Quote Originally Posted by DrPatrickBarry View Post
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.