Hopefully the Tory party will get hammered at the polls today and take a giant leap towards the crisis they so richly deserve. As I have urged before, if you ever want to get a party which does not share the vast majority of its views with Labour, then for goodness sake do not reward their aiding and abetting of pervasive government by voting for the buggers. Do not hold your nose and vote for Michael Howard’s carnival of clowns because they are the less evil because they are nothing of the sort: they are the same evil with the added toxic characteristic of providing an illusion of choice.
If you are going to vote rather than do something useful with your day, and yet you want an end to the European Union’s takeover of British politics, a smaller state, lower taxes (rather than just ‘less tax increases’) and an end to the panopticon ID/database state (or even just any one of those), you will get none of them by voting Tory. If you cannot bring yourself to kick the voting habit altogether, then why not vote UKIP? At least that way you get to indulge your fetish for voting whilst at the same time annoying the chattering classes and not rewarding a collaborationist ‘opposition’.
Agreed. The only hope for the Tories is for them to be hammered so badly, that in desperation they turn to a vaguely libertarian agenda next time around. But as matters presently stand they are pointless and worthless. Encouragement is the last thing they need.
I agree with every sentiment, the conservatives will backtrack on any promises Ref: the EU, they need to be trashed. VOTE UKIP!!
As someone of a basically centre-left orientation, it is so refreshing to skim over Samizdata every now and then. You can’t really trust leftwing websites to tell you what’s happening on the right because of the propaganda aspect. But when the rightwing websites are telling me how absolutely balls-up the right is, to the extent that they won’t even be voting Tory but will be abstaining or voting for no-mark clowns like UKIP who don’t stand a hope in hell of winning a seat… well it warms the cockles of my heart! It’s good to see that hard-core libertarianism has no support whatsoever in the political mainstream, nor, in fact in the general public either, to the extent that even the Tories, for electoral reasons, are forced to make comforting noises about the NHS and not cutting expenditure on public services.
Happy voting!
Your comments are sad but absolutely true. I quite like and respect my local Tory MP but I chose not to vote today.
I read the following on the Comment page of Business on 1st May and I do not disagree:
“Even in the extremely unlikely event that they were to win Thursday’s election, the blunt truth is that [the Conservatives] would be incapable of forming a durable and effective government. A Tory victory on 5 May which could only be by the narrowest of margins, would mean preparing for another election by Christmas; a Howard administration would quickly collapse under its own inadequacies and descend into warring factions of left-wing modernisers. right-wing tax-cutters, Europhiles, Eurosceptics, social conservatives and social liberals, all of which seem to hate each other more than they dislike Labour.
The blunt truth is that the Tories do not even have enough brain-power to fill the frontbench; nor do they have the vision. Despite eight years in opposition their intellectual batteries remain uncharged, their inability to grasp new ideas and directions awesome. Instead they have swallowed the New Labour consensus hook, line and sinker. Under a Tory government, the tax burden would rise almost as fast as under Labour; they would spend the same amount of taxpayers’ money on unreformed schools and hospitals; and they would give welfare reform a miss. There would be no proper choice in schools and hospitals, no effective crackdown on crime, no proper solution to the European quagmire into which Britain is being sucked. They have even ruled out across the board tax cuts preferring instead to offer bribes to various interest groups most likely to vote on Thursday. They have overplayed the immigration card, preferring fear and division to hope and optimism; and they have opted for increasingly hysterical attacks on the Prime Minister instead of presenting a programme for a Tory Britain. The Tories do not deserve to win on Thursday.”
Any dissenters?
UKIP?
You must be kidding??
Nothing would give this Centre-Left voter more pleasure than for the tories to move more to the right and therefore electoral irrelevancy. My biggest fear was if the tories ever elected a moderate, one-nation, euro-neutral candidate such as a Michael Portillo or Ken Clarke, luckily the one chance they had they went and voted a non-entity such as IDS due to all those torie luvvies, stepford wives and blue-rinse Godalming set deciding that a blander than bland ex-soldier was just the man to ensure a possible four term Labour government. I see that the tories have finally got round to exploring the option of removing the vote from the rank and file since they have patently shown they cannot be trusted with it. Too bad the horse has well and truly bolted!
Agreed, Anthony. There are many things I don’t like about Blair, but it’s heartening to see the right in such terminal disarray that rightwingers are either not voting, or voting for losers like UKIP.
