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.