over reacted you might say but that will sort itself out as they'll fail in elections when it counts.

The Tories have yet to do that. They haven't had an election of leader since 2005 and the MPs know that if they did, the front end of the party would begin to more reflect the membership.

There are a lot of promising politicians in the Tories, many of them Remainers. Rory Stewart, Tobias Elwood, Kemi Badenoch, Penny Mordaunt to name a few.

Once they put Brexit to bed, move Mrs May on, along with some of the old school, I think they will do well.

[Stolly]

So the ERG aren’t mentalist enough for you WP, it’s the Brexit party now? 🤪

So USA as a trading block has 25% of global GDP, China 15% and Europe 27%. Good ol’ U.K. on its own will have.... 3.5 ish. We’ll really pull in some greeeaaat trade deals with all that clout!

[Stolly]

Stolly,
Witton Park above reckons "Our system works well", I am not sure I agree with him. Personally I think both the Tories and Labour are too "broad a church". The Tories have been hampered for decades by the hard right of their party, and now labour has lurched to the hard left. This leaves the moderates in both parties in a difficult place. I personally would be comfortable with a coalition consisting of some mixture of Tory Wets/Blairites/Lib Dems/SNP, which would require both of the big parties to split.

To be honest Pat we need a proper proportional representation system but, for that, you need a majority in parliament to vote for it and, given that it’s not ever in the interests of the current party holding a majority, it’ll never happen. The present system maximises frustration as people always end up voting for the party that they disagree with the least or, more probably, have the best chance of beating the party they hate the most.

I pretty much dislike most of the policies of the tories and far too many of the present Labour Party too, the Lib Dem’s blew it in coalition and more or less sold their souls to the devil and the greens I like but the electoral system is fixed against them. Also I live in a constituency that had a 20% Tory majority where 80,000 people vote max, meaning that a 20,000 plus vote swing is needed. So my vote is pretty much the dampest of all squibs

[DrPatrickBarry]

The Tories have yet to do that. They haven't had an election of leader since 2005 and the MPs know that if they did, the front end of the party would begin to more reflect the membership.

That would be political suicide if their leadership did reflect the membership.

[shaunaneto]

Other than backward references to UKIP no one has mentioned the Brexit Party yet.

Well, I’ve not had an invite for this and frankly I’m not sold as things stand. But on the basis that you lot are buying the drinks and covering my liabilities (e.g vomiting down my shirt) I’ll attend your party.

Will it be like XOTFs but with more arguments and slanderous accusations?

Most importantly, have you mapped out the route yet. That’s key for me, otherwise we’ll just bumble around arguing which direction to take!

[Witton Park]

So the ERG aren’t mentalist enough for you WP, it’s the Brexit party now? ��

So USA as a trading block has 25% of global GDP, China 15% and Europe 27%. Good ol’ U.K. on its own will have.... 3.5 ish. We’ll really pull in some greeeaaat trade deals with all that clout!

Interesting figures. I haven't seen them before. Source?

https://fullfact.org/europe/eu-has-s...world-economy/
Not aware that the EU is much above 15% which of course will reduce by a fair chunk when we leave, but I note you did say Europe, but 27% still seems a bit high for the whole of Europe.

[Muddy Retriever]

So the ERG aren’t mentalist enough for you WP, it’s the Brexit party now? 🤪

So USA as a trading block has 25% of global GDP, China 15% and Europe 27%. Good ol’ U.K. on its own will have.... 3.5 ish. We’ll really pull in some greeeaaat trade deals with all that clout!

What proportion of global GDP is Switzerland? Certainly much less than the UK. And yet Switzerland has a trade deal with China, something the EU hasn’t. In fact the EU has been poor at negotiating trade deals because it has to take into account 28 countries who may have very different interests. A sovereign country like the UK would not have that problem. If we ever do end up leaving the EU and it’s customs union I reckon we will have the flexibility to sign much more deals than the EU.

[Witton Park]

So the ERG aren’t mentalist enough for you WP, it’s the Brexit party now? ��

So USA as a trading block has 25% of global GDP, China 15% and Europe 27%. Good ol’ U.K. on its own will have.... 3.5 ish. We’ll really pull in some greeeaaat trade deals with all that clout!

What is mentalist is when parties promise something at General Election time and almost immediately the election is over start to back pedal rapidly.

But I think you are misunderstanding what I said and you also misunderstand the ERG which actually includes some remain MPs and is used incorrectly by many commentattors.

Like it or not, there is a Brexit Party set up I believe to fight in future elections should the Government botch Brexit.

I think it will mop up a lot of "none of the above votes" and there will be lots of them up for grabs as a high proportion of the 82% who voted Labour or Tory will feel ripped off at the moment.

One of the fastest growing parties is also the old SDP which is a Eurosceptic, centrist party that supports PR. IT may be able to grow support but at the moment has no profile with the public.