People like H might actually like the idea that the current Tories share his and labour’s vision of an ID card carrying civil liberties abridging high tax future but I rather think he misses the point. I do not want people to vote UKIP because I think they can win but because it seems a good way to not just see the Tory party defeated but broken. Only when that happens can something better emerge to oppose the control freak statists of both left and right.
I am proud to say I have just voted Tory. I am a libertarian capitalist. The Tories are quite a long way from where I stand. But I hate and abhor the idea of a third term for Blair and, which is worse, Brown. In any case I think it was my duty to vote for the party closest to my views. Yes, I’d like to see the Tories replaced with a that stood unashamedly for low taxes, free speech, small government and UK independence. Today that choice was not on the ballot paper. Voting is not a fetish. It is a right that I treat as a duty.
Replace “Tory Party” with “the bourgeois state”, and your prescriptions have an oddly Marxist flavour, Perry!
H. and Anthony, if you think libertarianism is on a continuum, further right than conservatism, you have failed to understand libertarianism/statism relationships. Furthermore if you tend to think of the Samizdatistas as rightwing, you’ve either not been following this blog at all, or don’t have much comprehension skill. Vote for the left and enjoy your tyrannical “freedom.”
H: try stepping out of your box and realise that there is more to the world than your narrow views allow for. Thinks look Marxist to you because you have such limited frames of reference.
It tells you how reactionary the left is that they think there will be a really big difference between four more years of Blair and the Tories, whose manifesto can be summed up in three words: New Labour-Lite.
Well, Winzeler, the right wing takes many forms, and there are indeed statist conservatives, but I think most people would associate minimal state control and widespread privatisation as right-wing orthodoxies. I believe “left-libertarianism” to be oxymoronic.
If you break the Tory party, the successor will be the Liberal Democrats, who are further to the left than Labour.
Libertarianism, and even libertarian-leaning Conservatism, has no significant electoral support in the UK. This is not because the case is not being put well, nor is it simply because no party really articulates the view at all. It is because the overwhelming majority of the electorate don’t want it. It is absurd to suggest that the continued existence of the centre-right Conservative party is somehow preventing the emergence of a more libertarian party.
Caveat elector.
EG
“Agreed, Anthony. There are many things I don’t like about Blair, but it’s heartening to see the right in such terminal disarray that rightwingers are either not voting, or voting for losers like UKIP.”
Bwahahaha. Don’t you get it? The right wingers are voting Labour. You don’t honestly think that those millions of previous conservative voters have changed their voting preferences because of some paradigm shift in their political beliefs do you? It’s because of a shift in beliefs at the top of the Labour party. OMFG NOOB.
You have a duty to vote for people you yourself admit do not refrect your views? And seeing as you reward them with your vote anyway, how exactly do you expect them to move in the direction you want? Are you so unwilling to take the long view that you are willing to vote for slower death now rather than work for a cure in the future? If you have a ‘duty’ it is to vote your convictions. If all you ever do is vote for the lesser evil, all you will ever be offered is evil.
Seeing as how the Tory party is going to lose anyway, now is the PERFECT time to vote to make a statement.
What Perry said.
The only vista that I long for today is the Conservatives getting their backsides handed to them, following which they collapse into rump-status (scuse pun) and irrelevance.
There will be no true progress in this country until the rotting carcas of the Tory Party is cleared off the road and burned.
Euan is on the money. The fact is, the British public simply do not want privatised health. And no party seriously wanting to be elected could ever propose it.
I am reminded of the sort of thing the old guard said right before Thatcher arrived in No. 10.
The Tories may get me back some day (or not) but this time I am indeed voting UKIP.
Euan Grey,
If I was at all interested in the progress of electoral politics, then your sombre assessment would matter to me. But as I am interested in the battle of ideas, it does not.
Perry and I are only too aware of how unpopular our ideas are but you only have to look at the history of Fabian socialism to appreciate how today’s unknown, marginal and unpopular ideology can become tomorrow’s widely accepted consensus.
The Conservative Party (in common with all other political parties) is a mere speck of dust in the reckoning.
True. And that is because they think the NHS actually stacks up against private and hybrid solutions elsewhere in the world, whereas nothing could be further from the truth. Even France’s hybrid system is better than the UK’s fully socialist one, and that is saying something. We are stuck with a ‘Second World’ heathcare system because no one has the balls to start laying the ground work to undo 60 years of absurd propaganda. I have had faster and better healthcare at time in Croatia and Ghana (!) than from the NHS.
