Third Party Jitters

                                                Third Party Jitters

With the state of the coming general election very difficult to predict as neither of the two major parties being able to build up a convincing lead in the opinion polls the attention of the media has switched to the third parties that are waiting in the wings

Certainly it does seem that! Their problems are only just beginning with the media chipping away at them

At stake is the prize of who becomes the third political force in the country.

While the proportion of people who vote for one of the two major parties has consistently declined since the fifties there has always been one third party the Liberal Democrats who mopped up the protest vote. They were able to be the nice guys of British politics and though they ended up running several local authorities they managed to avoid in general mud attached to the major parties. Their members were either disaffected Tories who could not bring themselves to vote Labour and disaffected Labour voters who could not bring themselves to vote Tory..

With the present coalition that as all ended. Since going into coalition with the Tories in 2010 they have been held responsible for all the failures of the coalition and there is little doubt that their support is in steep decline. Their vote is likely to fall by more than half.

Where then will that leave the new protest parties. Two new parties have sprung up to take votes, one is the United Kingdom Independence party or UKIP and the other is the Greens. Issues her are of course who will take votes away from the main parties.

The Tory Party led by David Cameron is likely to suffer disproportionately as a result of UKIP. Here is a party which espouses as its main objective withdrawal from the European Union and measures against immigration. There has been a  surge of immigrants from Eastern Europe particularly Poland since they joined the European Union.

The problem for UKIP is that the evidence is showing that people are wanting more detail on what else they would do. While polls point to the fact that the majority of the British public with to remain in the EU suddenly it becomes glaringly obvious that they do not have policies geared to peoples main concerns as to what happens to the economy and also what happens to the National Health Service, Our socialized system of medicine. The National Health Service is indeed a sacred cow to most British people and how a new government would deal with it  will be an important issue in people deciding who to vote or.

The problem now is that the media are focusing relentlessly on the defects of UKIP’s policies.

Some of their politicians have been pillories extensively in the media. Seen as a threat by both major parties they are finding no shortage of material. The BBC conducted a straw poll about Nigel Farage in London. One of their constituency representatives described the place as a well known local mosque. The place in question is Westminster cathedral, the main cathedral of the catholic church in the country. This spawned a hashtag on twitter #Things that are not mosques. Other scandals have involved UKIP members who hold racist views. Mostly to be fair they have been promptly expelled by the party. Obviously they have to take action but the mud tends to stick and the papers gleefully report the scandals.

However the other third party the Greens are also picking up flak now. Their leader made a mess of an interview about the costings for their policies. They wanted to build more social housing but were unable to provide costings. Now they are trying to justify their position.

The trouble for both these parties is that as the current polls seem to predict a parliament in which no party will have an overall majority the policies of possible coalition partners become more important. Hence their policies are under a lot more scrutiny now and that looks set to continue to the election and possibly beyond.