Monster raving loony, green party, lib dem, whomever..just not tory or labour ?
Whatever party gets voted in they are all the blinking same. LIARS. But I do agree that the tories and labour shouldn’t be voted for. ASW for Lib dems being further left than labour, how true considering that noolabore are on the same side of the fence as the tories.
Will be voting Tory with a heavy heart, got to register an anti Blair vote, but UKIP are not the perty to do it, they are anti progress like the greens, and advocate nationalising the railways.
Oh for a proper small govt party
Perry said:
My problem is that I’d like a good education for my children. I can’t wait. H and his lefty friends aren’t going to deliver. The Tories’ voucher plan might.
Then vote for the bonkers Natural Law party if you must vote. Yet in reality a vote to stay at home is a vote for ‘none of the above’ and that is good too. If you vote Tory, you are voting to have a heavy heart for a great deal longer.
If you EVER want them to come to you, you cannot just vote for them anyway.
Anthony Burn writes:
“My biggest fear was if the tories ever elected a moderate, one-nation, euro-neutral candidate such as a Michael Portillo or Ken Clarke…”
Christ! If you can describe Ken Clarke as ‘euro-neutral’ you must be one of those willing to set fire to your firstborn if so commanded by some clown in Brussels.
That’s so derranged it counts as pathological!
It should, for the reason that we have a democratic political system. The battle of ideas is fought on the field of electoral politics. If you ignore this fact, then you are looking away from the battlefield and are thus likely to lose simply by not getting involved in the fight. Still, common sense never seemed to get in way of libertarianism.
EG
To bury ones head in the sand and talk about the “battle of ideas” is to risk a police state. The threat is immediate. “Right wing” libertarians must join with “left wing” liberals and vote Liberal Democrat. They are the only electable party against such disgraces as ID cards, house arrest and the abolition of trail by jury. They are the only party for the retention of traditional civil liberties.
To H.: Revel in your smugness all you want, but left and right will be irrelevant when a boot is stamping on the human face forever.
Perry de Havilland writes:
“If you EVER want them to come to you, you cannot just vote for them anyway.”
A conclusion I’ve also reached, sad to say. My vote went to UKIP on the ‘message in a bottle’ principle. The Tories simply don’t deserve to win.
Meanwhile, as the sage said, just wait by the bank of the river and eventually the body of your enemy will come floating by.
H’s triumphalism has about a year to live. At that point the economy will crumble and, once again, the smoke and mirrors charade of the Left to obscure the fact that socialism cannot defeat the fundamental principles of economics will be plain for all to see.
Euan,
The battle of ideas is fought on the field of electoral politics.
Euan Grey says “leave it to the professionals”.
Euan, my dear fellow, the battle of ideas is fought everywhere and anywhere except the field of electoral politics. Political parties do not come up with ideas, they merely register the fact that ideas exist and then fight to convince the public that they are the best ones to implement them.
Eaun, again you demonstrate your flamboyant disrespect for dissenting opinions, while supposedly upholding the right to dissenting opinions. No, the electorate is much more complicated than a simple battle of ideas. All you have to do is read the comments on this post to find that it is much more complicated. You have here dozens of people, most of whom espouse similar political beliefs, and they cannot find consensus on whether they should vote their strict beliefs or a compromise. Even if they could agree that a compromise is best, they can’t figure out which one to choose.
H., left-libertarianism is just as oxymoronic as right-libertarianism. Both sides wish to inflict their personal convinctions on society. Generally speaking the left wants to inflict their income redistribution ideas on society and the right wants to inflict their morality ideas (drugs, gay-marriage, abortion, gambling, et. al.) on society. Libertarianism rejects both with equal vehemence. May I suggest you google basic political spectrums to gain a greater understanding of political landscape. There’s a very simple one called Politopia that you should look into.
Euan Gray does not answer David Carr’s excellent point about the Fabians, but it is a good one nonetheless. I don’t expect to see a more libertarian polity until my dotage, but it is worth working for nonetheless. I have had enough with all this defeatist, complacent crud about “appealing to the “centre ground”. The late, great Sir Keith Joseph nailed the folly of this 30 years ago by pointing out that the search for the middle ground of politics often ended with the worst of both worlds rather than the best.
G Cooper – This is a genuine – i.e., non-sarcastic – question: Do you not think the British public is now away of the mechanics of the smoke and mirrors and will recognise them, when deployed, for what they are?
Or will they fall for it again? If so, they deserve every punch Tony delivers to their faces. (Or “every slap” may be a more apt word, in Tony’s case.) It’s fascinating, from a distance, to watch a nation that is possibly going to vote for suicide.
Perry, your theory is based on the present democratic political system prevailing so there is a chance for real Tories to make a comeback later, but I don’t believe this will be the case. Five years from now, Britain will have been much further subsumed into Europe and some of our voting and Parliamentary practices may well, by then, have been demeaned “against human rights” and declared illegal. You cannot count on the rules being anywhere near the same five years hence. It is not outside the scope of my imagination, at least, to think that national elections will have been declared antithetical to the EU and outlawed.
Tony cannot cede enough, don’t forget, as he thinks they are going to make him God King of Europe if he can just show them how extremely on the team he is.
Even with that said, look at how much the right (in the US) wants to control and spend money (military, propagation of so-called democracy), and look at how much the left wants to control personal lifestyles (prayer in schools, gun control). They’re all the same bunch of crap.
PS – I apologise for the incoherence of my post above. Of course, I meant “aware” and “deemed”. I’ve just got up and am on my first coffee.
The Tories aren’t going to get elected because people like them or get a warm and fuzzy feeling just thinking about them but because the electorate senses they are needed. The chain of events behind this has perhaps started already. The economy looks like it is taking a downturn. Gordon won’t be able to stop spending as its all he can do. Taxes will go up but not by enough so borrowing will increase and interest rates will go up. At that point the housing bubble will burst and people will start to look around for someone to get them out of this mess.
Mind you this all assumes that the Tory party will still be in a state to look like it could do these things and at the present rate of decay that might not be the case. Lets just hope this electoral shock will be big enough to set them thinking about what they believe and what are their principles.
I don’t think I agree with you, Perry. For three reasons. First, they’d draw all the wrong conclusions from a loss. Second, in power they’d be easier to move in the proper direction than during a campaign in which they think they have to ape the socialists to win. Third, they’re comparatively harmless caretakers who won’t wreck much while the real libertarian culture wave has time to build.
“The battle of ideas is fought on the field of electoral politics.”
God help us, if true. But I doubt it is.
As David says, parties don’t come up with ideas. They just adopt those that are already lying around. Our job as libertarians is to make sure that the dominant ideas that are lying around in the Universities, think tanks, media etc are libertarian ones. That way, whichever party gets into power, we will move in the correct direction. What the average voter thinks is virtually irrelevant.
That’s how the socialists did it and very successful they were too.
Julian Morrison’s three reasons are very sane.
Julius, you make it sound as if ideas are completely unrelated to reality, and it’s just a question of which ones get pushed the furthest in universities, think tanks, media, etc. You’ve got the cart before the horse. The ideas that bubble up reflect the social reality, not the other way round. Socialism did change the political face of Europe, but not because socialists were better at promoting their ideas. It was a reflection of the fact that industrialisation had created a relatively homogeneous working class which constituted a new nexus of power to be used and often enough abused.
As for all you libertarian millenarianists still waiting for the first coming, it seems to me that like Marxism and any number of other political theories, libertarianism is a utopianism that belongs in the past, not the future. All of the most economically successful countries in the world operate some form of mixed economy with powerful capitalist interests balanced with powerful state interests. The U.S. is no exception. Countries that most resemble the libertarian model, where the state has minimal influence, are the screwed-up countries of Africa or Latin America where the infrastructure has fallen away, and tiny oligarchies rise to the top to cream off whatever the riches are to be had, leaving the rest of the country in chaos.
OT – only the BBC could come up with this:
The World Trade Organisation has moved a step closer to freeing up global trade after agreeing a tariff structure for agricultural imports.
No, he doesn’t. He says use the democratic process and persuade the electorate. He also spells his name “Gray.”
Which presumably means “electoral politics don’t give us the results we want, so therefore cannot be useful.”
This IS the point I’m trying to make. You need to engage with the electorate in the electoral process and not indulge in fantasy about some battle of ideas that bypasses the process.
Here’s the answer, then:
Fabian socialism heavily influenced the mainstream socialist political philosophy in Britain by virtue of being a more reasonable and sensible alternative to revolutionary socialism or the more extreme brands of “democratic” socialism. First the less knuckle-dragging members of the Labour movement were persuaded and then the electorate was persuaded. The point is that you MUST convince the electorate of the merits of your case since we have a democratic system. As the Fabians did, so must the libertarians if they wish to succeed. However, think it is unlikely libertarians will do this since there is little in the libertarian philosophy that (a) libertarians can actually agree on amongst themselves and (of this) (b) is remotely appealing to any but a tiny number of people. Libertarianism is electorally unpopular and I cannot see any means by which this is likely to change.
Who’s saying that here? It is necessary to get enough of the electorate (about a quarter of those eligible to vote) in order to win power. A naked libertarian platform simply won’t do this. An openly socialist one won’t, either. The socialist platform succeeded in 1945 but was pretty soon seen to cause all manner of problems & is unlikely to succeed again. Economic liberalism succeeded in 1979, and persisted up to the late 80s because there was no alternative. But it’s unlikely to succeed again.
For all the complaints and defects, the fact remains that Britain is a relatively prosperous and free country. Economically, it is considered more free than the great US role model, and is less corrupt. It has less disparity in wealth, without approaching the levelling tendencies of much of Europe. It has problems, of course, but most of it works and most people are reasonably comfortable. Whatever your political platform, you will not succeed if you upset this, either by levelling or by calling for privatisation of everything. You don’t need to be centrist, but you do need to carry enough of the centre to prevail because the people who agree wholeheartedly with you (or with any given platform) are insufficiently numerous to carry the day.
EG
Euan Gray writes:
“The socialist platform succeeded in 1945 but was pretty soon seen to cause all manner of problems & is unlikely to succeed again.”
A prediction which will be interesting to consider in the light of tonight’s results for the Lib-Dems.
You keep bringing this point up to the neglect of the fact that conservatives have a far wider range of dissenting opinions than libertarians do.
This is wrong. Libertarianism accepts that there will be problems, but that because a.) proponents of individual freedoms retain the moral high ground and b.) the collective in the form of a government has demonstrated incapacity when it comes to alleviating problems (gross immorality, corruption, poverty, etc.) the government should be minimalized in order to promote personal responsibility. Fundamental libertarianism (minarchism) is basically opposed to initiation of force. Libertarianism enforces only one thing: People should have to and be able to live under their own convictions and the consequences thereof.
The footsoldiers of Conservatism will speak & they will vote UKIP??
“The blunt truth is that the Tories do not even have enough brain-power to fill the frontbench”: nor Labour. I heard a bit of a debate soon after the ’97 election – Hague, Lilley, Brown, Blair: three grown-ups and the P.M. I’d guess that with that objectionable twerp Derry Irvine gone, Brown is the only bright boy, or girl, in the cabinet. The Tories, after their surprise landslide win later today (!), can field Howard, Hague, Rifkind, Willets, Letwin, Fox. Looks like a 6 to 1 advantage to me and, for all I know, the Tories may have even more people who can count to 20 without taking off their shoes.
I guess to clarify; the left tends to want have the government “fix” poverty and meet the needs of the needy through varying levels of income redistribution, and the right tends to want have the government “fix” immorality through enforcement of law. Seeing that a.) government has demonstrated it can do neither of these and b.) not everyone agrees that these things should be done (or more accurately, to what level these things should be done), how can liberals and conservatives (like you, Euan) keep casting this “utopian” criticism on libertarians? Conservatives and liberals say, “Let’s fix this [whatever]” (even though we can’t), and libertarians say, “Leave it alone.” Hmmm…utopian.
H argues that most of the successful economies in the world are mixed ones, and cites the United States as a prime example. Riiight. The United States govt, combining state, federal and local taxes, in fact takes a smaller chunk of GDP than is the case either in Britain, Europe or Japan. Bad example to cite. You’ll have to do better than that.
And of course the terrific growth of ultra-low tax Hong Kong in contrast with mainland China until the early 1990s completely blows H’s argument out of the water.
It is true that when selling ideas, one needs a potentially receptive audience. Ideas don’t exist in a vacuum. Timing is often key. This is one thing the Fabians understood, as did those patient souls like the Adam Smith Institute, IEA, and their opposite numbers in the USA like CATO, etc.
If you want to spend the next 5 years as a cantankerous old grouch complaining about everything that’s the government is doing – listen to Perry.
If you’re someone who actually believes what happens to the country is more important than the complaints that can be leveled against what is happening, don’t.
The choice is between whether you want to be a chattering right wing nabob or a participant. Simple.
Verity writes:
“Do you not think the British public is now away of the mechanics of the smoke and mirrors and will recognise them, when deployed, for what they are?”
Only in part. I think the public is very well aware that Blair is a liar and that most of the Za-NuLabour front bench properly belongs in a home for the retarded.
The trouble is that they think the same of the Tories – and who’s to say they are wrong?
Given a choice between two hideous alternatives, they vote with their noses held for what they consider the lesser of two evils – even though most can see the smoke and mirrors for what they are.
The trickery will be exploded when the economy collapses. Which, of course, is precisely why the UK is voting today, rather than in six month’s time.
I’m not sure what a “chattering rightwing nabob” is but I am quite sure that a vote for the Tories today is a wasted vote. They are going to get thrashed anyway. Nothing but nothing must be done to give Tory MPs the slightest excuse for believing that they will ever regain power by offering the nit-picking, vision-free, carping, New Labour-lite manifesto on which they have campaigned for the last few weeks. I voted for them in 2001. Not this time. When they left office in 1997, I predicted 18 years at least in the wilderness. So far, I have seen nothing to revise that prediction downwards.
Perry
I sympathise with your argument but Verity’s right. We simply don’t have time to wait for the Tories to collapse. In fact if it was ever going to collapse I believe it would have been more likely following either the ’97 or ’01 embarrassments. If Blair is still PM in the morning we can only hope that his majority is so reduced that he can’t act with impunity. If he has a large enough majority then we may as well drop our pants, hold our ankles and mutter ‘s’il vous plait’. If there was less resting on the next few years I’d happily spoil the paper.
Hence, this morning, I put on asbestos gloves, held my nose and voted to keep my Tory incumbent in against the unthinkable prospect of the Labour or Lib Dem candidates winning. At least I can do that knowing that he thinks I’m voting UKIP, that his instincts wouldn’t be out of place here and he knows I’ll be a pain in his backside from next week.
Don’t pray for a reduced Labour majority. Remember J. Major and the “bastards”? A small majority means the backbenchers get to jerk the leadership around – and the Labour backbenchers are deep Red. Sure we’d be almost guaranteed a Tory stampede next time around, but the damage they’d have to repair just to regain the status quo ante… *shudder*
Perry: Don’t know if you migrated to NH as threatened, but the Natural Law Party has not contested British elections since 1997.
Glad to see you giving the nod to UKIP, especially in the light of this passage in its manifesto: “British armed forces to be deployed only when this is clearly in the national interest. Our forces are not world policemen or international social workers.” Hope you’re moving away from liberventionist delusions. OTOH, UKIP said it would have bailed out MG Rover, so what can a girl do?
Of course, all this is for amusement only. Bliar is going to win another whacking majority, and it will not be a resurgent Right but the coming international financial crunch (based on the collapse of the US dollar after a few more years of bipartisan warfare/welfare) which will put the skids under Bliar or Brown, depending whether Tone is smart enough to skedaddle to some fine position at the UN or NATO in time.
At that point almost anything will look better than no-longer-New Labour, since Brown’s tolerance of public spending and public sector expansion in the last few years, together with his milking of pension funds and encouragement of an unsustainable house price boom, will bring the ceiling down on the UK economy. Better start stockpiling those tins of baked beans, gold bars and any sharp implements they haven’t banned yet.
There won’t be much in the kitty for further foreign crusades of the kind beloved by I’m Tory Plan B (anag.) either.
Simple minded, you mean. These guys are ‘participating’ everytime they use their blog to ask people not to vote or to vote outside the usual ways.
Which makes them the perfect protest vote 🙂
I can understand the disappointment at the Conservatives’ less than radical stance. But I would rather punish Blair and Labour for their smugness, mendacity and illiberalism; for the damage they have done – and will continue to do – to the constitution and to small businesses.
I see it as a matter of personal pride. There is no way I could vote for the spineless tossers in the Conservative Party.
Hurrah for the sane views of Euan Gray so well expressed. Politics is the art of the possible and it is useless for a political party to ignore the general views of the people who they hope will vote for them.
A people it must be said who have been conditioned by a leftist, statist, politically correct media, BBC, education system etc etc; a people whose history has been rewritten or obliterated by those same organisations.
I wish Michael Howard well. It looks a little black for him and the nation at this time but the hope must be that the inevitable economic disaster brought on by Brownian policies will force an early collapse of Tony’ third term before he can wreak damage from which there is no return.
Otherwise there is always emigration of course.
EG:
“The point is that you MUST convince the electorate of the merits of your case since we have a democratic system”
I hardly think so. There is no prospect of libertarians persuading the masses of the virtues of libertarianism, within any plausible time scale. The only practical course is to work on the changing the views of the elite who determine policy in the first place. That is hard enough, but mass persuasion is a hopeless task.
But no-one is suggesting that the Tories should ignore the views of the people they want to vote from them. Of course they should but they should also be seeking to shape and influence those views. All they have done for decades (with a partial exception under M. Thatcher) is collude with the left….hence, as you say, we have a people conditioned by a leftist, statist politically correct media, etc etc. If the Tories want my vote, I want to know what they propose to do about this. Simply accept that it is inevitable and continue to operate in the ever more limited space left available to them by the left? To date, the answer seems to be “yes” which is why they are so useless. In the US, the Republican Party has over ten to fifteen years used the web, local politics and the TV Channels to challenge the assumptions of the left and its media friends…and the left hates it. No prizes for guessing which country has the less moribund centre-right party.
I think there is a way to unpick the argument about whether libertarians can influence “mainstream” views (to use Euan Gray’s question-begging term). Think of selling political ideas like entrepreneurship. A business tries to get a sense of what consumers want, what they will tolerate, what will excite them, etc. But such a business, if it really wants to shape the market, has to stick its neck out, to take risks. When Maggie decided to sell council houses, or when Reagan advocated supply side tax cuts, these measures involved a measure of risk. Of course these great politicians trimmed and changed much more than their hagiographers will admit, but they still took big gambles.
To come back to this issue of appealing to the “centre”, it is begs so many questions. For a start, public opinion is not a homogenous mass, and is even less so in our less tribal culture than during the middle of the 20th century.
It may appear hopeless to campaign for a more liberty-friendly world at the present time, but I am damned if I am going to succumb to an intimidatory “argument” that implies that the likes of us should give up. Sorry, all you “pragmatists” out there, but we are not going away.
Johnathan:
“A business tries to get a sense of what consumers want, what they will tolerate, what will excite them, etc.”
Yes but the important point is that the consumers of political ideas are emphatically NOT the voters – they just get presented with a choice of two packages once every five years. The real consumers are the parties, the policy makers, the media etc. They are the ones to whom we need to sell our product.
But are you seriously suggesting Michael Howard is anything but illiberal himself? I mean, do you actually remember his time as Home Sec?????
Julius, I do of course agree that the “selling” needs to involve the policy wonks, MPs, media types, etc. You are quite right. And that is exactly what a lot of we supposed “extremists” in our blogs, think tanks etc are trying to do.
I have just returned from the polling station. I voted against the party that wanted to take my money by threat of force and spend it on things I disagreed with.
This was difficult as the ballot paper did not have a candidate standing with that platform. But I was able to write “none of the above”. Unfortunately this was less than totally satisfying as I wasn’t able to write it below the list of other candidates, there being no space left at the bottom of the paper. So I wrote it down the side where an “X” was intended.
It was a tiny fuckyou in the grand scheme of things but it made me feel better than not voting.
Euan,
Apologies for the surname error.
My disagreement with you stems from the fact that you insist that change can only come about from the electoral process. You have things entirely the wrong way around. My goal is to change the climate of opinion which, in turn, gets reflected in electoral politics.
But truly there is no conflict here. You do things your way and I will continue to do them mine. After all, if my methods are doomed to failure, then you have nothing to worry about, do you.
To Perry and the other exquisites too delicate to soil their kid gloves by voting Conservative today, this may be your last chance to vote in a British election. We have already been catapulted back to the 18th Century with rotten boroughs and corruption at the polls. Considering the speed with which the godawful Blair has dismantled so much of our ancient constitution and civil rights, I wouldn’t place any bets on there being an election five years from now – if he’s in charge. Within five years, Britain will have long been subsumed into Europe and be permitted Micky Mouse regional “elections” only.
I have to agree with Euan Gray. The trick, of course, is to recast your policies and principles to make them the new centre ground. You can only do that by framing them in a persuasive way. It takes a long time for ideologies to achieve this nuancing. The Tories haven’t really begun to do this assertively yet, but have a better chance than any other electoral force.
Historically speaking a tax take of 40% of GDP is a political extreme rather than the centre ground. Couldn’t that the start of a recasting of the relative positions of supporters and opposers of the state?
I cannot see any argument for UKIP. This party is anti-Europe and British nationalist. Nationalism always seems a collectivist ideology to me.
John O’Dea writes:
“I cannot see any argument for UKIP. This party is anti-Europe and British nationalist. Nationalism always seems a collectivist ideology to me. ”
Which reveals nothing other than you know nothing about the UKIP.
A more sophisticated analysis would be that it is actually pro-Europe, because it opposes a statist, centralised control, which damages European interests in favour of the interests of a ruling elite.
I grudgingly voted Conservative. The way I see it, if we conservatives/libertarians boycott the Tory party and they get completely hammered again, all that will happen is the party/media/general public will conclude that they are still too far right and they’ll become even more Labour lite.
It was the Conservatives under Heath that took the UK into the (then) Common Market, and it is still the party of Europhiles like Ken Clarke, Chris
PetainPatten and Heseltine. At least Maggie did her best to mitigate the mess and later admitted she was wrong not to have taken an ever harder line on the EU. No, a vote for the Conservatives in 2005 will do exactly nothing to save Britain from what you describe and one you get past that illusion it becomes very easy for former Tories such as myself to turn my back on the party forever.Old Jack Tar – The Conservative Party is not “a party of Europhiles”. There are half a dozen eurowimps in the entire party: Clarke, Heseltine, Patton, Portillo and probably a couple of others. The presence of some rogue elements does not make the party “a party of europhiles”. But yes, Maggie should have taken a stronger line on Europe.
There seem to be a couple of delusions here:
1. That your vote counts.
2. That a vote for the Tories will change anything Labour’s done.
3. That voting is the only or at least most effective form of political agitation.
None of these are remotely true. Perry’s got it right by not wasting his time pulling a lever.
– Josh
Absolutely nothing. I think it certain that your way will fail and mine will prevail.
EG
Euan,
Best of luck to you.
I too voted Tory last Thursday. Pointless in a way as I live in a safe Labour seat. But I voted anyway because I am proud to stand up & be counted. I agree Michael Howard’s a long way from being perfect but we need a way back from the wilderness.
All you posters dishing him seem to have learnt nothing from the way Blair took Labour back into power.
Look past the spin & he’s got thru’ a pretty left wing agenda – & not just the obvious high taxes element but using govt. powers to re-engineer society.
I’m not saying the Tories should become as (politically) dishonest as Blair but we must stop indulging ourselves & concentrate on getting back into power.
I too voted Tory last Thursday. Pointless in a way as I live in a safe Labour seat. But I voted anyway because I am proud to stand up & be counted. I agree Michael Howard’s a long way from being perfect but we need a way back from the wilderness.
All you posters dishing him seem to have learnt nothing from the way Blair took Labour back into power.
Look past the spin & he’s got thru’ a pretty left wing agenda – & not just the obvious high taxes element but using govt. powers to re-engineer society.
I’m not saying the Tories should become as (politically) dishonest as Blair but we must stop indulging ourselves & concentrate on getting back into power.
I voted Tory last week. Bit pointless really as I live in a safe Labour seat. But I voted because I was proud to ‘stand up & be counted’
True, Michael Howard isn’t perfect but he understood that the Tories had to win some seats this election or risk becoming forgotten about.
Posters dishing him seem to for not being ‘right wing’ enough seem to have learnt nothing from Blair. Does anyone seriously believe Blair’s objectives have changed just because his principals have?
I’m not saying the Tories should be a dishonest as Blair but we need to get back into serious contention before indulging in some of the more fanciful wish thinking I read here & elsewhere.
To do that we need to take people with us – & then is a step process that starts with practical reasons to vote Tory.
Highbrow libertarian debate can wait – lets get back in power first!
I voted Tory last week. Bit pointless really as I live in a safe Labour seat. But I voted because I was proud to ‘stand up & be counted’
True, Michael Howard isn’t perfect but he understood that the Tories had to win some seats this election or risk becoming forgotten about.
Posters dishing him seem to for not being ‘right wing’ enough seem to have learnt nothing from Blair. Does anyone serious believe Blair’s objectives have changed just because his principals have?
I’m not saying the Tories should be a dishonest as Blair but we need to get back into serious contention before indulging in some of the more fanciful wish thinking I read here & elsewhere.
To do that we need to take people with us – & that is a step process that starts with practical reasons to vote Tory.
Highbrow libertarian debate can wait – lets get back in power first!
No, multi-post Mike, I don’t think you should elect a party in the vain hope they’re going to morph into something palatable. Your suggestion is basically “disengage the brain and pull the lever.” No deal.